A large share of assessment centres now run entirely online: case study delivered through a portal, group exercise in breakout rooms, interviews and presentations over video. Employers kept the format because it is cheaper and widens the candidate pool. For candidates it is a genuinely different event from the in-person version, and treating it as the same day on a webcam costs marks.
What actually changes
The exercises are the same; the signal is thinner. Assessors still score the same criteria, but they see you through a small rectangle with compressed audio. Behaviours that read clearly in a room (attentiveness, energy, listening) have to be slightly amplified to survive the pipe.
Logistics become part of the assessment. Nobody formally scores your connection, but a candidate who is late from a login failure, inaudible, or reading exhibits off a phone screen is performing under a handicap the whole day.
The day is more tiring than it looks. Four hours of concentrated video interaction is draining in a way an in-person day is not. Plan for it like an exam: sleep, food, and breaks used properly rather than spent refreshing email.
The setup that removes risk
Do all of this the day before, not the morning of:
- Test the exact platform (Teams, Zoom, or the employer's own portal) on the machine you will use, with the camera and microphone it will use. Our equipment check takes two minutes and catches the usual suspects.
- Wire what can be wired. Ethernet beats wifi; if wifi is unavoidable, sit near the router and ask the household to stay off video for the day.
- Frame yourself properly: camera at eye level, light in front of you rather than behind, head and shoulders filling the frame. Details in our camera presence guide.
- Prepare a fallback: phone hotspot configured, the assessor contact number written on paper, and a charged phone with the platform app installed.
- Close everything else. Notifications during a shared screen are at best distracting and at worst embarrassing.
Exercise by exercise
The case study. Usually delivered as documents in a portal with a timer. Use two windows side by side (brief left, your answer right) rather than flicking between tabs, and keep rough workings on paper. The approach itself is unchanged.
The group exercise. The hardest to translate online, because turn-taking has no body language to run on. Interruption reads worse on video than in a room, and silence reads emptier. What works: use names (Sara, you have looked at the numbers, what do you think), summarise at intervals, and volunteer for the scribe or timekeeper role, which gives you legitimate structural interventions. See the group exercise guide for the underlying craft.
The interview. Closest to normal. Look at the lens when speaking, not the faces on screen; it feels wrong and reads right. Notes are acceptable in most virtual interviews, but as a glance-down prompt sheet, not a script: reading is instantly audible.
The presentation. Rehearse the mechanics: sharing slides while keeping your video visible, presenting to a silent gallery, handling do you want to take questions as you go. Practise the whole thing aloud at least twice, on camera, under time. Our presentation stage runs exactly this format and scores delivery as well as content.
Keeping presence through a screen
Energy transmits at about 80 percent through video, so aim slightly above your natural level: a touch more vocal variation, more deliberate pauses, visible reactions when others speak (nodding reads; blank listening reads as absence). Sit forward slightly. Keep water within reach: a long online day dries out your voice, and your voice is most of what they are getting.
And when something breaks (it sometimes does), handle it visibly well. Calm rejoin, quick apology, straight back to the task. Assessors know the technology fails; how you behave in the thirty seconds afterwards is free evidence of composure, and more than one candidate has scored well in the recovery.
The candidates who do best online are rarely the most naturally telegenic. They are the ones who removed every avoidable risk the day before and rehearsed the format until it was boring. Both of those are choices, and both are available to you: a full mock run is the fastest way to make them.