Assessment Centres are widely used across many industry sectors and countries and are recognised by managers and human resources professional as an effective way of selecting, developing, and identifying talent.

The design of assessment centres (ACs) requires an in-depth understanding of the critical elements of a given role, clarity of the job-related behaviours, and the context within which the role operates. The use of diverse activities, exercises, and simulations allows candidates to display their competencies. The use of multiple observers/assessors minimise sources of bias in evaluating each individual’s performance and apply structured processes to observe, record, classify and evaluate performance.

While Assessment Centres are efficient and effective in predicting job performance of candidates, they may be complex to organise as they need a suitable space and the availability of trained staff to operate. The candidates also need to be available and able to travel to the location where the Assessment Centre is to take place.

A Virtual Assessment Centre moves this process online with the following advantages:

  • There is no need to find a physical location to hold the Assessment Centre. This can offer major savings in both travel time and costs with the assessment material online costs can also be further reduced and this, along with the point above, can help organisations meet their carbon targets.
  • Candidates avoid the stress of traveling across time zones/re-adjusting to different time zones which helps them to focus better on the assessment processes.
  • Candidates generally report a positive experience of the assessment centre process. With enhanced technology, recordings of exercises help to provide quality time to the assessors to review and evaluate candidates’ performance.

On the negative side it may be that both some clients and some candidates prefer face-to-face meetings. This may be especially important for some after a long period of isolation and virtual working caused by Covid-19. It may be harder to justify the costs involved in travel, accommodation and disruption of the work schedule. The future format of assessment centres may be a hybrid approach requiring reduced face-to-face time and assessors conducting the evaluations virtually.


ODRL can assist with designing assessment solutions to meet your needs. These include the operation of physical and online assessment centres, and training and coaching to organisations who wish to operate their own assessment centres

Through our online platform we can package assessment tools to meet your specific requirements. These can include job simulation exercises, role plays, case study analysis, in-trays, group discussions etc.

For further information on these topics please contact Dr. Kay Sahdev (ks@odrl.org.uk)