Siemens, the pioneering digital business operating globally, is working with Aon’s Assessment Solutions to ensure it hires candidates who are most likely to thrive and adapt in an ever-changing complex environment. Aon’s Assessment Solutions is part of Aon (NYSE: AON), a leading global professional services firm providing a broad range of risk, retirement and health solutions. Siemens operates across 200 countries and employs over 300,000 people.

The new assessment process has been in place since January 2020 and identifies behaviours needed for employees to succeed now and in the future.

Simon Roberts, Regional Head of Talent Acquisition at Siemens, explained:

“We started by developing our Mindset Model internally to unify our organisational culture, values and behaviours that are important for future success. We needed to be able to identify candidates who have high potential to survive and thrive in a VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) world. We knew this before the pandemic but having robust information about key talent is even more important now as we set our talent strategy beyond COVID-19”.

The new model means Siemens selects people who can keep up with the unpredictable ways in which roles, the organisation and the industry change. The solution was designed before the pandemic but meant talent assessments were ready for the major global changes too.

Aon’s support included mapping Siemen’s Mindset Model onto pre-validated assessments to measure the abilities, work styles and preferences. Four of Aon’s assessments help the talent team and hiring managers to understand candidates’ numerical reasoning, logical reasoning, learning/memory capacity and personality. All assessments were designed to engage digitally for completion on laptop, phone or tablet.

The project ensures Siemens’ hiring managers and recruiters have pre-interview insight to enable improvement in talent quality and diversity. The organisation also wanted to improve retention by identifying those who are fit for the future, while increasing greater talent mobility opportunities with access to global candidates.

Although the process has only been in operation since January 2020, interesting results are already apparent and predicting success – candidates who perform better in the assessments are showing the ability to perform 12% better than those who didn’t perform as well.

Nick Short, Talent Acquisition Lead at Siemens, added:

“The benefits for talent acquisition and the business are clear. We have robust information about key talent, which is even more important now as we set our talent strategy beyond COVID-19. We as a team have improved credibility within the business as we’re making talent decisions backed by science which is also increasing fairness and reducing bias, not least consistently making strong decisions regardless of whether a candidate has a formal degree and qualifications or not.

“What’s important is a person’s ability to fit our Mindset Model, for now and the future. This new method and consistency has become particularly strong for our business now as we aren’t able to have face to face interactions with candidates. We’ve been able to continue assessments and gain in-depth insights into each individual while facilitating a more effective and safe experience for candidates, hiring managers and the business.”

Skye Trubov, Organisational Psychologist at Aon’s Assessment Solutions, said:

“Siemens is a technological pioneer and is experiencing global socio-political and tech advancements that have challenged it to entirely rethink its customer proposition, products and services. These enormous changes impact the employee behaviours needed to succeed now and, in the future, so talent processes need to reflect this. The new method is supporting the business, the talent acquisition team, hiring managers and candidates in fundamental ways”.

The Association of Business Psychology Workforce Experience Awards uniquely celebrate excellence in the application of psychology in business. Siemens and Aon have been shortlisted in the Excellence in Assessment category.