Employers have adopted the job-relevant assessments, but personality tests are undermining them

New research finds most talent acquisition teams have already moved to skills-based hiring, but legacy tools may be cancelling out the benefit.

• 82% of talent acquisition managers use job-relevant skills or work-sample assessments, the format both employers and candidates rate as the fairest and most accurate
• Yet 56% still use personality tests too, despite only 10% of job seekers rating them as the fairest or most accurate form of assessment
• Just 22% say their assessments have helped reduce staff attrition
• 81% say improving quality of hire is their main reason for using assessments, and 60% have a specific KPI tied to it
• Only 11% say improving fairness or reducing bias is their main focus when choosing an assessment

New UK research* from pre-hire assessment specialist ThriveMap suggests that most
employers have already made the right call on assessment format, testing job-relevant skills
and real work samples rather than relying on personality profiling alone. The problem is that
many are still running personality tests alongside them, and it’s stopping the switch to skills-
based hiring from paying off.

The gap between intention and outcome

Talent acquisition managers are clear on what they want from assessments. 81% cite quality
of hire as their main priority, ahead of consistency (53%) and reducing bias (51%), and 60%
have a KPI specifically tied to it. Most have also picked tools that, in principle, should deliver
on that: 82% now use job-relevant skills or work-sample assessments, the format both
employers and job seekers agree is the fairest and most accurate way to test a candidate.
Yet only 22% say their assessments have actually helped reduce staff attrition, the clearest
sign that a hire was the right one. Having the right format isn’t the same as having a hiring
process that works.

Old habits are still in the mix

One explanation may be that job-relevant testing is rarely used on its own. 56% of talent
acquisition managers still include personality tests as part of their process, even though only
10% of job seekers think they’re the fairest or most accurate way to assess a candidate.
Layering a low-trust, low-realism test onto an otherwise sound process risks undoing the
benefit of the parts that do work, particularly when only 11% of employers say fairness or
bias reduction is their main focus when choosing assessments in the first place.

The result is a hiring process that looks modern on paper, built on skills and job-relevant
tasks, but that still leans on tools candidates don’t trust and that weren’t designed to reflect
what the job is actually like day to day.

Christopher Platts, Founder and CEO, ThriveMap said “Most employers have already
made the right call on paper, they’ve moved towards skills-based, job-relevant assessments
and away from generic profiling. So why isn’t it moving the number they care about most?

Our view is that job-relevant and job-realistic aren’t the same thing. You can test the right
skill and still give a candidate no real sense of the pace, the pressure or the environment
they’re walking into. And when personality tests are still sitting in the process alongside it,
tools that over half of employers use despite barely one in ten candidates trusting them,
you’re diluting a good idea with a bad one. If quality of hire is genuinely the priority, the fix
isn’t another assessment stage. It’s making the ones you already run actually reflect the job.”

*Survey carried out on behalf of ThriveMap by OnePoll in February 2026 with 1,000 job seekers and 200 talent acquisition managers.

The full State of the Assessment Market 2026 report can be downloaded here.