Augmenting Professional Creativity through Hands-On Assessment

A case study from TCS iON

‘Hands-On’ is a concept of ‘assessing by doing’. We all know the benefits it can provide in making assessments more interesting as well as retaining the knowledge gained for a longer period.  TCS iON recently leveraged it to solve business challenges of one of their corporate customers as well as to measure candidate’s capabilities more efficiently while recruiting.

We worked with Euroclear – a Belgium-based financial services company that specializes in the settlement of securities transactions, as well as the safekeeping and asset servicing of these securities. Euroclear wanted to solve some critical business challenges that they were facing in the organization well as come up with new business ideas for their processes. We realized that the best people to solve those challenges and provide new ideas are the ones who have been living with it – the employees. When these statements were taken to the employees, there was lot of ideas shared to solve them. But to get a practical solution, we utilized the power of getting the employees “hands-on”.

We created a hackathon for them where different group of employees participated in huge numbers & worked on addressing the problem statement at hand in form of hands-on assessment. This was achieved by leveraging the TCS iON Hands-On VM where they had to do hands coding in actual online tools to work on those problems. Post that, it was looked at by experts and guess what, the organization did find solutions to the problem and funded a specific project for the same.

Employees used multiple online applications like excel workbooks, coding applications (R studio, R, SQL, Libre Office) etc. without the need to install them on their machines. This kind of assessment removes restriction of using the available question types in an assessment. It gives the required proof for taking a decision of pass/ fail for evaluators. At the same time, it can be a great way to do practice assessments before a live exam.

We at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) ourselves recruit more than 50,000 people globally.

Hiring for technical roles in any organizations is challenging, as it is difficult to evaluate the technical know-how of the candidates based on solely their performance in the theoretical interviews and tests.

We ourselves have utilized the TCS iON Hands-On offering to recruit candidates in technical roles.  For example, if we are recruiting people who need to work on Java related technologies, they have to write a code in Eclipse which they are going to use when they start working with us. These assessments have helped us in getting better visibility of the candidates.

We now have included Hands-on as a specific mechanism to train our new joinees. This has helped employees to practice better as well as be more prepared before starting actual work. Till date, TCS iON Hands-On programming console usage has crossed 25 Mn candidate completions.

If you are interested to know more about how it works, please reach out to –

Kirsten Hemingway – [email protected]

Dermot Finnigan – [email protected]

David Hancock – [email protected]