Assessment day: candidate group discussion

[anicebag]

Has anyone assessed one of these recruitment exercises? If so, what are they looking for/ not looking for?

Barclays life skills has loads of good advice in this.

As a recruiter, we were looking for people who had interesting ideas, listened to others , were flexible in their thinking, able to negotiate and influence.

Depends what skills the employer wants ...

Thank you!

I have....

Don't go in thinking you have to lead and dominate the discussion. It's more about how you work as a team, take other people's ideas and develop them, draw people who haven't said much into the conversation, show active listening skills.

We were told to listen out for phrases like "What do you think about John's idea, Sarah?" or "I like Brian's idea about selling widgets, would that work with Mary's idea of selling online?" - things that show you're taking on board what others have said rather than just pushing your own ideas all the time.

I was assessing these on Friday!

Looking for team working as well as analytical ability, problem solving and creativity. Looking for behaviours which are supportive, empowering, open, decisive etc. and how you put these into practice when working with others.

Don’t volunteer to be time keeper or write on the board. Take a role in helping to break down the problem and set and analytical framework for thinking about it (ie we have many issues, can we classify them into groups? Can we set solutions into short term and long term?).

Don’t volunteer to be time keeper or write on the board.

Unless no-one has done it- the problem is that the task fails if no-one does these things.

Brilliant: thanks everyone.