The Effectiveness of Virtual Assessment Center Platform

The Assessment Center (AC) Method has been widely used as one of the evaluation methods for selecting, promoting, and developing leaders in a company. In Indonesia, AC has also been used for selecting the Board of Directors, especially in State-Owned Enterprises (Peraturan Menteri BUMN, 2021). In the digital era, the demand for a fast and flexible assessment center increased and became essential for selecting the right candidate as evidenced by a 57-percent rise of the Assessment Center project from 2017 to 2021. In response to COVID-19 pandemic as well as to cope with the increasing demand, Assessment Center Indonesia (ACI), by Telkom Indonesia, has been developing a Virtual Assessment Center (VAC) which has been implemented for AC in Telkom since the middle of 2020. The current study was conducted as an effort to examine its effectiveness. ACI tested the effectiveness of Virtual Assessment Center (VAC) using the effectiveness framework that measures: 1) ease of use, 2) perceived usefulness, and 3) the consistency of virtual and offline AC results. The first and second aspect of effectiveness indicators were collected by using questionnaires and was analyzed using descriptive statistics. As for testing the consistency of virtual and offline AC result, the ratings of nine competencies from 32 employees who took offline and virtual AC in 2021–2022 were gathered and were analyzed using the Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test. The result showed that participants' perceived ease of use in the Virtual AC group is slightly higher than the offline method. As for the human capital users' usefulness, it was confirmed that the Virtual AC was perceived as more effective than offline methods. Moreover, from the Virtual AC administrator's perspective, they agreed that the Virtual AC supported the flexibility of time, place, and number of participants. In addition, Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test also validated that there were no significant differences between the pairs' rating of nine competencies measured by either offline or virtual methods (p> 0.05). The results from the three perspectives above showed that Virtual AC can be regarded as an effective replacement of the offline assessment. Further analysis is still needed to compare the validity of offline versus virtual AC. Practical implications also provided in the research paper.

I. Introduction

The Assessment Center method was initially used for the Army in World War II to select and recruit army candidates. It was brought to the private sector by AT&T, in 1959 to managerials competency in employees (Tripathi, 2016). The method remains popular until now and has been used widely and globally.