Candidate assessment services
The costs associated with either missing great people, or hiring the wrong people are huge. So, getting your assessment process right is key. We can help.
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Organisations can face several challenges with their candidate assessment process, from poor completion rates to bad candidate experience, and bias.
Whatever your challenge may be, we can analyse the causes and find solutions in our assessment process review.
Reed Talent Solutions has supported all kinds of organisations in enhancing their assessments. From interview and assessment design, and training your hiring managers, through to providing a variety of assessments and hosting assessment centres, we can help you make an impact and ensure your talent is the best available for your needs.
Our experts can design and deliver bespoke assessments that suit your organisation and can also recommend several off-the-shelf online assessments. Assessments we deliver include:
Ability assessments
Situational judgement tests
Job-focussed assessments
Personality questionnaires
Written exercise assessments
We can also provide qualified assessors and occupational psychologists to support your assessment process.
Ability assessments are a powerful tool to help efficiently screen individuals at scale while gaining deeper insights into their core competencies.
With these assessments we can help you predict job performance, especially when specific skills – such as numerical reasoning – are critical to success. With varying levels of norm groups, these assessments are suitable for evaluating candidates at every level of experience and seniority.
The portfolio of ability assessments our team can provide include:
Numerical reasoning
Numerical calculation
Deductive reasoning
Inductive reasoning
Verbal reasoning
Checking tests
Following instructions
Situational judgement tests are designed to evaluate a candidate's decision-making, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills in situations they might encounter in your workplace. They will give you insight as to how applicants will react and make decisions in certain scenarios.
On the other hand, situational judgement assessments provide valuable insight into the expectations of the role, helping candidates understand what’s required while allowing employers to assess key skills in a more engaging and candidate-friendly way than traditional competency-based interview questions.
Our experts can also work with you to design situational judgement tests that align to your competency framework or other candidate evaluation models, such as values-based, leadership, or role-specific frameworks .
These assessments can be very useful in supporting early talent programmes, where often candidates can lack the real experience to demonstrate their full potential in traditional competency-based assessments.
If you’re looking to identify the right person for a specific role, our job-focussed assessments are designed to evaluate the key skills and competencies that matter most. Tailored to the demands of the role you are recruiting for, a job-focussed assessment will help you identify and exclude those who lack essential capabilities – while offering a positive and relevant experience for applicants.
Because this type of assessment closely mirrors the role itself, applicants gain a clear understanding of what is expected, making the process insightful and engaging.
The job-focussed assessments cover roles in the following areas:
Industrial
Customer service
Sales
Retail
Hospitality
Early careers and graduates
Technology
Professional services
Personality questionnaires offer you a way to successfully measure candidate behaviours and competencies – helping you predict job performance and ensure alignment with your organisation’s values.
We offer access to a range of industry-leading personality tools, including:
SHL OPQ32
Saville’s Wave Professional Styles
Hogan Personality Assessments (including the Hogan Dark Side)
SOVA Personality Questionnaires
Our expert team can map these tools to your organisation’s competency framework or behavioural profile, allowing you to assess candidates directly against your specific requirements.
To deepen insights, our qualified assessors and occupational psychologists can also conduct validation interviews with your candidates, exploring key findings and producing bespoke reports aligned to your organisation’s behaviours and competencies.
Our expert team specialises in designing custom assessments that simulate real-life scenarios candidates are likely to encounter in their roles. These exercises - such as in-tray tasks, case study reviews, and role plays - are crafted to reflect the specific demands of your organisation.
Each assessment includes a tailored marking framework that evaluates not only the skills required for the role but also the behaviours and values demonstrated in candidate responses.
You can choose to deploy assessments internally, with full handover of materials, or outsource the process to our team, who will host, mark, and provide detailed feedback - streamlining your assessment workflow.
Assessment advisory and support services
We offer a comprehensive suite of services to support best practice in recruitment and assessment, including:
Advisory services to align assessments with your organisational goals
Qualified assessors and occupational psychologists to facilitate exercises and conduct validation interviews
Project management support for assessment centres and high-volume hiring
Predictive validity studies to evaluate how well your assessments forecast future job performance
Training for hiring managers and recruiters: recruitment and assessment best practice, inclusive hiring, unconscious bias awareness
Why choose us?
As part of the Reed Group, with over 60 years’ experience assessing and placing candidates, we’re experts in understanding how to determine the right fit for your organisation. From graduate schemes to c-suite recruitment, we have designed assessment processes that select the best people and ensure a positive candidate experience that aligns with your employer brand.
With a vast pool of qualified assessors, we can provide a flexible service that can scale with your hiring needs. Our assessors carry a variety of qualifications and include chartered occupational psychologists and BPS Level A & B. Our team has experience across multiple sectors.
We can advise on the latest tools and trends and help you roll out process changes including training your hiring managers, designing capability profiles and assessment frameworks that support your organisational goals.
We partner with leading online, psychometric assessment providers, such as SHL, Saville’s and Pearson Talent Lens and can secure the best value and service to suit your requirements.
Case studies
Media company
Flexible, on-demand recruitment support for a large media client
Multinational professional service network
Contingent worker onboarding and payroll technology for a blue-chip client
Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency
Driving a better solution: Recruiting 1,100 test centre associates
Royal Mail Group
Delivering the post: Recruiting postal workers across the UK for Royal Mail
Latest insights
FAQs
A candidate assessment is a process where a would-be employer evaluates the skills, experience, and qualification of candidates via assessments such as an interview, written examination, work sample test, or psychometric test. With the world of work constantly changing, organisations can face several challenges when it comes to recruitment assessment and the candidate assessment process. Candidate assessment services support an organisation’s search for top talent, finding the best and most diverse people available. Candidate assessment takes care of everything from interview and recruitment assessment design through to training of hiring managers and hosting assessment centres.
Candidate assessments aren’t just for hiring - they’re a valuable tool for employee development, future leader identification, and organisational restructuring.
Assessments that measure ability, aptitude, behaviour, and personality can help uncover individual strengths and development areas, supporting targeted growth and training initiatives. They also play a key role in succession planning, helping you identify high-potential employees who are ready to step into leadership roles.
During times of restructure, assessments can highlight transferable skills and traits, enabling smoother transitions and better role alignment across your organisation.
Candidate assessment services give a rich insight into the available candidate pool. Recruitment assessment methods allow you to take a data-driven approach to recruitment, resulting in:
A fairer assessment method
Faster decision-making with better results
Hiring people who better understand and fit your organisation
A system whereby the diversity of your hires can be tracked
A better candidate experience
Recruitment assessment can actually cut your organisation’s recruitment costs. Investing in candidate assessment will result in a more efficient, effective recruitment process. Using assessments can dramatically reduce your time to hire as decisions can be made based on data as well as interview performance, while pre-employment recruitment assessment results in an increased quality of hire and better retention rates, both of which are cost-effective in the long-term.
Recruitment assessment tools can include everything AI and automation, such as interview question generators or screening tools, to psychometric testing and online assessments. Also, assessments can be done in person with no extra tools needed.
The vast majority of organisations, across all sectors, use recruitment assessment methods. Whether it is volume or c-suite recruitment, professional services or manufacturing, private or public sector, all types or organisations can use some form of assessment.
A blended recruitment assessment is a combination of two or more assessment methods. Blended recruitment assessment methods offer a more realistic reflection of work life, allowing organisations to get a more rounded assessment of each candidate. Bringing together multiple psychological and task requirements allows recruitment assessments to achieve better outcomes.
Recruitment assessments provide a standardised, data driven set of results for every candidate, regardless of their background. This helps to reduce biases based on factors such as education, gender, race or age. Also, the use of assessments rather than interviews, help remove unconscious bias from the process.