Companies are relying on aptitude and personality tests more to combat AI-powered job hunters
Cognitive and personality tests are becoming mainstream, hiring test providers told BI.
Employers are the most interested in testing for soft skills, like emotional intelligence, the firms said.
Are you happy? Do you sleep well? Do you have many friends? Are you a workaholic?
Those are some of the questions Katelin Eagan, 27, said she had to answer recently when she was applying for a job.
She agreed to take a cognitive and personality assessment as part of the hiring process, but was a bit bewildered. Many of the questions had nothing to do with the engineering position, which, after completing the tests and going through several months of silence, she was eventually rejected for.
Eagan says she's been applying for jobs full-time since the start of the year. Her efforts haven't panned out yet, which she attributes partly to how competitive her field has become and employers having room to be picky.
"I think there's definitely a lower amount than I thought there would be," she said of available roles.
But that may be only part of the story. Employers are growing increasingly selective, partly because many are seeing a flood of seemingly perfect candidates, many of whom are suspected of using AI to finesse their applications, according to recruiters and hiring assessment providers who spoke to BI.
The solution many companies have come to?
Make everyone take a test — and see who candidates really are, irrespective of what ChatGPT suggested they put on their résumés.
According to surveys conducted by TestGorilla, one firm that administers talent assessments for employers, 76% of companies that had hired in the 12 months leading up to April said they were using skills tests to determine if a candidate was a right fit, up from 55% who said they were using role-specific skills tests in 2022.
Employers seem most interested in testing for soft skills — amorphous qualities like communicativeness and leadership — as well as administering general aptitude and personality tests, Wouter Durville, the CEO of TestGorilla, told Business Insider.
TestGorilla's Critical Thinking test was completed more than 100,000 times in the first quarter of this year, a 61% increase compared to the same quarter in 2024.
The firm also offers a Big 5 personality assessment, which was completed more than 127,000 times in the first quarter — a 69% increase compared to last year.
Demand among US employers in particular has been "massive," Durville said, adding that many firms have turned to tests as a result of being overwhelmed with job applications. The US is the largest market for the firm, which is based in the Netherlands.
"The biggest thing is people just want to hire the best people. It's very selfish and it's fine," Durville said.
Canditech, another firm that offers hiring assessments, says it's also seen rapid growth in the last year. In 2024, the assessment usage grew 135% compared to the prior year, CEO Guy Barel told BI. He estimates that assessment usage is on track to soar 242% year-over-year.
Barel says the surge is partly due to the job market tipping more in favor of employers. In many cases, companies he works with are flooded with "tons of candidates" and looking to "move forward as fast as possible," he said.
Criteria, another skills-based assessment provider, says test usage has more than doubled in recent years.
"AI is kind of creating this authenticity crisis in talent acquisition, because everyone can and is putting their résumé into ChatGPT." Criteria CEO Josh Millet told BI. "It's all about demonstrating your ability or your skill or your personality in an objective way that's a little bit harder to fake."
Jeff Hyman, a veteran recruiter and the CEO of Recruit Rockstars, estimates that demand for testing among his clients has increased by around 50% over the last 18 months.
That's due to a handful of different reasons, he said — but companies being inundated by job applications is near the top, thanks to candidates leaning more on AI to gain an edge and send out résumés en masse, he says.
Hyman says a typical job he tries to fill for a client has around 300 to 500 applicants, though he's spoken to companies trying to fill roles with more than 1,000 candidates within several days of being posted online.
The number of job applications in the US grew at more than four times the pace of job requisitions in the first half of 2024, according to a report from WorkDay.
Companies also want to test candidates' soft skills as remote work grows more common, Hyman adds — and they want to be sure they're getting the right person. Depending on the size of the organization, a bad hire can cost a company anywhere from $11,000 to $24,000, a survey conducted by CareerBuilder in 2016 found.
According to TestGorilla, 69% of employers who issued tests this year said they were interested in assessing soft skills, while 50% said they were interested in assessing a candidate's cognitive ability. A separate survey by Criteria ranked emotional intelligence as the most sought-after skill among employers, followed by analytical thinking.
"It's about their personality and to see if they are a good fit to the organization, if they share the same DNA," Durville said, though he noted that, in many cases, companies find the results of the tests to be shaky as a sole evaluation metric.
TestGorilla, Canditech, and Criteria told BI that employers say they're enjoying the time and cost savings of administering tests.
According to TestGorilla, 82% of employers who said they used skills-based hiring — a catch-all term for hiring based on proven skills — said they were satisfied with new hires, compared to 73% of US employers on average.
Canditech, meanwhile, claims its assessments can help employers cut down on hiring time by as much as 50%, and reduce "unnecessary interviews" by as much as 80%, according to its website.
But Hyman thinks there are some issues with hiring tests. For one, he says employers turn down candidates who don't score well "all the time," despite them being otherwise qualified for the job.
The trend also appears to be turning off job candidates. Hyman estimates around 10%-20% of applicants will outright refuse to take a test if employers introduce it as a first step in the hiring process, though that's a practice Canditech's Barel says is becoming increasingly common.
Hyman says he frequently has conversations with employers urging them not to put so much weight on test results, due to the potential for a mis-hire.
"That's lazy hiring, to be honest. I think that's not the right way to go about it," he said.
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