Lord Sugar’s The Apprentice is back in March. Sixteen, often pretty unusual, contestants participate to see who can outdo each other and win the ultimate prize of  landing a job with Lord Sugar.  Of course, with heavy editing by the BBC, some are made to look worse than others, but it provides for great entertainment as they try their hands at a series of business tasks.

 

Although all competing, part of what they learn is how to work together effectively to ensure their team wins each task. And working together is what they seem to find hardest to do, not surprisingly when you consider the size of their egos.  As well as working together effectively they learn to hone their sales techniques (remember the lad on junior apprentice who had the hardly ground-breaking idea of taking his ice cream stall down on to the sand at the beach, instead of waiting for the customers to come to him?). They improve their customer service – at least, most of them learn to be less rude to potential clients and suppliers. They learn about time management (i.e. getting their task completed in time) and they brush up their presentation skills (they have a go at pitching ideas and products).

 

In some ways The Apprentice is a very long and very intense assessment centre with the aim of finding the person with the most suitable talent to fit into a key business role. Finding that ideal person is not an easy thing to do and unfortunately the most relied upon recruitment tool for most businesses is the ‘interview.’ Statistically there is no correlation between success at the interview and success in the actual job. Scary eh..? 

 

Assessment Centres, even those run in one day rather than sixteen weeks with the Apprentice do significantly improve your chances of finding the right person – the special one. 

 

If you’d like to know more about Assessment Centres and other effective forms of talent selection – please get in touch.