Wash-up meeting
Fit & BehaviouralThe meeting at the end of an assessment centre where assessors pool their recorded evidence on every candidate and reach a decision.
Also written: wash up, calibration meeting, assessor debrief
The wash-up is where the day is actually decided. Assessors and interviewers bring their notes, work through each candidate against the competency framework, and agree an outcome. Nothing is settled in the room you were sitting in, which is the single most useful thing to understand about the format.
Because the marking is evidence based, the discussion is anchored in a way an unstructured comparison of impressions is not. An assessor arguing for you has to point at something you did, and an assessor arguing against you has to do the same. That is the practical case for making a contribution observable rather than merely correct.
It is also where consistency gets tested, and the asymmetry is uncomfortable. A single dismissive interaction is raised by whoever saw it, and negative evidence is more memorable and more actionable than positive evidence, so being strong three times and impatient once tends to be discussed as the impatience.
One consolation follows from the same structure. A weak performance in one exercise can genuinely be argued away by evidence from another, because the whole point of running several exercises is that no single one decides. That is not true of a single interview, where one poor conversation is the entire record.
Worked example
A candidate is quiet in the group exercise but produces the sharpest written note of the day.
In a run of interviews that reads as one weak session and one strong one, resolved by whoever speaks last. In a wash-up it is two pieces of evidence under different competencies, and the note is on the table for anyone to read.