Talent Identification & Selection

Assessment centre design consultancy. Find the right candidates, make the right impression.

Assessment centres done well are a powerful signal about an organisation's culture, its standards and the seriousness with which it takes its people decisions.

Assessment centre design and consultancy delivered by chartered occupational psychologists, working with resourcing and talent teams at medium-to-enterprise organisations.

At volume, your selection process is one of the most widely experienced touchpoints your employer brand has. A poorly designed assessment experience does not just produce worse selection decisions, it actively damages your ability to attract the next cohort. Wharton Global designs assessment centres that solve both problems.

Assessment centre environment representing rigour and design

The problem

What often undermines assessment centres is not a clear failure, but a gradual loss of consistency. Over time, assessor standards shift, scoring becomes less aligned, and a process that felt rigorous at the start becomes less reliable in practice.

Assessment centres are a significant investment, but they deliver strong returns when they are thoughtfully designed and properly maintained. Calibration, consistency across panels and locations, and regular quality review are what keep the judgements as robust as the process itself.

What Wharton Global does

Every Wharton Global assessment centre begins with the role and the organisation, not a standard exercise library. We define precisely what the process needs to assess, building exercises and scoring frameworks around the specific demands of the role, the culture, and the level at which candidates are being assessed.

Assessor calibration is built into the process architecture. Our chartered occupational psychologists design the scoring criteria, train and calibrate assessors, observe the process in action, and moderate output before any decisions are made. That consistency of standard is what allows assessment centres to work reliably across multiple cohorts and assessors without degrading over time.

The candidate experience is designed with care. Every individual goes through a process that is clearly briefed, consistently applied, and followed by constructive feedback. From Wharton Global client feedback, 96% percent of candidates assessed through our processes rated the experience positively, and almost nine in ten in our tracked candidate feedback said it increased their desire to join the organisation.

Our approach

Role and criteria brief

We assess the specific capabilities, not generic competencies, for the precise profile the role and the organisation require.

Exercise design

Exercises built around the specific demands of the role, and scoring frameworks designed to minimise assessor interpretation variance.

Assessor training and calibration

All assessors trained and calibrated against the same standard before any live event, because calibration is an ongoing process, not a one-off session.

Live facilitation and moderation

Wharton Global chartered occupational psychologists observe the live process, moderate scoring across assessors, and review output before any appointment decisions are made.

Feedback and ongoing quality

Constructive candidate feedback as standard. Where the centre runs over multiple cohorts, Wharton Global monitors data quality across cycles and recalibrates before standards drift.

What it produces in practice

A global consumer business worked with Wharton Global to design and run an assessment centre programme across UK and European operations over ten years. 96% percent of candidates assessed through our processes rated the experience positively, and almost nine in ten in our tracked candidate feedback said it increased their desire to join the organisation. Retention at three years reached 91%, compared to a consumer goods average of 70%. More than 60% were promoted within three years, many into international leadership roles.

96%

candidate satisfaction

91%

three-year retention

90%

increased desire to join organisation

A global consumer company found that candidates were withdrawing from its recruitment process at multiple stages because the exercises bore no relationship to the actual work or the culture that made the organisation worth joining. Wharton Global redesigned the assessment centre around the organisation's own products and identity, building an immersive two day format centred on a live press conference simulation, cross functional group challenges, structured psychometric profiling, and assessor training that built internal capability alongside the selection process. Over ten years, the model was extended to a London hub and European operations, with assessor calibration maintained across geographies and seniority levels to protect the consistency of standards. As a result, 88% of appointments rated as high performers in first year reviews against a sector average of 65%, 91% retention at three years, and 96% of candidates rating the process positively, many choosing this organisation over London based competitors based on the assessment experience alone.

Who this is for

Heads of Talent, Resourcing Directors and HR Directors in large organisations who need a partner capable of designing and sustaining a selection programme that does not degrade over time.
Organisations making recurring specialist, professional, or senior appointments where the process needs to work consistently across assessors and cycles.
Businesses where sector competition makes the candidate experience at the point of selection a material factor in the ability to attract the talent they need.

Questions we get asked

Indicative investment

Scope determines cost. We scope before we price. Get in touch to discuss what the right engagement looks like for your situation.

Have questions about an assessment centre

Client feedback

“Wharton Global use their extensive knowledge of both public and private sector organisations to calibrate the likely impact of prospective job holders. They have a strong track record of adding value to key hiring decisions at complex, high profile enterprises. They do this by reaching into a well developed, current toolkit and extensive application experience.”
Global HR Executive, 30 year relationship