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Over the past year, we’ve carried out several assessment projects for HR professionals — HR Directors, HRBPs, and T&D partners among others.
In this article, we share our observations that help fine-tune the assessment format for this specific audience.
Assessing HR professionals is a genre of its own. HR people are experienced users — they’re usually well-acquainted with assessment methods and tools, conduct interviews themselves, and read reports carefully. To make an assessment project for HR both diagnostically valuable for the client and meaningful for the participants, the approach must be carefully calibrated. We’ve identified four characteristics of this audience that help set the right tone for such projects.
1. They already know the tools
HR professionals are often on the other side of the interview table.
They easily recognize familiar methodologies, quickly grasp the structure of the process — and often see right through it.
In our experience, business cases still work well, especially when you need to assess specific skills like negotiation, facilitation, or team leadership. HR participants usually show a high level of trust in the process, including business cases. They tend to bring depth, curiosity, and genuine interest in self-reflection.
The key condition: the case must feel professionally authentic — not only relevant to the industry but also resonant with the participant’s real experience. HR professionals appreciate well-crafted details, realistic plots, and enough data to dig into. They also enjoy non-standard formats — for example, in one group project we designed a small fact-finding exercise within a team discussion.
That said, the decisive factor is often not the method itself, but who conducts it.
Here, the consultant is not merely a moderator but a dynamic professional counterpart — someone intellectually agile, knowledgeable, and capable of building genuine trust.
As many participants note, what matters is not only the result but the feeling that you’re in a real dialogue with another professional — with space for reflection, not just a procedure executed "by the book".
2. They look for freshness in interpretation
Many HR professionals have been assessed before.
They’ve experienced a variety of tools, formats, and feedback styles. They rarely take a report or feedback session as a fixed portrait of “who I am.” Instead, they treat it as an entry point — an opportunity to see themselves from a new angle.
Yet there’s a risk of diagnostic fatigue: another report that doesn’t bring new meaning or perspective.
What tends to increase value for experienced, reflective participants:
- Narrative interview analysis — uncovering self-perception patterns and leadership roles through the participant’s own stories. This approach returns authorship to the individual, allowing them to see their own quotes and phrasing through an interpretive lens they wouldn’t easily apply themselves.
- Team feedback sessions — showing not only individual traits but also shared team patterns, strengths, and development hypotheses. The Group Development Plan format, for instance, can be a powerful and refreshing alternative to IDPs.
3. Diverse backgrounds, unique stories
There is no single “right path” into HR — and that’s a historical feature of the profession in CIS countries. People arrive from consulting, business, academia, or operations, bringing different balances of theoretical knowledge and practical experience.
This makes HR a field where professional identity is often self-constructed and developed proactively.
As a result, HR participants tend to have deeply personal, authentic professional stories — which can’t be captured by surface-level diagnostics. Behind each career narrative lies a set of values, meanings, and internal logic worth exploring.
In such cases, narrative-based techniques work particularly well — for example, Story Semantika. They help reveal not just behavioral patterns but the author’s logic: how people make sense of their path, what stands behind their decisions, and what truly matters to them.
This creates the foundation for a meaningful dialogue — about what they’ve considered their growth points and why they chose particular development trajectories. It’s a way to assess not only competencies, but also self-awareness in how one builds their professional identity.
4. The project needs precisely calibrated criteria
Most HR professionals have strong soft skills — so standard competency models rarely capture them with enough nuance.
To make the assessment truly insightful, it’s crucial to invest time early on with the client to define what really matters: which competencies are most relevant, what the underlying business questions are, and what the company actually wants to learn.
This alignment turns the model from a formal checklist into a genuinely useful diagnostic tool — for both the organization and the participants themselves.
Based on recent projects, clients most often want to see HR professionals demonstrate:
- Professional and personal maturity — accountability, resilience, and readiness for complex, large-scale challenges
- Systemic and strategic thinking — the ability to look up from daily operations and see the broader picture
- The subtle diplomacy of business partnership — influencing without exerting pressure
- Business acumen — the habit of viewing issues not only through the “people” lens but also through data and performance indicators
- Curiosity and openness to new horizons — willingness to renew practices, learn new approaches, and stay connected to the external environment.
What the company gains
Assessing HR allows organizations to look at their teams from a new angle: to see who is ready to take on a true partnership role, who thinks beyond their function, and who can develop HR practices rather than merely maintain existing ones.
Such projects help identify people with the potential for larger, more complex tasks — and highlight where the team may need fine-tuning: in mindset, skills, or focus areas.
For the participants themselves, it’s an opportunity to step back, rethink how they make decisions, and clarify what they want to evolve in their professional practice.