This interview is with Ben Schwencke, Business Psychologist at Test Partnership.

Ben Schwencke, Business Psychologist, Test Partnership

Ben, could you please tell us a little about yourself and your journey to becoming an expert in pre-employment testing and recruitment?

As with most psychology students, my initial interest was in the clinical and therapeutic space. I knew I was interested in psychology but didn’t know any of the alternative career paths available to psychology students until my final year. After learning about industrial and organizational psychology, I realized that was the area for me, allowing me to explore the more commercial aspects of psychology.

Armed with this knowledge, I elected to complete a master’s degree in occupational psychology, helping me specialize in the business application of psychology. Training, leadership, change management, and personal development are all fascinating topics of study and practice, and I found myself completely in my element.

However, the topic that interested me the most was selection and assessment, particularly with respect to pre-employment testing. Pre-employment testing and psychometrics represented a particularly good niche for me, as I have always been focused on numbers, statistics, and research. No other area of psychology is as quantitative as psychometric testing, and the commercial angle really appealed to me.

I love using psychology to solve real-world problems and help organizations optimize their selection processes. Today, I am as passionate about psychology as ever. My experience and expertise allow me to work with a wide range of organizations, serving as a trusted advisor to HR teams and hiring managers around the world. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunities that I have been presented with and can’t wait to see how the industry continues to evolve in the future.

What initially sparked your interest in this field, and what were some of the key milestones that shaped your expertise?

Even before I knew about industrial-organizational psychology, I was fascinated by individual differences between people. I would often wonder what differentiates successful people and how we can identify those with incredible talents. I have always believed that wasted potential is the greatest tragedy facing humanity. Imagine what we could achieve as a species if every person’s potential were utilized to its fullest extent. We have everything we need to overcome the odds and drive forward—we just need to give the right people a chance to help.

Organizational psychology is all about making this dream a reality, giving everyone the tools and opportunities they need to thrive in the workplace. Achieving my master’s degree in occupational psychology was a key milestone in my journey, as it is a critical entry requirement in this field. Armed with the theoretical knowledge and academic rigor required for a career in psychology, I was ready to stretch my wings and find my way in this field. The next major milestone was landing a business psychology position at Test Partnership, a London-based psychometric testing provider.

Not only did this allow me to gain valuable experience, but it also helped me build a network of valuable contacts. Test Partnership is known for exceptional client support, helping me forge incredible relationships with many HR practitioners, senior business leaders, and other psychologists.

Lastly, my teaching experience in academia represents another key step along my journey. For many years, I have been teaching statistics and serving as a seminar tutor in my old master’s course, which has been an honor. Moving from student to teacher highlighted just how far I had come in my development while giving me valuable and transferable skills along the way.

You've spoken before about the limitations of traditional resume screening. From your experience, what are some common misconceptions hiring managers have about resumes, and how can pre-employment testing help overcome these?

The biggest misconception that hiring managers have—not just with résumés, but with recruitment in general—is that experience is massively overrated. Research shows that previous work experience is very weakly associated with job performance, making it an unreliable indicator of success.

Moreover, we know that after five years of experience, the association with job performance drops completely, making it entirely irrelevant to recruitment. This matters because many candidates have been de-selected simply because they had only ten years of experience while another candidate had fifteen. Even worse, many hiring managers try to read résumés like crystal balls.

They examine which college a candidate attended, what their interests are, or whether their personal statement has typos—nonsense that means nothing in recruitment. I have seen the mental gymnastics play out many times, with hiring managers progressing candidates because their résumé seemed “more professional” or because they believed them to be a “culture fit” based on a two-page résumé.

The biggest problem, however, is with early-careers hiring, where candidates aren’t even expected to have done anything noteworthy enough to include in a résumé. Here, logic goes completely out the window, and organizations screen candidates nearly at random based on entirely made-up criteria.

Pre-employment tests, however, allow you to actually measure the constructs that matter rather than inferring them from a résumé. If you want to hire someone who is smart, assess their cognitive ability. If you want someone who is hard-working, give them a behavioral assessment. Résumés do a terrible job of highlighting these capabilities and represent a huge opportunity cost for the organization.

Pre-employment tests are also infinitely more scalable than résumé screening. You can invite 10, 100, or 1,000 candidates to complete a pre-employment test instantly—the volume doesn’t matter. However, résumé screening doesn’t scale at all, and with sufficient volume, it becomes impossible. This matters most in early-careers hiring, as résumé sifting offers no value anyway, making it an extremely time-consuming exercise in futility.

You've highlighted the importance of pre-employment tests in skills-based hiring. Can you share an example of a time you successfully implemented these tests to measure a specific skill set, and what were the outcomes?

Soft skills are something we always recommend evaluating in recruitment, as these are almost impossible to gauge from an interview. Resilience, work ethic, and emotional intelligence—these characteristics are huge drivers of performance and engagement in the workplace, but interviews are largely just social-skills tests. We recently worked with a large insurance firm to identify and measure the specific soft skills associated with performance in their sales team.

Test Partnership always places a huge emphasis on providing world-class client support and is always keen to work collaboratively with clients to solve their problems. We conducted a validity study within this organization, administering our soft-skills assessments to a sample of sales staff and then correlating those skills with their actual performance in the role. What we found was nothing short of amazing, allowing us to directly predict who will—and who won’t—be suitable for sales with surprising accuracy.

Armed with this knowledge, a customized behavioral assessment was designed specifically to measure those characteristics, serving as a pre-employment test for sales roles. After implementation, the quality of hire rose both quickly and dramatically, with new hires getting onboarded and ramped up faster than ever.

Most organizations are unaware that performance can be predicted and that the specific characteristics underpinning performance can be identified. Such is the value of organizational psychology—it reveals things that many organizations simply didn’t think possible, transforming the scope of HR within the business.

In a previous answer, you mentioned using aptitude testing for apprentice recruitment. How did you go about convincing stakeholders to adopt this approach, and what advice would you give to someone facing similar resistance?

From a psychometric perspective, aptitude testing for apprentice recruitment seems like the perfect solution. Fundamentally, apprentices are being paid to learn, and organizations are investing tremendous sums of money, time, and energy to make that happen. Cognitive ability is quite literally the ability to learn and is the strongest predictor of both job performance and training success, making aptitude tests essential here.

Moreover, because aptitude tests can be used at scale, you can handle high volumes of apprentice applications with ease. Why would you possibly want to read an apprentice’s résumé? They literally haven’t done anything worth reading—it’s a gargantuan waste of time. However, their ability to learn is undeniably important, so why not screen candidates this way instead? Of course, different organizations have different concerns. Some, for example, are worried about candidate attrition and completion rates.

From experience, I know that early-career candidates are disproportionately likely to complete assessments—after all, they are fresh from school. These are people who are more comfortable being tested than any other demographic, so this shouldn’t be a concern. Other organizations have concerns about validity and relevance to the role. Aptitude tests can seem abstract and not immediately role-relevant, making it hard to connect them to job performance. However, we have quite literally 100 years of evidence behind cognitive assessments; no other screening tool is as evidence-based or as demonstrably effective as aptitude tests.

Lastly, organizations are also concerned about costs. This is understandable, as HR budgets are often notoriously tight. However, I urge organizations to consider this an investment rather than just a cost, as high-performing employees generate substantially greater returns for their organizations—well worth the expenditure. Additionally, improvements in retention make testing profitable, as the costs associated with turnover can be tremendous and should not be ignored.

Shifting gears to intern recruitment, you've emphasized the limitations of resumes, especially in the age of AI. What specific pre-employment testing or video interviewing techniques have you found most effective for assessing intern candidates?

The impact of AI on résumés and application forms cannot be overstated and has rendered this form of assessment obsolete. Even before AI, résumés were highly questionable as a screening tool, but now, AI has completely killed their usefulness. Candidates can mass-produce applications that are both highly targeted and well-written, yet tell you nothing about the quality of the candidates themselves.

One mistake many organizations make in intern recruitment is overly focusing on knowledge and hard skills. The whole point of an internship is for candidates to acquire skills and experience—requiring these from the outset creates a catch-22 situation. If candidates need skills and experience to join the internship, but internships are how they acquire those skills and experience, it puts them in an impossible position.

Instead, I strongly recommend using aptitude tests for intern recruitment. What you need, ultimately, are smart people who can acquire knowledge quickly rather than people who already have that knowledge. Although, on day one, the experienced candidates may appear to be better employees, they will quickly be eclipsed by the smarter candidates, and this gap in performance will only widen over time.

Realistically, the whole reason organizations offer internships is to identify who would make a good full-time employee at the end. By the end of the internship, the smartest candidates will be the ones who make the best employees, having long since surpassed the other interns. Consequently, you must give people time to learn the ropes and acquire skills—don’t make judgments on candidates too early.

You're passionate about reducing bias in hiring. Beyond pre-employment testing, what are some other actionable steps organizations can take to minimize bias at each stage of the recruitment process?

As I mentioned earlier, I firmly believe that success at every level depends on people being given the opportunity to express their talents. Bias and discrimination in the recruitment process serve only to hamper this goal, to the detriment of the individual, the employing organization, and society as a whole. Bias and discrimination should, therefore, be seen as catastrophic failures of judgment, holding everyone back from achieving their full potential.

Bizarrely, though, organizations seem completely oblivious to the inherent biases involved in résumé screening and interviewing, yet they are disproportionately concerned with perceived biases in pre-employment tests. Résumé sifting and interviews—which are notorious for causing adverse impact based on gender, age, ethnicity, neurodivergence, etc.—are simply given a pass by HR teams and hiring managers. This is very odd, as pre-employment tests are tangible products that undergo substantial adverse impact and fairness analysis before even being brought to market.

Additionally, many well-meaning HR teams and employing organizations are adopting a “human-centric” approach to hiring, aiming to minimize automation or external tool use. Although this sounds good in theory, in reality, these stages are where bias and discrimination are introduced. As humans, we all harbor implicit (or even explicit) biases, and the more “human-centric” the recruitment process, the more insidious these effects become. Ironically, de-centering humans from the recruitment process as much as possible is the key to avoiding biases.

For example, using qualifying questions in application forms rather than old-school résumé sifting will dramatically reduce bias. Using a structured interview with a formal scoring criterion will be far more effective and fair than a conversational interview. The less room for human error, bias, and flawed judgment, the fairer and more effective the recruitment process will be.

Based on your experience, what are some common mistakes organizations make when implementing pre-employment testing, and how can they ensure these tests are used effectively and ethically?

It can be tempting to blame employing organizations for mistakes made during implementation, but in reality, it is the responsibility of the test provider to help with implementation. Test Partnership always prioritizes supporting clients, especially during the initial implementation and onboarding, minimizing the probability of early problems.

However, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink, and some organizations will disregard the advice and recommendations presented to them. One of the most common mistakes I have seen is using pre-employment tests too late in the process.

Realistically, pre-employment tests are screening tools, primarily used for short-listing. This makes perfect sense, as they are quick, low-touch, and can be scalably sent out to high volumes of candidates. However, candidates may not receive them well later in the process. If they have already gone through multiple rounds of interviews, dedicated significant time and effort, and incurred expenses to attend in person, they may not welcome being screened out based on a 20-minute online assessment.

Realistically, the window for these assessments is before meeting candidates in person—after that, the ship has largely sailed. Similarly, many organizations set their pass marks and cut scores far too low, allowing through candidates who are unlikely to succeed in the role. This happens because many hiring managers simply aren’t aware of how powerful these tools can be and worry needlessly about screening out good candidates. Although no assessment tool is perfect, psychometric assessments are the best tools we have—so ignore them at your peril.

Looking ahead, what future trends do you see shaping the landscape of pre-employment testing and recruitment, and how can professionals stay ahead of the curve?

A significant macro-trend that most people seem to be ignoring is the massive change in how people access the internet and choose to work. Historically, laptops and desktop computers were the primary way of interacting digitally, but for Generation Z, mobile devices are becoming far more critical. Instead of a mouse and keyboard, we are seeing younger professionals rely on voice-text and touchscreens, representing a huge shift compared to previous generations. Consequently, given that pre-employment tests are most useful for early-career hiring, assessments must adapt to meet the expectations of those completing them. I can envision a shift toward more mobile-friendly assessments that can be easily completed on touchscreen devices.

Additionally, Generation Z shows a strong preference for quick, highly engaging, short-form content. Assessment providers must once again adapt to the expectations of their test-takers by making assessments shorter and more engaging. Gamified assessments are a good example of this innovation, better aligning with how younger applicants use the internet.

Lastly, I anticipate greater protections against the use of AI in recruitment, as it is currently making traditional hiring methods obsolete. Given that ChatGPT can process screenshots, AI can now be used at almost any stage of the recruitment process to give candidates an unfair advantage, necessitating strong action from providers. Overall, I see assessment providers catching up with the times, while laggards fall significantly behind the curve. Those looking to adapt to these realities must do so quickly to avoid being overtaken by more forward-thinking competitors.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

You are very welcome, and thank you for the opportunity to share my story. The last thing I would like to add is that, as with most things in life, pre-employment tests vary in quality. People ask me all the time, “Do pre-employment tests work?” and the answer is, “Yes, but…” A great many assessment providers refuse to follow best practices, developing assessments that quite literally do not work.

One should never take for granted that an assessment provider knows what they are doing; instead, ask for evidence of quality. A wide range of quality-control statistics exist in psychometrics, and these should be outlined in a technical manual. Reliability, validity, fairness, and candidate experience all matter and should never be assumed—they should be proven. However, just because some providers refuse to do their jobs properly doesn’t mean that pre-employment testing is flawed—quite the opposite.

Well-designed pre-employment tests are uniquely powerful, being both more effective and fairer than any other selection tool. Consequently, organizations must do their due diligence and carefully choose which providers they want to work with. The stakes can be very high, so ask for evidence of quality before working with any pre-employment testing provider.