12 Jun
It’s exciting to take up new projects with same clients! Not only does it increase our revenue but helps us in leveraging the insights across different projects for the customer’s benefit. We have partnered with a Leading Travel Company for many years now. And have together worked to contextualize and assess the organization’s competency framework to their context through Jombay assessments. In fact, our work over the years has even solidified their process for recruitment along with internal potential assessments as well. And I have been thrilled to have received consistent feedback to say there is a lot of match between assessment center results and behavior demonstrated on the floor, and that managers have found a strong link between productivity, job & culture fit and indicators from Jombay assessments. The company’s managers even insist on getting Jombay’s assessment reports before they take a hiring decision! In certain pockets of the company, after 6 months, they were able to record that sales productivity went up 10-12 percent!
I proudly present an interview with the client partner who ensured the project’s success along with his leadership team! We asked him about the learnings from this successful partnership & our various projects together.
1. What was the business context/intent of running this exercise?
We have been partnering with Jombay since 2015 for a range of projects. At the outset, we wanted to contextualize and assess the organization’s competency framework to map it to our setup. With Jombay, we mapped competencies and behavioral traits across different roles, levels and functions to create a framework that specifically worked for us. Once this was in place, Jombay rolled out competency assessments for 700+ managers, to understand their potential, which helped us plan our promotions & development needs. We then decided to use these assessments for hiring, expanded its use to multiple levels and functions and now use it regularly to assess ALL incoming people on our parameters to see if they fit the job and culture at Mahindra Holidays.
2. How has using a virtual model impacted logistics.
We started the assessment center exercise for 700+ managers across multiple levels, roles & geographies. Today, we continue to roll out these assessments when hiring, and deal with similar variations of geography and skills. The HR manager for each function is able to run with and use the platform independently. A range of Jombay Assessment tools, from Psychometric Assessment, to Cognitive Assessments get used. For us the primary benefit that we observed was the scalability of this Assessment Center.
3. What were some of your key learnings for implementing a successful and scalable Assessment Center exercise?
In our case, choosing a virtual model for the audience solved problems of coverage and reach. The validity & reliability of the Jombay Assessment Center ensured a match between reports and manager perception – which increased buy-in. Spending time evaluating the competency framework (vis a vis business feedback) is worth the effort. Having buy-in from business and the CHRO goes a long way in ensuring the success of such an exercise.
4. How have you evaluated the success of this initiative? What has been the response from participants, managers & the business?
Since both the assessment center for measuring potential and for recruitment are introduced, they have been easily accepted by participants across our organisation. We have been able to run analytics internally, the results of the Jombay Assessment Centers for front line sales teams to understand which behavior impacts retention. We then went back to modify the competency framework – making it more robust and refined. We also mapped the results of the assessment center with their performance and after 6 months we were able to record that sales productivity went up 10-12 percent! On the recruitment front: our hiring managers have given us consistent feedback to say there is a lot of match between assessment center results and true behavioral traits. In fact they are often eager to see these results before making a decision! This has been proof of success for our assessment centers for recruitment. We continue to use Jombay Assessments as a mandated part of our hiring process across the business!
5. How was the Assessment Center integrated into the scheme of things at your organisation?
We were lucky that the top management was aligned to our project. This made it easy to drive awareness and bring in a corporate process and mandate for the Assessment Center. The recruitment project followed, and that too became a part of the norm and discipline of the process easily, and without any teething troubles!
