The last few years have been an exciting period for Assessment Practice in India. A number of new entrants have brought in different and newer approaches, making the industry more vibrant and competitive. What should we look forward to in this space in the days to come? Here are my thoughts, looking into the crystal ball.

More demand for specific, decisive results. There is increasing pressure on managers to decide quickly while choosing people they want on their teams. Considering the lack of employable talent and the increasingly widening demand-supply gap of talent, there is a big need for the tools to become a decision aid and become specific in their output and decisive in the results they provide. We expect the market to
emphasize on the capability of the tools to provide greater granularity and specificity in results rather than merely on the general characteristics of a person. We also expect a greater use of visualization and a
shift from the current text-centric reports to visually communicative reports in 2015.

Greater demand for specialized tools. The trend of using multiple tools to assess an individual, to ensure that the decisions are correct and actionable is gaining ground rapidly across the world. We expect this trend to make its way into India from 2015 onwards. Traditionally, the emphasis in India has been on technical skills. As the promotion velocity increases in the Indian corporate world, pushing younger managers into positions of greater responsibility, the need to assess their emotional intelligence apart from their cognitive and behavioural capabilities has increased. We anticipate that the Indian industry will shift to a suite of tools to assess and measure cognition, behavioral fit and emotional intelligence of the candidates.

Assessments across the board. We anticipate an increasing use of specialized assessment tools at pre-interview stage at all levels of management, moving from the current practice of using such tools only for select positions. Compared to the salary packages and the increasing cost of a wrong hire or a wrong fitment, the cost of assessments has shrunk. There is a sharp increase in the relative affordability of assessment tools and we expect this trend to accelerate in 2015. Assessments across the board should gain momentum over the year.

Consolidation of frameworks. In the last three years, some of the large firms have consolidated multiple competency frameworks across group companies to provide a common, organization-wide, unified, company or group-specific managerial competency framework. Creation of such a common framework for all managerial positions introduces a common language within the organization and provides a framework spanning Talent Acquisition, Talent Development and Talent Management and helping the entire employee lifecycle management process.

We anticipate this trend to accelerate with large organizations or groups going in for unified competency frameworks. As a result, the relative importance in assessment has shifted from measuring technical
competencies to managerial ones.

Death of time and distance. The increasingly shorter decision cycles in business are reflected in the assessment space also. There is a great emphasis on getting the results of the assessment on an ever shortening lead time. The advent of connectivity has already made distance irrelevant, as most of the well-known tools are now available online at a click of a button. 4G will provide opportunity for assessments to be delivered on an almost real-time basis.

We will see changes in delivery, consumption and use of online assessments, given the enormous tech upgrades that are sweeping the Indian market.