When a date has to be staffed in an organisation that runs many selection procedures, the first question is almost always: who has time? The second question, who is actually qualified for it, often stays in someone’s head. The scheduler knows her people. She knows who may run the one-to-one interview and who only observes. As long as she is there, this works.
We ran selection procedures for two decades and saw this arrangement often. It works until it does not.
Knowledge in someone’s head is not documentation
Qualifications in scheduling are rarely a secret, but they are rarely written down. There is a list, perhaps in a spreadsheet, perhaps on the intranet, and then there is what the coordinator additionally knows: this person has completed the training for the procedure, that one has not, the third is cleared for the group exercise only.
The problem shows up in three places:
During sickness and holidays. Whoever stands in does not know the additional rules. The stand-in staffs by availability, and availability is the only thing in the spreadsheet.
When a replacement is needed at short notice. If someone drops out at seven in the morning, there are minutes to decide. Nobody looks anything up in that moment; they ask: who can step in? The answer comes from whoever happens to be reachable.
When someone asks afterwards. If a works council, an auditor or a client asks later whether the staffing was permissible, the reconstruction begins. Who sat in which procedure, and with what qualification?
What the standard says, and what it does not
DIN 33430 requires that people involved in aptitude assessments are qualified for the task. It does not prescribe a professional title; it describes requirements for knowledge and competence. How an organisation represents that qualification internally is up to it. Whether that is sufficient for your procedure in a specific case is something to clarify with your own specialists or an adviser — this is not legal advice.
In practice it means: a staffing decision is easy to justify when, for every role in every procedure, you can show which requirement applies and why the person assigned meets it. That is less bureaucratic than it sounds, but it does require the requirement to be written down somewhere before anyone is assigned.
An example from everyday operations
An assessment with eight candidates, two rounds of observation and one-to-one interviews in the afternoon. The day before, a psychologist scheduled for the interviews calls in sick. The coordinator phones three people. The first is on holiday, the second is willing, the third would have time but is not yet cleared for this procedure.
The second person takes over. All is well, as long as the coordinator is in the building that day and the knowledge about the third person is not lost.
The same scenario during the holiday season: the coordinator’s stand-in sees a spreadsheet with three names and three availabilities. She calls the first person who can say yes. That is the third person.
None of this is bad faith. It is a process that depends on the right person happening to be there.
Qualification before availability
The conclusion we drew from this is simple: the order of checking has to be reversed. First you define who is eligible for which procedure and which role. Only from that group do you then staff by availability.
That has three consequences:
- The qualification is maintained once, instead of being recalled at every staffing decision. Whoever has completed a training is cleared for the procedure; whoever has not does not appear as an option.
- Stand-ins need no special knowledge. The list of candidates for the job has already been filtered.
- The justification is produced along the way. Anyone who asks gets the recorded requirement and the assignment, without anyone having to reconstruct it.
The same applies to the ratio of observers to candidates. A procedure’s supervision ratio is a requirement too, one that should be fixed before the assignment rather than noticed when the room turns out too full or too empty.
Where the limits are
A recorded qualification does not replace the judgement of the professionals. It says who is formally eligible, not who is the best choice for this day and this group. And it has to be current: a matrix nobody maintains is worse than none, because it creates a false sense of security. So anyone introducing this also has to settle who grants clearances, who withdraws them and how often they are reviewed.
What flynne contributes
In flynne you record the required qualifications and the supervision ratio for each procedure type. People without the required qualification do not appear as an option when staffing, and the conflict check blocks assignments that do not work in time terms. The role is not tied to a profession: where you work with trained managers or specialist observers, it is set up accordingly. The decision about who is cleared stays with you.
