Helping employers see more in people with our new assessment model, validated by industry analysis and data taken from a pool of 3 million candidate completions

Today I’m excited to announce a major new upgrade to Arctic Shores’ Task-based Assessment and what we measure within it — an update that I believe is one of the most pioneering advancements in psychometric testing for decades. 

After 10 years in business and two years of intense research and development, Arctic Shores has:

1. Analysed data taken from a pool of 3 million assessments over the last 10 years 
2. Examined the latest peer-reviewed research and industry forecasts on what will determine employee success in the AI era from the likes of the World Economic Forum, McKinsey, and the National Foundation for Educational Research 
3. Distilled insights from working with over 350 organisations, to solve the complexities of sifting high-quality candidates at scale, and making the transition from experience-centric hiring to skills-based hiring –– helping them fulfil their mission to become a skills-led organisation. 

The result of this groundbreaking research and development is that Arctic Shores has updated the model in our Task-based Assessment to help organisations evaluate Skill-enablers™ –– the factors our research identifies as critical for predicting a candidate’s potential in an AI-enabled workplace, where change is now the only constant.

Following three months of smooth adoption by our existing customers, feedback on the new model from Amazon, Molson Coors, Siemens, and many others has been overwhelmingly positive. 

In the remainder of this blog, I explain what Skill-enablers™ are, the problems they solve for TA teams and hiring managers, and what TA teams are actually saying about them. 

What are Skill-enablers™?

From all of the research, our team of psychometricians, cognitive scientists, and data scientists established there are three core factors most predictive of success in any role: 

• Thinking style — This tells us about a person’s innate ability to acquire knowledge, adapt, think strategically or critically, solve complex problems, be curious, and make decisions.
• Self-management — This tells us about how determined or persistent a person might be, how well they can focus or navigate challenges, what environment they might thrive in, and what level of emotional control they might display in challenging circumstances.
• Interacting with others — This tells us about how well a person might collaborate, understand the emotions of others and grasp nuance, be perceptive to what’s going on around them, and adapt their behaviours as a result.

We call these the Skill-enabler™ factors because they dictate a candidate’s ability to continuously adapt, interact, and learn new skills. 

For more detail on the specific Skill-enablers™ that make up each factor, please download our companion guide here.

Our extensive research identified these as the most critical qualities TA teams need to hire for to overcome two previously insurmountable problems:

1. Simplifying skills based hiring, and allowing TA teams to transition to the approach in months, not years
2. Selecting candidates with the potential to succeed – and continue succeeding – in the AI-enabled workplace

Here's how they do that. 

1. Skill-enablers™ facilitate the adoption of a skills-based hiring approach in months, not years

One of the reasons our customers responded so well to our new approach is that measuring Skill-enablers™ allows TA teams to radically simplify their approach to skills-based hiring — fulfilling the pragmatic vision championed by Josh Bersin.

“We have this enormous interest in skills-based hiring, skills-based internal mobility, skills-based development, and skills-based pay. All of these are centred on HR initiatives, HR technology, and HR infrastructure. But in reality, if we’re not focused on the business problem, we’re not going to be successful.

We’re now reaching a point where we have dozens of examples of companies that have done this in a pragmatic way, and hundreds of examples of companies that haven’t done it in a pragmatic way, who are going to be frustrated.”

Skill-enablers™ help TA teams accelerate the transition to becoming a skills-led organisation by simplifying the process in two ways:

TA teams no longer need to implement a perfect skills taxonomy to be able to embrace skills-based hiring 

Creating a skills taxonomy is a long, arduous process that is holding many TA teams back from transitioning to skills-based hiring. 

Sifting candidates based on their Skill-enablers™ allows TA teams to get started with skills-based hiring right away and layer in the skills taxonomy to the hiring process later –– safe in the knowledge that any candidate selected today will be able to acquire the new skills required in the future. This allows TA teams to embrace skills-based hiring in the pragmatic way that Josh Bersin suggests we should all aspire to.

Skill-enablers™ speed up the transition to skills-based hiring –– because they’re a simple concept every hiring manager can get behind

Hiring manager engagement is a challenge for almost every TA team we speak to. And it’s not because the majority of hiring managers are stuck in their ways. It’s because – just like TA teams – most hiring managers with open roles on their desks are already overstretched and the idea of doing something in a new way feels stressful. 

Feedback shows that hiring managers see real value in selecting for Skill-enablers™ and can grasp the concept quickly –– meaning TA teams can accelerate their mission to move away from experience-based sifting and create impact faster. 

But our research revealed another issue: even if TA teams can now move towards skills-based hiring quickly and easily, rapid skill decay and the introduction of AI to the workplace is going to drastically change what good looks like when it comes to which skills are required.  

Here’s how Skill-enablers™ overcome that challenge.

2. Skill-enablers™ enable you to hire candidates with the potential to succeed – and keep succeeding – in the AI-enabled workplace

According to Boston Consulting Group, the average shelf life of many hard skills is just 2.5 years –– meaning employees will need to be able to learn, unlearn, and relearn new skills in a continuous cycle to survive. AI only exacerbates this need. Because it can do many of the tasks that we previously needed a human for, the people we hire today must be able to (i) think critically about where they can add value; (ii) rapidly learn how to use new AI technology; and also (iii) learn new skills which AI doesn’t possess. 

Skill-enablers™ fulfill this brief in two ways:

Sifting on Skill-enablers™ gives you confidence new hires will be able to learn and relearn new skills in continuous cycles. 

Because our new model is based on research into both current AND future workforce skill requirements, Skill-enablers™ allow any recruiter or hiring manager to be confident the talent they’re hiring can: think critically, consistently acquire new skills in the future, and demonstrate the human skills AI does not possess. 

This focus improves retention, increases productivity, and reduces future performance management for employees who can’t keep up.

Candidates with the right transferable skills can also acquire the right hard skills quickly –– essential for overcoming skills shortages. 

For sectors facing a major skills shortage, where there aren’t enough people with the right hard skills to go around, hiring candidates with the right transferable skills is often a necessary but daunting option.

Evaluating a candidate based on their Skill-enablers™, however, means that hiring managers can have extra levels of confidence that the talent they’re hiring will have both relevant transferable skills and the ability to quickly acquire, and keep acquiring, the relevant hard skills too –– as well as the resilience to consistently adapt, and the interpersonal qualities required to collaborate to solve complex problems that they’ll no doubt face. 

What people are saying about Skill-enablers™

Fulfilling a 10-year mission to find a better way to uncover candidate potential 

When my co-founder Safe and I set out to build Arctic Shores back in 2014, our mission was to create a better way to uncover candidate potential –– helping employers see more in people and develop a richer, more accurate understanding of a candidate’s core strengths and capabilities. 

To do that, we had to go against the grain of traditional, self-report, question-based assessments by building our assessment using tasks not questions –– an approach anchored in cognitive neuroscience, built using the same approach used in clinical psychology settings in the NHS. 

Instead of asking candidates to tell us what they were capable of and assuming they knew (instead of overestimating their abilities… or underestimating them as is more commonplace among underrepresented groups), we asked them to complete a series of tasks to show us. 

We designed our assessment so that we would be able to score every single move a candidate made. This helped us build a more holistic picture of their potential and capture around 12,000 data points per candidate.

But until now, we have only changed how the world uncovered potential. Today, in updating our measures to help candidates evaluate Skill-enablers™, I’m excited that we are now also helping TA teams change what they measure to uncover candidate potential –– in a way that is future-proofed and aligned with the needs of the future workforce. 

I’m immensely proud of the Arctic Shores team and all the work it has taken to get us here and would like to take a moment to say thank you to our loyal and pioneering customers who have leapt head-first into embracing this evolution of the way we measure candidate potential. 

If you’d like to learn more about our research and our Skill-enabler™ measures, you can download the Arctic Shores Skill-enabler™ companion guide here or feel free to get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.