Behavioural indicator
Fit & BehaviouralA specific observed action or statement recorded by an assessor as evidence, positive or negative, under one named competency.
Also written: behavioural indicator, positive indicator, negative indicator
An indicator is the unit of evidence in an assessment centre. The assessor writes down what a candidate said or did, close to verbatim, and then files it under a competency with a sign attached: asked the quiet member for their view sits as a positive under teamwork, talked over two people sits as a negative under the same heading.
The reason to understand this is that it changes what preparation means. Assessors are not scoring the quality of your thinking directly, they are scoring the evidence your thinking produced. A correct analysis you kept to yourself produces no indicator at all, so it is scored the same as not having had it.
It also explains why one action can be worth more than another of apparently similar quality. Bringing a quieter person into a stuck discussion generates evidence under teamwork and under judgement at the same time, because it is both a collaborative act and a well timed one. Restating your own earlier point generates nothing under either.
The common misreading is that this rewards performing. It does not. Assessors are trained to distinguish a contribution that moved the task from one staged to be seen, and a candidate visibly playing to the assessor generates negative indicators quickly. What it rewards is making genuine contributions audible rather than internal.
Worked example
A candidate spots that two figures in the group brief contradict each other and works around it silently in her own notes.
Nothing is recorded, because nothing was observable. Saying it out loud, in one sentence, would have produced an indicator under commercial judgement and given the group a fact it needed.