This week (31 May – 6 June) is Work Wise Week 2015 and Dr Roxane Gervais, chair of the British Psychological Society's Division of Occupational Psychology, has written a blog post on the Work Wise Week website.

At the same time, a group of experts from the British Psychological Society have developed a new assessment centre standard. The standard is designed to support best practice and enable organisations to run centres more effectively.

An assessment centre involves the assessment of a group of candidates or employees by observation of their performance by trained assessors on a number of different exercises, and job related tasks, including those where participants interact with each other.

The new standard can help both those running centres to improve their practice and those commissioning centres to select high quality service providers.

Professor Jamie Hacker Hughes, President of the British Psychological Society, said:

"This piece of work is an excellent example which demonstrated the wide range of work in which British psychologists are involved. In this case, showing how psychology can be instrumental in enhancing the work of British commerce and industry through helping it to select the very best people to fit the necessary roles."

Helen Baron, who chaired the group, said:

“The most important outcomes for us are that the standard will help organisations make the right choices when selecting people into roles and that participants in assessment centres have a positive experience, and be assessed fairly and effectively with due concern for their rights and wellbeing.”

The working group, made up of academic and practitioner occupational psychologists, used an evidence-based approach to ensure that the standard embeds the latest research findings to optimise assessment centres.

For example, recent research shows that the average of assessors’ ratings is typically more accurate than a rating agreed between assessors after a discussion meeting. It turns out that the better approach is cheaper to implement and releases assessors from long meetings that often run late into the evening.

Assessment centres are widely used by organisations for the selection and development of staff and the evidence shows they are effective at understanding a person’s capability and predicting work performance in management roles.

However, new research conducted by psychologists found that 98 per cent of assessment centre assessors reported not being allowed sufficient time to evaluate and score candidates effectively – this and other issues identified in the research led to poor selection decisions.This means that organisations do not select the people they need, reducing their potential performance and individuals may not be offered the jobs they are suited to.

Read more about Work Wise Week.