Turon reports that behavioural assessment is quickly becoming the cornerstone of modern recruitment. “Behaviour assessments enable employers to evaluate how people approach work,” she explains, "not just what they’ve done. Tools like situational judgement tests and validated psychometric assessments bring structure to evaluating human skills, turning instinctive hiring into evidence-led decisions. That shift is critical, especially when nearly 40% of current skills are expected to be obsolete by 2030.”
According to Suzie Berry, group director of talent at data visualisation business Flourish, the future is here and it’s about using intuition and smart, scalable tools together to make faster, fairer, and more effective hiring decisions.
“Technology can support recruiters by helping identify the best-fit candidates through data-driven insights, but it's vital that we don’t remove the human element of recruitment,” says Berry. “When working to find talent for an organisation, it's not a binary number into a binary role, a whole variety of elements need to be considered, and teams should use emotional intelligence to align clients and candidates effectively.
A study from HireVue finds that 72% of TA leaders leverage skills assessments to evaluate candidate qualifications.
For Adrian Langton, chief people officer at consultancy BML, the key is to use technology at the start of a recruitment process, rather than for the entire exercise. “Technology tends to have a role at the very top of the applicant funnel, where the most potential people for a role are found,” he says. “Improvements in technology, including AI, are welcome, because the old filters based on keywords were at best, blunt tools that ruled out a lot of very promising candidates and turned the applications, that passed through those filters, into carbon copies of each other.”
Langton is adamant that the ability to understand how an applicant would fit into an existing team and how they can contribute to the vision of the business remains a human trait. Casting this process aside in the name of technology fails to recognise its worth. “The insight borne of experience is vital, especially when recruiting senior figures,” he says. “Calling it just ‘gut feeling’ risks minimising what is actually one of the most insightful tools a recruiter or business leader might have.”