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One of the most difficult and critical jobs facing any senior company executive is identifying his or her successor. So much depends upon the correct choice.

Likewise, the job of selecting talent for promotion within a company is a challenging task, and these days many executives are known to ask whether there are any scientifically proven methods of balancing their subjective judgement.

Leading Thai consulting company, APMGroup, is quick to assure that there are many assessment tools available in the market.

However, managing director Arinya Talerngsri said there were no such tools currently available that offered a "showcase" of having successfully identified potential leaders for Thai corporations.

Seeing this need in the market, the APMGroup has entered into a partnership with a US-based company, Hogan Assessment Systems, which is recognised as having the most accurate personality assessment framework for evaluation of job candidates or staff appraisal, Arinya said.

Hogan's personality assessment framework has been distilled from a database with more than 20 years of records, she said.

The new partnership is not only preparing to offer its services in Thailand, but is also planning to open a branch in Vietnam next year.

"It will be our first overseas expansion," Arinya said.

Until recently, most Thai companies have had little interest in personality assessment tools.

"But now, top executives are becoming keenly interested. This is because in today's environment, business success depends very much on people. They have also learnt the tough lessons of promoting the wrong people," Arinya said.

A Hogan consultant, Jarrett Shalhoop, said his company had 20 years of personality-assessment research that showed the relationship between test scores and job performance. Unlike other products that assess only the strength of candidates, Hogan's assessment tool offers an insight into potential "career derailers".

"It's important to identify that before it happens," Shalhoop said.

Asked why companies should care about these issues when they were facing an immediate challenge of survival amid economic recession, Shalhoop said leadership was an important issue in every environment and was "probably more so" in difficult times.

"When the economy is good, you may afford to have anyone running the business. But now it's more than ever critical to have capable people defining strategies and figuring out how to come through this crisis," he said.

Hogan's director for alliances and partners, Ryan Ross, said the global "war of talent" was still being waged, and organisations that could identify and retain top talents would win.

"And with the 'Y' generation, individualised [career] development plans and individualised coaching is critical," he said.

Arinya said that among the target customers for Hogan's assessment tool were companies and organisations that were looking for a tool to find "jewels" within their existing staff; family-owned companies that were seeking to develop their sons or daughters as successors; and public and private companies that needed to prepare younger staff to take over when others retired.

Top companies that have used Hogan's personality assessment tool include Dell, PepsiCo and Cisco - which is currently working with Hogan to prepare its Asian executives for expatriate work, Ross said.

Pichaya@nationgroup.com