In the course Personnel Psychology, a student team will help you in making better decisions related to one of your HR-related challenges. The teams will come up with high quality and practically relevant recommendations based on an analysis of your organization, collected data, and relevant (academic) literature.

The students will receive training and guidance by lecturers from Tilburg University.

✅ Key features of the challenge

• Students per team: 4-5 students
• Course: Personnel Psychology
• Programme: Master Work and Organizational Psychology
• No. of hours spent per team: 150 hours
• Deliverables: Presentation and report with recommendations (and, if required, an implementation plan).
• Company time investment: Your time involvement is 8-12 hours in total (e.g. weekly (short) meetings, interviews, final presentation, etc.)
• Matching fee: €850,- (ex tax, charged by Master Challenge (NOT the university))

📑 Challenge Examples

A variety of topics related to HR are suitable for this challenge. The student teams can work on challenges like, but not limited to, the following:

• Help us improve our personnel selection systems.
• Come up with more effective employee development policies.
• Help us improve our reward systems.
• Identify and test new ways of recruiting talented new employees.
• Identify the best way to socialize new colleagues.
• Propose ways to reduce turnover.

🏢 Requirement for participating companies

• Any company/organization from any industry can apply

💰 Costs

Master Challenge is organizing this challenge-based learning program free of charge for educational organizations. In order to cover costs like company recruitment, platform development, marketing, coordination, etc. Master Challenge issues a matching fee of €850,- (ex tax) per team. This is to be able to further operate and close the gap between education and practice.

❗️You will only be charged when matched to a team.

👉 What does the challenge ask of you as a company when matched to a team?

• A contact person that typically invests between 8-12 hours (e.g., joining the (online) kick-off, (bi-)weekly update meetings, final presentations, providing information, answering questions).
• Most assignments require students to collect data within the host organization (e.g., interview data, focus groups, quantitative data, document analysis). Typically, the data collection requires a time investment between 6-10 hours in total.
• A selection of documents to get the team up to speed. For example, a pitch/slide deck detailing your company’s activities and structure, the problem associated to the challenge, specific questions related to the topic that you might want the students to research for you, trend reports, industry reports, other relevant (research) reports.

📨 How to apply

You can submit the challenge directly through the website. Provide a title that summarises the challenge. Subsequently, briefly elaborate on your challenge. See link for a template you could use: https://link.masterchallenge.me/challenge-template or use the challenge generator: https://masterchallenge.me/challenge-generator

🗓 Planning

• August 11: Submission Deadline
• August 25 (or sooner): Receiving message if your challenge is approved by the Course Coordinator
• September 1: Teams rank the challenges including a brief motivation for why they want to solve this challenge. The companies receive an overview of the teams that have chosen their challenge.
• September 3: The companies rank the teams that want to solve their challenge.
• September 5: Teams are matched with challenges. Matches are shared with the teams and companies.
• September 8-10: Kick-off meeting with your team (your team will contact you to set up the meeting)
• October 6: Final presentations in time slots of 20 minutes (after you are matched to a team, we will schedule the time slots)
• October 13: Deadline final report 

Questions? Want to discuss your challenge before submitting one? Feel free to schedule a call 👉 here.