Situation 

A leading financial services provider, specializing in pensions, investments and insurance, was facing recruitment challenges. They needed to fill contact center roles—mainly phone-based positions handling customer inquiries—but their process needed a revamp.

The numbers tell the story: In 2023, the company processed approximately 7,000 applications to fill 250 entry-level positions. That’s a mountain of CVs and a serious administrative burden. Their approach was pretty standard—online application, a telephone interview followed by  a face-to-face competency interview. They’d assess just 12 to 14 candidates per day, running two interviews simultaneously, seven times a day.

In addition to the scale of the effort, hiring managers kept gravitating toward candidates who already had contact center or financial services experience. The client’s talent acquisition team spotted this bias and realized they were probably missing out on brilliant people who hadn’t worked in these specific areas before. These candidates might have exactly what it takes to excel—they just didn’t tick the “industry experience” box.

The bias wasn’t just costing them good candidates. A single-stage competency interview rewards people who’ve rehearsed the right answers, and rehearsed answers tell you very little about how someone will actually behave on a difficult customer call. Hires who looked strong on paper were arriving with the wrong expectations, then leaving. Attrition and absence levels told the real story. The client was burning resource on a 7,000-application process and still ending up with the wrong people.

So they set an ambitious brief: stop using experience as the main selector, and start hiring for behavioral potential instead. That meant redesigning the whole pipeline, not just the assessment day.

Solution 

We stepped in to flip the client’s assessment approach on its head, creating something that was fair, inclusive, and—dare we say it—actually fun.

Our psychologists teamed up with our creative team to figure out how to support evidence-based hiring decisions while giving candidates an experience they’d never forget. What emerged was a multi-stage, immersive assessment that aligned with the client’s goals and gave everyone a fair shot.

Assessment Framework Development

Our psychologists rolled up their sleeves and did a deep-dive job analysis, systematically reviewing multiple information sources to define the capabilities, experience, skills, abilities and behaviors that make someone successful in these contact center roles. They talked to hiring managers, incumbents and recruiters to understand what “good” really looks like—not just on paper, but in practice—securing stakeholder buy-in and support throughout the process.

From the research an assessment framework was created which guided the design of all the assessments. This research-driven approach meant the assessment process was built on best practice methodology while actually measuring what mattered for job performance. Our goal was to achieve:

• A standardized assessment process ensures all candidates have the same experience, enhancing equality, diversity, and inclusion (ED&I) and increasing fairness
• Objective assessment of candidates, focusing on evidence-based criteria that are relevant to job performance
• Concrete, evidence-based rationale for hiring decisions, ensuring fair, accurate and defensible outcomes

Three-Stage Assessment Process

Our psychologists designed a multi-method assessment process to offer candidates multiple opportunities to shine. By mixing different types of assessments, we could accommodate different strengths and preferences while reducing bias—accommodating neurominority candidates and accounting for different preferences for showcasing abilities.

The three-stage process cleverly blended automated scoring with human insight, cutting down on bias while saving assessors’ time.

Stage 1: Telephone Screen

The client wanted to keep their phone interview—it was working well for them. So, our psychologists took what they had and made it better, creating standardized questions and scoring while keeping the motivational elements and assessing behaviors from the assessment framework.

Stage 2: Online Assessment

Here’s where we got bold: we ditched the CVs entirely. To reduce the likelihood of decisions being based on work history, we developed a gamified online assessment that tested the core behaviors we’d identified as crucial for success.

Working with the client’s test publisher, our psychologists advised on aligning their gamified assessment to the assessment framework, creating an automated sift stage ahead of the assessment center which boosted pipeline efficiency. The highest scorers moved forward, regardless of their background—saving time and boosting objectivity by moving the sift from filtering on work history to measuring the behaviors that actually predict performance.

Stage 3: Immersive Assessment Center

Candidates were expecting a standard, corporate assessment process. But, with the assessment center invitation they received a video that parachuted them into an alternative world where—for one day only—they became part of a fictional organisation, an underground resistance movement tasked with stopping ruthless art thieves from pulling off the art heist of the century.

Within this world, candidates did an interview, a mock customer conversation exercise to understand customer-facing roles, and a group exercise with clues and problem-solving tasks.

We dressed the assessment room and utilized themed props—ticket stubs, Instagram posts, umbrellas, and even a Magic 8 ball—creating an assessment experience unlike any they had encountered before.

The candidates worked together to solve puzzles and piece together clues. The high-energy, creative challenges included finding criminal targets, cracking cryptic codes, locating target artwork and galleries, and responding to the intel of a double agent. All of it was woven into a cinematic experience delivered by professional actors.

The whole assessment center was anchored in science and a robust assessment framework—all within just two hours.

By creating this fantasy world full of brain-teasing challenges and tasks, candidates had such a good time they relaxed and brought their true selves to the event. As a result, the in-room assessors could then use the scoring guides to easily identify the core attributes the client was looking for in its recruits.

To ensure the success of the assessment center, we provided comprehensive training and clear assessment guides for managers, assessors, and facilitators, ensuring they understood assessment best practices and had a detailed briefing of the exercises themselves. Everything was built to travel. Portable exercise packs, scoring guides, and assessor briefs meant the model could run consistently across three sites, and the gamified assessment sits inside the client’s existing tech setup so it’s straightforward to maintain and update.

Results 

In the first four months of assessment centers, we achieved:

• 2% “no show” rate (down from 25%)
• 86% assessment center pass rate (more than doouble from the previous rate of 41%)
• 98% offer acceptance rate (up from 73%)
• 75 days in recruiter time saved since removing CVs from the pre-assessment center stage
• Attrition at its lowest level since the pandemic
• 98% candidate satisfaction at the end of the assessment center
• 94% new joiner satisfaction
• 89% of candidates felt more positive about the employer than about its competitors

But the more interesting results are about who’s now getting hired, and how they’re performing:

• 87% of hires come from outside financial services or contact centers, up from just 10%
• Customer Service NPS up 113%, from people hired through the new process

New joiners have included nail technicians, chefs, employees from a world-famous golf course and a football club, and former retirees returning to work. None of them would have made it past a CV screen in the former process.

Candidate Feedback:

“The best interview experience I’ve had.”

“I forgot I was being assessed.”

“I have never had an interview experience with this much human touch.”

“The best one I have done. The others were old school and formulaic.”

“The playfulness was different level.”

“It’s nice to be tested on ‘you’ rather than experiences you may have been fortunate or unfortunate to have gone through.”

“I’ve been bragging about how much fun it was.”

Client Feedback:

“Our new immersive assessment process sees us shift immediately from an old-fashioned, competency-based interview to a modern selection process focused on behaviors, underpinned by robust occupational science. We’ll jump from lagging behind our peers, to a market leading proposition that will ultimately see us making better informed hiring choices. Results so far have been really encouraging, and it’s been great to see such positive initial feedback from our managers and candidates.” – Talent Acquisition Leader

“It was a new refreshing way to carry out recruitment, and one I think will bring in the right people. I enjoyed the interview section as I felt like the questions were much more suited to what we are looking for. I also felt the role plays were great as it gave us a real insight into the candidates’ customer service skills. Overall, I felt it was a big success and look forward to doing the next recruitment day.” – Hiring Manager

“The role play gave an insight into the candidates’ behaviors which is the most important thing. The group exercise really allowed people to immerse themselves into the exercise, and I feel we saw their true colours.” – Hiring Manager