Assessment Centre
Professional skills assessment and competency frameworks
Recruiting outstanding talent is a strategic challenge. The market is tight, suitable profiles are scarce and the stakes for your organisation keep rising. To hire well, one step has become essential: skills assessment. Done properly, it provides a dependable foundation for hiring decisions and ensures a strong fit between the candidate, the business, the role and the way work is organised.
This approach goes far beyond technical know-how. It also highlights soft skills, which are critical for long-term performance and cultural integration. With reliable, fit-for-purpose assessment tools, you gain a clear view of strengths, development areas and genuine potential—so you can make informed decisions and de-risk your choices.
At Actual Talent, we have developed robust skills-assessment solutions grounded in many years of HR experience. Our mission is to turn your hiring into lasting success by giving you everything you need to identify, select and support your future talent.
Skills assessment: hire with confidence
Optimised recruitment
Define target profiles precisely, then assess candidates’ skills objectively. You’ll achieve a closer match between required capabilities and the real needs of each role, significantly reducing the risk of a mis-hire.
Better talent management
Assessment clarifies which skills to develop and allows you to plan learning in a targeted way. Internal mobility and professional development become smoother and more intentional.
Organisational performance
Align individual capabilities to company goals. Improve productivity through a sharper allocation of talent based on a nuanced, evidence-led assessment of skills.
Greater fairness and transparency
Objective, consistent criteria for everyone create a solid basis for pay and promotion decisions. A shared approach to assessment becomes a common reference across the organisation.
Clearer internal communication
Establish a common language around skills throughout the business and build a better shared understanding of roles and accountabilities.
What is a competency framework?
A skills assessment measures and analyses an employee’s abilities, knowledge and behaviours in a professional context. It becomes the golden thread running through your people processes. It is anchored in a competency framework—a structured document setting out the skills required for different roles or job families within your organisation.
This framework provides a common basis for defining expectations, assessing performance, identifying learning needs and guiding professional growth. It typically includes a detailed description of each competency, related performance indicators and the expected proficiency levels. The result is a fairer, more consistent approach to people management that remains aligned with your strategic objectives.
When does a skills assessment become indispensable?
Recruitment
Especially for leadership or strategically important roles, assessing technical and behavioural competencies helps ensure a candidate has the attributes needed to lead teams and deliver complex projects.
Internal mobility
Assessment provides the evidence you need to confirm the fit between a promoted or redeployed colleague and the requirements of their new role.
Talent management
Identify training needs and structure development pathways with clear objectives. Ongoing assessment underpins robust development plans.
Organisational change or merger
Align your workforce with new requirements and ensure a smooth transition. Assessment acts as a reference point to map capabilities to future demands.
Reduce errors, improve outcomes: why assessment matters
Skills assessment has become a cornerstone of modern HR. It enables you to maximise team performance and bring rigour to every stage of recruitment. It doesn’t stop at operational know-how: understanding soft skills is decisive for sustainable success within your company.
By adopting a rigorous assessment approach, you surface candidates who best match the role’s demands and significantly reduce the risk of poor hiring decisions or unnecessary staff turnover. You can also anticipate integration challenges: by identifying behaviours, aptitudes and motivational drivers, you accelerate cultural onboarding and shorten time-to-competence for new joiners. Assessment further supports induction by objectifying strengths and development priorities.
Continuous assessment opens the door to proactive talent management. Built with you, our competency frameworks become practical tools to steer careers, target learning needs and support the progression of your people. You gain visibility and effectiveness by anchoring HR decisions in evidence that serves overall business performance.
You’re unique—create your own competency framework
At Actual Talent, we’ve developed a method to help you build a bespoke competency framework precisely aligned to your organisation’s needs and culture. Our three-stage process reflects your professional context and strategic goals.
Insight interviews
We begin with in-depth interviews across key roles in your organisation. This initial discovery maps the competencies that matter in each function and the behaviours that drive performance. The 360° approach delivers a complete, contextualised view of expectations by role.
Co-creation workshop
We then run collaborative workshops to co-build the competency framework and a supporting leadership charter. These sessions are designed to secure buy-in, ensuring the framework is practical and true to your values and DNA. This collective involvement guarantees relevance and ownership. It also makes assessment a shared, collaborative process.
Enablement & rollout
Once the framework is defined, we support hands-on implementation. We embed it across your HR processes—recruitment, performance, learning and progression. With this operational anchoring, you can structure talent management, increase consistency and bring greater reliability to day-to-day assessment—supporting skills growth and the achievement of your strategic objectives.
The outcome is a framework that’s comprehensive and practical, and that evolves with your business and the requirements of each role.
Assess4U: a fast, reliable soft-skills assessment
Technical skills alone are no longer enough. The real differentiators are behaviours, people skills and a candidate’s ability to thrive in your culture. That’s why we created Assess4U, an online assessment designed to identify, in minutes, the soft skills that underpin sustainable performance in role—through a simple, streamlined experience.
Many probationary periods fail for behavioural rather than technical reasons. With our assessment, you get a clear, objective snapshot of each candidate’s profile—helping you avoid mis-hires and reduce unwanted turnover.
In just 8 minutes, the tool benchmarks every candidate against a reference group built from high-performing profiles in the market. You can quickly identify people who will perform, grow and contribute—while speeding up and simplifying your process. This instant insight sharpens decision-making.
Actual Talent: advancing sustainable recruitment
Actual Talent is a trusted partner thanks to recognised expertise and an innovative approach centred on personalised support for employers.
HR expertise
Our specialist team helps you define and run the assessments of the critical competencies that will make the difference in your organisation. Our deep understanding of roles and behavioural skills means we deliver a tailored service matched to your specific needs.
People-first
Beyond our skills solutions, we place the human experience at the heart of every engagement. We help shape your HR and capability strategies and anticipate future organisational demands. With a personalised approach and strong market insight, we guide you to optimise hiring and unlock the potential of your talent.
Participative approach
We involve your teams at each stage, ensuring the resulting competency framework is both relevant and widely adopted. This engagement drives alignment with your culture and strategic aims.
Powerful tools
We integrate advanced solutions such as SAVEN to assess behavioural competencies (soft skills) quickly, precisely and impartially. Combined with our expertise, these tools enable confident, evidence-based HR decisions.
Learning & development
We support the design of your learning plans to structure capability building. By equipping your people with best practice and sustaining continuous skills growth, we improve organisational effectiveness and employee satisfaction. With Actual Talent, you gain end-to-end support for skills assessment and the creation of a robust, adaptable competency framework—aligning career progression with your company’s strategic goals.
Let’s turn your talent management into a driver of sustainable performance.
Optimise your HR practices with assessment tools designed by the experts at Actual Talent.
