SBT has been looking into the in-house Human Resources sector since early 2004. At the time various companies started expressing their need to call upon the cognitive sciences as a supplement to existing assessment tools for candidates about to be recruited.
Traditionally, an individual in a work situation is only assessed in terms of his professional and behavioral skills. However, the tasks a post is composed of require basic cognitive skills (memory, language, logical reasoning, attention, or visual and spatial skills).

SBT therefore adopted a double approach to:

• elaborate cognitive indicators that would give information regarding the required skills for a specific post,
• constitute a set of exercises to assess these very indicators.

PEPCo: Assessment Programs for the Cognitive Potential

PEPCo was developed by SBT in order to select, recruit, and accompany candidates with various profiles. They are dedicated to:

• Human Resources Managers in major companies who wish to have procedures and tools to avoid wrong  recruitment choices as far as possible or who have to establish skills asessments and appraisals on the occasion of man power planning.
• Assessment Centers and Corporate Universities with high potential identification programs.
• Recruitment agencies having to guarantee their customers rigorous methods on which their tools rely.
• Specialized institutions for staff retraining when companies merge or are reorganized: Skills assessment centers, retraining platform i.e. for employment agencies.
• Major temp groups looking for tools to improve their customer loyalty rates  as well as the turn-over of  placed temps, and open-ended contracts on the occasion of their new recruitment skills.

The PEPCo measurements are based on the analysis of response time and quality of answers given on the occasion of closely supervised exercises. They are completely objective and non-declarative. In addition to an interview and/or behavioral tests they represent an added value in terms of quality for the assessor and make his decisions more reliable.

Candidate performance is analysed in accordance with the evaluation objective, compared with performances of populations with identical characteristics in terms of age and social and educational background, or by comparing it with the data of candidates applying for the same type of post.

This element of calibration with regard to similar people in relation to intra-individual variables is an important contributor to the reliability of PEPCo™ tools.

The www.pepco.fr website is specifically dedicated to companies as a media for HR management services in the form of Assessment Programs for the Cognitive Potential (PEPCo™).

There is a generic version of PEPCo™ designed to transversally assess the Cognitive Potential of candidates (Basic, Profile and High Potential) or a specifically job-related version (Job-related PEPCo™: call center agent and trade commissioner) are available for recruitment purposes. PEPCo™ Call Center Agent, for instance, comprises dynamic and fun exercises requiring the same cognitive skills as those required for the various tasks of a Customer Service Representative in a Call Center in order to test candidates' suitability for the job.

In order to meet more specific requests (mass recruitment, particular features of a job, specific goal of an assessment session…), SBT also develops custom modules and respects rigorous procedures. (EDF, GFC…)

The innovative and relevant nature of the cognitive approach to Human Resources has lead major market players to intensively collaborate with SBT: The French company PerformanSe SA integrated PEPCo™ into their own assessment tools and thus associated both cognitive and behavioral assessments (TwoB, Brain & Behavior), while both the French Vedior and BPI groups became strategic stockholders.