4 Things Online Assessment Centers Can Do for Your Business

Bringing a new leader to your company or promoting one of your own is a risky move. Will they meet targets? Engage their teams? Grow with the company? Make the wrong decision and it could slow down sales, instigate conflict, result in missed deadlines, lost productivity, and many setbacks. Furthermore, it is also incredibly expensive to bring somebody onboard who doesn’t work out.

You may have picked the right person in the past, but it doesn’t mean that you’ll get it right every time. This is where online assessment centers excel. Their use of data to help rank and track candidate performance throughout a simulation provides hiring managers the tools they need to make informed decisions with insightful and fair data. Here are four things an online assessment center can do for your business:

1. Find leaders who will meet targets.

Whether it’s in sales or R&D, achieving targets is a key measure of leaders’ success. Getting the work done as an individual vs. manager is very different and it’s easy to confuse individual productivity with leadership potential. Let me put it simply: Your best salesperson or engineer will not make the best leader, no matter how much you think they’ll teach their excellence to others. Technical expertise won’t take them far in leadership. They will have to achieve targets through the work of others and that requires a whole different set of skills.

An online assessment center works as a flight simulator. You place the person in the leadership role for a few hours, mimic common leadership challenges they are likely to encounter, and you compare their skillset to others. Our research shows that high performers in the assessment center are 6x more likely to be top-performing leaders in their organizations.

2.  Find leaders who will increase staff retention.

As the cliché goes, “employees don’t leave companies, they leave bad bosses.” According to Gallup, 50% of employees have quit to get away from their manager. And for a good reason. Bad managers can destroy engagement, productivity, bring on conflict and stress. It takes leadership finesse to motivate and engage employees. And if that isn’t enough, staff retention has a real dollar value: Replacement costs for a single employee range from 0.5 to 2 times annual salary.

An online assessment center will help you spot, in your candidates, the skills necessary to drive up staff retention. Indeed, leaders who receive high scores in the assessment center are 2x more likely to retain their staff based on our research.  

3. Find leaders who will grow with your company.

With the high rate of change in today’s markets, you’re not only hiring a leader for today: you also need a leader for the future. As your company grows and develops, strong leaders will grow with it. They will be able to move into bigger roles, increase their breadth and scope, learn how to influence across boundaries, and hone their entrepreneurship and strategic thinking.

This is where online assessment centers can help. They not only provide information about the leaders’ current skillset but also their future potential. We found that leaders who receive high scores in the assessment center are 6x more likely to move up in the organization and grow with it. 

4. Find leaders who will stay.

The fourth, and perhaps most important way online assessment centers can help your business is by helping you identify leaders who will actually stay with your company. After investing so much time, money, and effort into finding the right person, you really want to be sure that they will stay. In fact, 63% of companies say that retaining their employees is more difficult than hiring them. We found that leaders who perform well in the online assessment center are 3x more likely to stay with the company, saving you up to twice their annual salary in replacement costs.

Hiring a new leader is a risky business and online assessment centers can increase your odds of getting it right. Our research shows that if you select candidates who do well in the assessment center, they will be 6x more likely to meet targets, 2x more likely to increase staff retention, 6x more likely to grow with your company, and 3x more likely to stay.