Certified assessors and progressive test methods
A reliable and highly valued partner for Selor for more than 10 years
As a governmental selection body, Selor takes an ambitious perspective of quality in the area of recruitment and selection. They apply their own unique approach to the education, training and certification of assessors and develop their own innovative tools for testing and measuring competences. On both domains, Quintessence is a solid and valued partner.
Our conversation partners:
Sofie Van Damme introduces Selor: ‘You can go to Selor if you are looking for a job or a new career step with the government, if you want to take a language test, or if you’ve decided you’d like to work in the safety and security sector. We take care of and support the recruitment and selection procedures for Federal Public Services (FPSs), for the various Belgian communities and regions and for other governmental services and institutions.’
Joachim Vercouter: ‘In a broader sense, we want to really position ourselves as an expertise centre in the field of Human Resources. When it comes to recruiting, selection, orientation and certification we contribute to talent management within the government. In an objective, competency-oriented manner that offers every candidate equal chances.’
Koen Verlinden: ‘Selor’s ambition is to become the reference and a trend-setter in the HR landscape. For example, 13 years ago I was involved in the implementation of the very first electronic mail exercises for measuring competences. That was extremely progressive at the time. Today we are investing strongly in continuously improving and professionalising our methodologies and in quality training, education and certification of people. Both internally and for our clients.’
Selection and assessments are an important part of the methodologies that Selor follows, consciously choosing to work together with specialised partners such as Quintessence, who contribute to the quality of their services.
Charlotte de Groot, Senior Consultant at Quintessence: ‘We provide the training and certification of assessors for Selor Academy. This three-day training course is directed at people who already have experience with assessments. It is based on our own ‘Certified Competency Assessor’ programme and takes a practical approach to work. Over just three days, we work together with an internal co-trainer from Selor to ensure participants know assessment methodology inside out. We practice the required interview, observations and feedback skills. This is all done in a highly realistic setting, in which last year’s master’s students took on the role of job applicants.’
Sofie Van Damme: ‘We have noticed that the Quintessence trainers have knowledge and experience that is perfect for guiding our consultants in a professional approach to competence assessment. Using the Selor Academy certification model, we have already certified around 300 assessors, a great many of whom work with our clients. This is important because it gives the government services the independence vital for the autonomous performing of selection procedures. Selor continues to be a supporting partner, but no longer needs to run every procedure from A to Z by themselves.’
When organising selection procedures, Selor makes frequent use of automated testing and reporting tools. This has a lot to do with the large number of candidates they process. In order to fulfil governmental requirements relating to transparency, motivation and diversity, the reliability and validity of the full range of test instruments is carefully monitored.
Joachim Vercouter: ‘For the acquisition and development of testing tools, we always start from the competency model that we drafted for the various functional levels of the government services. That competency model is linked to a fixed set of indicators that we are immediately able to measure using diverse PC tests. This automation itself helps in generating the final score and feedback text.
For mailbox applications such as PC In-Basket© and Web In-Basket© we have already been collaborating with Quintessence for years. We have done this for a number of situational assessment tests and practical assessments for lower education levels. They have built up extensive expertise in this sort of testing and show great flexibility in making tests operational on the basis of our competency model. I’ve rarely seen this level of collaboration in the area of IT anywhere else.’
Web In-Basket© The mailbox exercise Web In-Basket© builds further on ten years of experience with PC In-Basket©, the program that has already proven its value in the Benelux region with approximately 150,000 candidates. It follows up assessments with fully automatic reporting on skill-based scores as well as performance related to specific behavioural indicators.
Koen Verlinden: ‘The evolution that we have made in the area of PC testing is enormous. It goes hand-in-hand with the development of technology. We are now quite occupied with decentralised tests: candidates no longer need to come to our PC room to perform every test, but can do them in the buildings of their future employers for example. For certain types of tests, we believe in a not-so-distant future where selection tests are available via a candidate’s own computer or smartphone.’
Charlotte de Groot: ‘That would be a fantastic development, especially considering the mobility problems that we are all familiar with. At Quintessence we are also actively developing this sort of possibility. This is, incidentally, not the only parallel we have with Selor. It pleases me that Selor shares quite strongly in our vision for taking sustainable approaches to selection procedures.’
Koen Verlinden: ‘That’s right. And for us, it’s even more important in view of our commitments, by way of the government, to areas such as diversity. People with different cultural baggage, but also, for example, hearing or visual limitations, must be perfectly able to participate in our procedures. This has an influence on content – think about the reading levels of certain texts – but also on our infrastructure. As necessary, we provide braille readers and magnification software.’
Our interview partners at Selor
We asked our interviewing partners at Selor to summarise the essence of a high-quality selection procedure in a few key words: