Assurity Consulting is the UK’s leading independent consultancy specialising in workplace health, safety and environmental solutions.

Their directly employed consultants support organisations across the UK and Europe guiding them through their findings and provide all the help, advice and information they need, giving them the reassurance and peace of mind that they are in control of their workplace compliance.

Assurity Consulting consultants can't be pigeon-holed – unlike mainstream jobs such as a lawyer or software engineer, no-one plans a career in 'compliance consulting'. ‘Workplace compliance consultant’ isn’t in a graduate's vocabulary.

As a result, selling the career and Assurity Consulting's graduate entry has been difficult. What became clear was that their recruitment machine needed more focus.

Initially Assurity Consulting contracted TimelessTime to train its HR and management team in recruitment. This added science to the process and grew their management’s understanding.

But it also highlighted that more work was needed to determine the sort of people who might be good in the role of consultant.

The premise emerging from the training was simple: if your existing consultants excel, hiring more like them will support business growth. If you know exactly who you want, you'll know where to look for them, how to select them and how to build their commitment in the early years.

So we had to characterise the present employees in a fashion that would allow meaningful conclusions that could be used to find, target and select future recruits.

Because psychometric assessment is insightful and reliable and usable in the selection phase of recruitment, we built a number of custom online assessments that Assurity Consulting employees could take to put their personal characteristics in a data bank.

We then analysed the resulting data and drew conclusions from the results.

We sought common forms of characteristic by building a graphical visualisation and by completing multiple correlations on the data.

Commenting on TimelessTime's performance, Paul Phillips, Director of Consultancy Services at Assurity said it was “A professionally executed project with a novel approach leading to a well-structured analysis and insightful conclusion.”

We found a common or normative form.

Among other characteristics, the normative form illustrated existing consultants have:

• a desire to engage in investigative activities;
• high verbal reasoning ability and;
• a bias towards social activities and were generally extroversive.

The detailed results will enable Assurity Consulting to know how to structure recruitment advertising and how to sell the role when talking to recruits.

By reversing the process, Assurity Consulting can use psychometric tests to inform managers before interviews and frame interview tests and questions. The result is a robust and targeted recruitment process.

In addition, the insight will inform their managers about tactics for retention once new recruits are in place.