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Assessment centres, the Process Communication Model, FRIS and Gallup talents: when these tools are worth using, how they support recruitment, and why none of them replaces a board’s decision.
What a bad management hire costs
Around 40% of top managers hired from outside leave or are dismissed within the first eighteen months (data from the Center for Executive Succession at the University of South Carolina). A large LeadershipIQ study covering more than 20,000 hires puts the figure higher still: 46% of new recruits do not last in the role over the same period.
What matters most, though, is what sits behind those numbers. In the overwhelming majority of cases the deciding factor is fit, or rather the lack of it – interpersonal, cultural and in working style. Technical competence is rarely the weak link. A candidate looks faultless on paper and in interview, and yet does not find their feet in the reality of the organisation, the board or the team they are meant to lead.
What does that cost? Gartner and the Harvard Business Review estimate that a failed executive hire can consume the equivalent of ten to fifteen times the person’s annual salary once you count severance, lost productivity, disruption to the team and the cost of strategic decisions taken in the wrong direction. SHRM puts the cost of replacing an employee more conservatively at 50–200% of annual pay, with management roles at the top of that range.
With stakes like these, it is no surprise that organisations increasingly reach for additional diagnostic tools. Europe is among the most mature markets for talent diagnostics, and industry reports forecast continued growth here of around eight per cent a year, driven in part by wider use of these tools among medium-sized companies in Central and Eastern Europe, Poland included. It is also a market strongly shaped by the GDPR, which in itself forces a more careful and considered approach to testing. The question is whether companies are using these tools in the right way.
What tests in recruitment do and do not show
Let us dispose of the first worry straight away. Neither a test nor an assessment session makes the decision for the recruiter, and that is not what they are for.
The data on the accuracy of selection methods make this clear. A landmark review of the meta-analyses, published by Sackett and colleagues in 2022 in the Journal of Applied Psychology, overturned beliefs the industry had held for half a century. Take the measure the researchers use, the validity coefficient denoted by the letter r. It shows how strongly a given method predicts actual performance at work, on a scale from zero (the method says nothing about future results) to one (a perfect prediction). In recruitment practice, values above 0.30 are considered useful and those above 0.50 strong. It turned out that the single strongest predictor of future performance is the structured interview (corrected validity r ≈ 0.42), ahead of cognitive ability tests, long assumed to lead the field, whose validity was revised down to r ≈ 0.31. Work experience on its own predicts performance poorly (r ≈ 0.18).
The most important conclusion, though, comes from elsewhere: no single method is enough. Only when tools are combined – an interview with a suitable test, for instance – does overall predictive validity rise to r ≈ 0.63–0.65, which counts as very strong. What determines the strength of the prediction is the skilful combination of several methods and the competence with which they are used.
All three of the experts we spoke to arrived independently at the same metaphor: each tool is a different map of the same person. The sense of the observation is shared. Every method measures a different parameter and reveals a different part of the picture – one shows how a candidate acts, another how they communicate and respond to stress, a third how they think, and a fourth what gives them energy. None provides a complete portrait, and none can sensibly be read out of context. Until an organisation knows who it is really looking for, a test result on its own says very little.
A map does not decide where we are going; it only shows the terrain, and choosing the route remains with whoever knows the destination. So let us look at which part of the terrain each of the four maps reveals, and what question it answers.
Four diagnostic tools in C-level recruitment
Assessment centre – watching a candidate in action
An assessment centre is a method in which candidates are observed in action – through a set of group and individual tasks (including simulated conversations with an employee, a client or a colleague) and paper-and-pencil in-basket exercises based on working with data and written communication – against competencies defined in advance. As Alicja Duda, who has run such sessions for more than twenty years, explains, a competency comprises three linked elements: knowledge, the ability to apply it, and the softer dispositions that allow both to be demonstrated effectively in practice.
The process begins long before the session itself, with building a competency profile with the client (usually around five competencies), breaking it down into observable indicators and designing tasks that give candidates the chance to display those competencies. During the session each participant is observed by at least two assessors. Alicja Duda stresses why that rule matters:
“The minimum is two assessors, because each of us sees reality through our own filter. The second assessor keeps the observation as objective as it can be.”
That is where the method’s greatest value lies: it allows you to observe how a candidate actually behaves, rather than what they say about themselves. The expert puts it this way:
“In an interview we mostly hear declarations. Here we see the person in action, all day and across a variety of tasks, where there is no room for pretence.”
The method works well for leadership and strategic roles, including board and C-level positions, because that is where the cost of a wrong choice is highest, and because the objectivity of the session limits decisions made on the basis of seniority or personal liking. Sometimes a session also reveals potential that the company’s everyday hierarchy has given no chance to show.
Duda is candid about the method’s limitations, however. A session is expensive and time-consuming, and it carries a poor reputation picked up from stories online, which only adds to participants’ stress. Above all, it should not be treated as an oracle, as she puts plainly:
“I would be wary of deciding on the basis of one tool alone. You have to take the whole picture into account: the earlier stages of recruitment, performance reviews and how the person operates within the company. We show who shows the most promise and what work needs doing, but the decision always belongs to the client.”
For the most senior roles one further nuance is worth adding: a candidate’s own distance from this form of assessment can itself be informative. A guarded response along the lines of “I have years of experience behind me and you want to assess me with a questionnaire” says as much about a person as the result of any single exercise.
PCM – how a candidate communicates under pressure
PCM describes the structure of communication and how someone reacts under pressure. Unlike the popular four-type models, it distinguishes six types arranged in a structure of floors, in which the base is the strongest and most natural style, while the phase marks the current stage, bringing different needs and different responses to stress. Weronika Witczak-Zerwa describes what the model is about:
“PCM shows the natural communication style, rooted in innate or developed dispositions. When we act in line with it, we use no extra energy; every other form of communication draws on that energy.”
The model, developed at one time with NASA to help select people for work in confined, high-stress environments, is particularly valuable where you want to understand how a candidate reacts under real pressure and to judge whether a particular board and team can live with that way of reacting.
Here Witczak-Zerwa adds an important caveat. In Poland, PCM has no implemented automated recruitment reports, so its real strength shows in advisory and development work and in assessing fit – that is, in showing the potential for two particular people to work together. That leads to a deeper observation about the nature of C-level recruitment, which the expert puts as follows:
“When we hire at C-level, we are not doing it in order to develop that person; they are the one who is meant to develop others and fit into the organisation. So you need to know what challenges the company faces and what natural qualities, alongside competence, that person will need in order to last.”
FRIS – thinking style and fit with the team
FRIS is a Polish diagnostic tool created by Dr Anna Samborska-Owczarek, on the market since 2015 and grounded in cognitive psychology – a different foundation from Jung-derived instruments such as MBTI, DISC or Insights. Beata Piasny, a certified trainer in the method, underlines the difference:
“FRIS concentrates on internal mental processes, that is, on the way we process information. MBTI and DISC describe personality traits and temperament above all. That is the fundamental difference.”
The tool diagnoses two layers. Thinking style is the perspective that engages first in a new situation – Facts, Relationships, Ideas or Structures, whose Polish initials give the name FRIS – described through four types: the Competitor, the Partner, the Visionary and the Investigator. Action style, by contrast, is a composition of all the perspectives. Piasny illustrates thinking style with a simple example from a sudden incident on the road: one person immediately takes charge and reaches for the phone, another first makes sure the passengers are safe, and a third needs a moment’s quiet to work out where things stand. That first reaction is what indicates the dominant perspective.
In a management context, FRIS works well for diagnosing how well a leader fits a team and for communication between different styles. Piasny points, however, to an application that is especially valuable in C-level recruitment: the tool can be used not only on the candidate but on the manager running the recruitment, to help them articulate their own, often unspoken, expectations.
“Managers often find it hard to put their own expectations into words. On the technical side – education, experience, languages – it is straightforward. The difficulty starts where you have to define what this person is actually meant to change, which problems they should solve and who fits the team.”
Gallup talents – where a manager’s strength comes from
CliftonStrengths describes 34 talents spread across four domains (thinking, influencing, relationship building and executing), of which the top five matter most. Beata Piasny, who has worked with the tool for more than nine years and run over three thousand individual sessions, explains the idea of a talent in the simplest terms, as a strong need that shows in the first instinct:
“A talent is an overwhelming need expressed in the first instinct. Someone with the strategic talent generates several alternative courses of action whether they mean to or not. It is simply their nature.”
The expert draws an important distinction between a talent and a strength:
“A strength is a talent applied in practice, repeatedly and usefully. It becomes part of our style and our personal brand – what other people say about us once we leave the room.”
Gallup’s data here are telling: meta-analyses link strengths-based development to increases in organisational profit of up to 29% and in employee engagement of up to 15%. Piasny adds two caveats, though, which separate professional use of the tool from money wasted. First, talents should not be read in isolation:
“Talents react with one another like elements in the periodic table and create something new. That same strategic talent will work differently in the company of other talents.”
Second – and this applies to all the tools discussed here – without a competent debrief the report ends up in a drawer:
“Companies invest in tests and workshops, and the effects often fade away. Without a session with a trained person the tool adds little, because what gives it value is the interpretation of the result.”
Where bad hires really begin
This is where all four maps meet. If 40% of hires into the most senior roles end in failure, and the usual cause is fit, the source of the problem rarely lies with the candidate. Far more often it lies in the fact that the organisation never defined who it actually needed.
Piasny recounts a story that is a textbook example of this. In one recruitment, she and her manager, as she recalls, “were talking about similar things but understanding them quite differently”. Her manager made the final decision, and then – once the new person was in post – began, in her view unconsciously, to question what she did, because she did not match his unspoken expectations about how the work should be done. The real weakness turned out to be a badly framed question to which the candidate was supposed to be the answer.
Witczak-Zerwa describes the same phenomenon from the perspective of owners and boards:
“At board level the mode is: get on with it, show us who you have. Instead of pausing for a moment and saving a great deal of time by doing so, decision-makers set off straight away. The nuances nobody has named stay out of sight, and it is those that later decide success or failure.”
This is precisely where the tools add the most value: they supply a language that lets you structure the conversation about expectations before anyone starts looking at individual candidates. A form based on the FRIS or Gallup methodology, completed together with the chief executive, can draw out what the chief executive could not put into words: what working style the new person is to bring, who on the board they must be able to reach an understanding with, and what responses to stress the organisation can tolerate.
Turning the results into one recruitment decision
From the conversations with three experts and from the market data, a coherent and practical model emerges. It is not complicated, but it requires a discipline that is hard to keep up under time pressure.
- Context before tool. First establish what challenge the organisation faces, what the new person is actually meant to change, who they will work with, and which natural dispositions will allow them to hold the role over the longer term.
- Match the method to the question. To observe behaviour under pressure, use an assessment centre; PCM reveals communication, responses to stress and fit with the board; FRIS shows how someone thinks and how they fit the team; Gallup talents map sources of energy and areas of strength.
- Combine several methods. The research is unambiguous: a single tool has limited validity, and only a combination – a structured interview with a diagnostic, for example – genuinely reduces the risk.
- Competent interpretation. A result without a professional debrief is money wasted, because the real value is created by the person able to read that result.
- The decision rests with the organisation. The tool provides the basis for a decision and shows who shows most promise and what is worth working on; the decision itself is made by whoever knows the destination.
The formal dimension is worth remembering too: the results of psychometric tests are as a rule the personal property of the person tested, and using them within an organisation requires consent and respect for the GDPR. That is one more argument for embedding these tools in a well-considered process and using them deliberately.
What this means for C-level recruitment
The most expensive hires most often fail at the very source, at the stage of asking who the organisation really needs. Assessment centres, PCM, FRIS and Gallup talents are four valuable but different maps: each reveals a different stretch of terrain, none shows the whole, and none will tell a board which way to go. Used well, they give an organisation something valuable – a language in which it can finally name who it is looking for; used hastily, they end up in a drawer along with the money spent on them.
What makes the difference is a properly framed question, asked before anyone reaches for a tool.
This article draws on conversations with Stalwart Manacus experts: Alicja Duda (assessment and development centres), Weronika Witczak-Zerwa (Process Communication Model) and Beata Piasny (FRIS, Gallup talents). The market data come from, among others, research by LeadershipIQ and the Center for Executive Succession (University of South Carolina), the meta-analysis by Sackett and colleagues (Journal of Applied Psychology, 2022), estimates from Gartner, the Harvard Business Review and SHRM, and Gallup meta-analyses. Forecasts for the European talent diagnostics market (growth of around 8% a year, rising use in Central and Eastern Europe) are based on industry reports, including Dataintelo, Psychometric Tests Market (2026).
