2-minute read
9th April 2026
Those of you that joined last month’s Saville Assessment webinar will be familiar with some research we carried out recently looking at whether HR is genuinely set up to make defensible and reliable leadership selection decisions in this period of change and disruption.
For those that weren’t fortunate enough to catch Olivia Black and I live at the time, the response was overwhelming and, honestly, a little sobering.
The short answer is no, HR teams are not feeling confident and equipped to make confident and defensible decisions at this level. And the reason keeps coming back to the same thing: the quality of data available to inform those decisions just isn’t good enough.
That’s a problem worth taking seriously. Leadership hiring and promotion decisions are among the most consequential (and expensive) calls an organisation makes. When they go wrong, the cost isn’t just financial. It’s cultural, operational, and often very hard to undo.
That’s exactly what I’ll be exploring at HR Technologies UK in London on Wednesday 29th April (Seminar Theatre B, 12.30pm – see you there!). I’ll be diving deeper into findings from our recent global market research, insight from HR leaders on where things are going wrong, what’s driving it, and what forward-thinking teams are doing differently.
One of the things I’m genuinely excited to talk about is how organisations can move away from the constant cycle of uninspiring leadership selection and, instead, shift towards implementing structures to identify potential earlier, before a role even opens up.
Rather than waiting for a gap to appear and scrambling to fill it, the best teams are building a much clearer picture of who their future leaders are right now. That shift alone changes everything: better decisions, stronger pipelines, and a lot less wasted spend on hires that don’t quite cut the mustard.
At Saville Assessment, this is something we’ve put a lot of work into. Our Leadership Potential Dashboard brings together psychometric insight in a way that gives HR teams a genuinely clear, data-led view of leadership potential across their organisation. I’m looking forward to showing what it can do, and what it’s already doing for the organisations using it.
I’ll also be touching on something a lot of HR teams tell us is genuinely holding them back: getting buy-in from the business to invest in assessment in the first place. If you’ve ever had to make the case for scientific assessment to a sceptical CFO or exec team, this one’s for you too – and there’ll be a lot more of that on the stand but I don’t think I’m allowed to talk about that yet! 
If you’re heading to HR Technologies UK, I’d love to see you there. Grab a free event pass here if you haven’t already, come along to the session, and find us at Stand EE25 afterwards.
The team will be running live demos and, if building the business case for assessment is something you’re wrestling with, we can help you work through that too.
Leadership decisions are getting harder. The good news is we’re here to help you get them right.
See you in London.
H
With a background in psychometric research and development, Hannah has spent the majority of her career working hands‑on with organisations around the world, helping them make fairer, more defensible decisions about talent. She is a long‑standing advocate for evidence‑based selection and the responsible use of psychometrics in assessment and development.
Connect with her on LinkedIn here
