How much does an Assessment cost?

How much does an Assessment cost at an Assessment Agency?

When you order an Assessment with an Assessment Agency the costs are usually somewhere between 500 and 3000 euro. Smaller firms or independent professionals offer tests starting at €500 while market leaders such as GITP charge 5 times that. When you compare prices you have to make sure you don’t compare apples with oranges. Which components are tested and by whom? An assessment made by a very experienced professional will have a different price than one made by someone fresh out of college. Therefore it is important to understand what an Assessment beholds. These questions will help you do that.

• How many hours are spent on each component of an Assessment:
  Function analysis and intake, Interviewing, Test interpretation, Role-plays and Reporting
• Which and how many tests are part of the assessment?
• How experienced is the person performing the assessment?
• Is the person performing the assessment a qualified psychologist who is registered with the NIP?
• Is the test peer reviewed? (two-man rule!)
• Which other quality guarantees apply?
• Costs of location and lunch: from converted garage to canal house.

Starting your own Assessment Centre

The costs of test material spans from thirty to a hundred euro per candidate for a full test program. Then there are start-up costs for training and education, procedure development and operational costs such as location, computer and candidate planning.
A professional will need between 4 and 10 hours to make an assessment, depending on the size of the assessment. An intelligence screening for instance will usually take under two hours, while a full Management Assessment might take up to 10 hours: 8 hours of testing and interviews and two hours to write the report. Therefore the internal cost price of an assessment will be somewhere between €200 for a junior psychologist to €2000 for a full management assessment performed by an experienced professional.

What is the yield from an Assessment?

More interesting, but harder to determine, is the yield from an Assessment. The yield for your organisation depends on these factors:

• Preventing mis-hires
  As an assessment helps paint a clearer picture, you are able to prevent mistakes. A mistake might be when someone turns out not to have the right motivation, is less intelligent than his degrees and attitude would suggest or when you hire someone whose personality and values do not match the job or the organisation. It prevents potential damage running into millions depending on the job a candidate applies for. These damages include Selection fees, Job familiarisation, Salary and potential damage to goodwill and job satisfaction experienced by colleagues.
• Higher performance on average
  An assessment helps predict job performance as intelligence, consciousness and integrity are such contributing factors. When you consistently select better candidates performance in  the entire organisation will go up. By systematically doing this you might achieve an average performance increase of up to 5% and this will really set you apart from your competitors. Large organisations usually realise this and use assessment programs as a standard part of their selection procedure.
• Using talent more effectively
  Finally it is important that employees gain more self-knowledge while the company gains more insight into its employees. This allows the available talent to be used more effectively and each employee to reach their full potential.

An assessment is a valuable experience for a candidate and contributes to a company’s professional reputation.

Conclusion

Generally speaking it is a good idea to use an Assessment as a selection tool when you are hiring people for senior jobs or jobs which require a person to possess certain skills. An assessment then pays for itself. For lower job levels and when you are hiring larger groups at once, buying your own test material and setting up an internal assessment program might prove more useful.