The Centre for Human Resource Development, XLRI-Xavier School of Management, recently hosted an international conference on ‘Assessment centres and talent management in emerging markets: lessons from global practice’.
The two-day conference was inaugurated by Fr E Abraham SJ, Director, XLRI; George Thornton, Professor Emeritus, Colorado State University; and RK Premarajan, Chairperson, Centre for HRD, XLRI.
Excellent opportunity
Talking about the event, Fr Abraham said, “All too often personal decisions in organisations are fraught with issues of subjective, less reliable approaches to assessment and measurement. Assessment centre as a methodology, to an extent, tries to address some of the issues and has achieved a lot of traction in spite of its resource intensive nature. However, AC methodology adopted at its first industrial application at AT&T has undergone tremendous transformation and today with extensive use of technology many of these implementation challenges are getting addressed. I trust that the conference will not only provide excellent opportunity to share some of the recent advances in the areas of assessment centres and talent management but will also facilitate joint work between academia and practitioners of the science of assessment. This forum will be an excellent opportunity for the practitioners and academics in this field to exchange ideas and learn from one another.”
The conference was co-chaired by Prof RK Premarajan, Chairperson, Centre for HRD, XLRI Jamshedpur and George Thornton, Professor Emeritus, Colorado State University, USA.
Premarajan said, “In the changing world the main goal of the human resource management is to achieve competitive advantage by the strategic allocation of qualified personnel. It is, therefore, imperative for organisations to search for more accurate methods for assessing talent and supporting their development. Assessment centres, diagnostic centres and development assessment centres are excellent ways applied in organisations to support the needs.”
Thornton said, “The conference will not only provide opportunity to discuss assessment and development centre trends with people from around the world, but will also help to advance thinking and provide excellent opportunity to share some of the recent advances in the areas of assessment centres and talent management.”
Speakers and discussions
The inaugural session of the conference discussed on the ‘Assessment, measurement and prediction for talent management’. The session was chaired by Thornton and the other speakers were S Pandey, MD, Corporate Comprehensive Management Consultants (CCMC) and Satish Pradhan, Independent Consultant and Former Advisor, Tata Sons Ltd.
The two-day conference hosted discussion sessions and paper presentations on three themes: ‘Global standards for the assessment centre method and its growth in emerging markets’, ‘Advances in assessment centres in selection applications’, ‘Contemporary development in building people competencies using ACs’, ‘Validity issues in assessment centres’ and ‘Technology and assessment centres’.
Two workshops were also held: ‘Innovations in assessment centres’ facilitated by Premarajan and Thornton and ‘Designing assessment centre simulations’ facilitated by Thornton.
Some of the speakers at the conference were Andreas Lohff (MD & Owner, Cut-E Group Hamburg Area, Germany), Helen Baron (CPsychol, AFBPsS, CSci. London, UK), Mehmet Surmeli (Founder, Top Talent Solutions, Turkey), Pearl John (Member of Asia PS leadership Team & the India Leadership Team), Manohar Garikapati Lazarus (Practice Lead-Organisation Development, Infosys BPO Ltd), Bill Byham (Executive Chairman at Development Dimensions International (Ddi) Purdue University, Greater Pittsburgh Area), Christof Obermann (Professor & Dean for Business Psychology at The University of Applied Sciences in Cologne, Germany) amongst others.
The international conference was a hybrid event combining the “live” in-person event at the XLRI campus and a “virtual” online component for remote attendees. The conference has online sessions by many international speakers, while the paper presenters from Asian regions were campus at XLRI to make their presentations.