By Imogen Clarke

Nowadays, the recruitment process is more strenuous than ever. With the pandemic causing redundancies and furloughing, the number of candidates vying for job roles has skyrocketed. However, companies still need to be able to sieve through their sea of applicants in order to find the ones that will fit neatly into their industry. It is time-consuming enough to look through all the applicants’ resumes and narrow them down to potential interviewees without then worrying you have made the wrong choice when you finally do hire someone. And as for the new hire, they may be concerned that they have also made the wrong choice by accepting this job role that they perhaps thought was something else entirely.

So, how can companies avoid this and successfully streamline their recruitment process? Fortunately, you can now use science. Artic Shores, a UK-based technology company, are reinventing recruitment by developing behavioural assessments with a little help from neuroscience. Using data and analytics, they construct psychometric assessments that make the candidate selection process more rooted in accuracy.

The truth is, when it comes to the interviewing process, both sides can be hard to read; psychologically, we all want to look our best and appear as experts in our field, but Artic Shores’ assessments cut through the niceties and focus on the science.

According to Artic Shores, “While CVs and interviews are often seen by candidates as ways to convey their strengths, employers also need to see their development areas. This can be difficult, however, given how it may seem to be in candidates’ best interests to hide them from you. Psychometric tests can help employers to see these growth areas more clearly, beyond candidates’ efforts to appear socially desirable. This allows you to establish a more complete, transparent picture, with likely development areas balanced alongside the more obvious strengths.”

So, what do these assessments do? The science team at Artic Shores develop tasks that “measure true human behaviour”. They specialise in seeing just how potential employees will naturally behave in their working environment, so employers will have a clearer idea of what to expect if they do hire them.

And this level of testing isn’t just for weeding out unsuitable candidates; it is also to help said candidates discover if they really are applying for a role that suits their skills and will benefit them in the long run. Even if the assessment does pick up on areas that need improvement, this doesn’t mean that the employer is going to immediately reject the applicant; instead, the purpose of the behavioural assessments is to help employers see where they can lend their support to their employees and help them develop their abilities. It preludes to a positive working environment that benefits both parties, where the employer doesn’t have to worry about hiring new staff and the employees can train and flourish in different areas of the job.

But Artic Shores also has another agenda; encouraging diversity in the workplace. There is, ultimately, a strong bias when it comes to the hiring process, even though it may be unintentional. Artic Shores refer to this as homophily, “the biologically-hardwired tendency for humans to seek out and commune with people who look, sound and think like us.” Without realising it, companies are automatically hiring candidates that are familiar to them, i.e., look and sound like them, and are ignoring viable candidates that perhaps come from different social backgrounds, are of different ethnicity, etc.

The purpose of psychometric testing is to promptly nip this trend in the bud; instead of hiring candidates who all come from same walks of life and all have similar opinions and work ethics, companies will be able to hire a diverse team who can all offer something unique to their field. Not only is it morally right to promote diversity within the workplace, but it also benefits companies by bringing together people who can offer different insights and ideas that otherwise would not have been voiced.

Artic Shores’ assessments are revolutionising the way that businesses approach the hiring process; their data-driven testing is responsible for saving companies from spending their time and money on recruitment and training, only for them to then repeat the same process when the new hire isn’t suitable. With a little help from neuroscience, companies can effectively streamline their practises and spend more time focusing on other prominent aspects of their business. Psychometric testing is also paving the way for more workplace diversity, which, in 2020, is really something that should already be in action.