Where are you on the Assessment Maturity Curve?

In today’s hiring market, Talent Acquisition teams often found themselves caught between seemingly opposing forces when it comes to selecting the best candidates.?

Firstly they are tasked with getting great, diverse talent into the business at speed.? Meanwhile candidates are benefitting from the ubiquity of AI tools like Chat GPT, rendering legacy testing and interview processes redundant and ineffective. ?Alongside all this, talent functions are also expected to deliver a great experience for candidates that stands out from the crowd.

All whilst doing more with less! ?

There comes a point where the old ways don’t work any more and new thinking is needed to square these seemingly irreconcilable requirements.? The good news is there are solutions, and as a first step organisations can benefit from taking a studied look at where they are and how to move forward.

The Ommati Assessment Maturity Curve is a structured framework that helps talent acquisition leaders evaluate their function’s readiness to enhance hiring quality, deliver great experiences and minimise bias. This model takes into account the assessments and technologies used, the expertise within the TA team, hiring managers’ involvement and capability, the candidate experience and business processes. The clarity of assessment strategy and strength of analytics is also key to building a system that is impactful and responsive.? These elements ultimately all work together to drive efficient cost-per-hire, fast time-to-hire and overall business impact.

Five stages of the Assessment Maturity Curve

The model outlines five stages of assessment maturity as shown below:

Each stage of evolution in assessment maturity has a unique flavour bringing its own challenges and opportunities:

1. Emergent – In this initial stage, basic assessment practices are in place, typically relying heavily on traditional methods like CV screening and unstructured interviews, which may be inconsistent across hiring managers. While some HR policies exist, they often lack the rigour needed to ensure consistently high-quality hires. Organisations in this category sometimes find they "don’t know what they don’t know," with over-reliance on outdated methods that pose high risks of bias, impact candidate experience negatively, and are costly and time inefficient in an increasingly budget-conscious environment. With enhanced awareness, this presents significant opportunities improvement and indeed leap-frogging some of the intermediate stages to a better position.

2. Foundational – At this stage, structured policies have been introduced to drive consistency across hiring functions, and the TA team has enabled some process compliance across the wider business. Basic competency frameworks or structured interview guides ensure a degree of objectivity. Although the assessment processes may not be highly sophisticated, they mark a recognition of the need for structure and rigour. However, they often lack broader hiring manager buy-in and still require further refinement to produce measurable impact.

3. Legacy – In this stage, the organisation has recognised the need for objective and fair assessment, with organisations moving beyond unstructured interviews. Often, however, the tools used were implemented years ago and may have become outdated, like generic off-the-shelf tests or traditional assessment center exercises, which haven’t been digitized. Often the security of these legacy solutions is an issue as they are highly susceptible to candidate use of Chat GPT and similar tools. The process may also feel cumbersome with an experience that’s more reminiscent of the 1990s or 2000s, rather than leading consumer-level experiences of today.

4. Tailored – More advanced organisations have begun to customize their assessment approaches, particularly for high-volume roles. These may include tailored situational judgment tests, virtual or digital assessment centres, and bespoke assessments aligned more closely with organisational needs. This enables targeted measurement of relevant behaviours and skills while providing a streamlined experience for candidates, reducing recruitment barriers and supporting strategic hiring.

5. Innovation Leader: Over recent years, advancements in GenAI, such as ChatGPT, have required organisations to evolve further. Candidates now have unprecedented access to tools that assist with traditional assessments, particularly those based on text. To maintain integrity and candidate engagement, employers must now go beyond tailored methods. New innovations like AI co-piloted interviews, objective skills matching and immersive simulations offer scalable experiences that enhance prediction accuracy and fairness while reducing costs and labour. With technological developments moving at pace, even in this category there is much to be done to keep up.

The maturity curve is intended to help organisations get a realistic sense of where they are and chart the way forward. This involves considering firstly the combination of threats to the integrity of their processes (for example, from the ubiquitous use of language models like Chat GPT by candidates), and secondly to lead innovation in a way that genuinely helps deliver business benefit.

What feeds into the evaluation?

There are a number of areas of activity which all work together to determine an organisation’s level of assessment maturity:

• Assessment Strategy: Many organisations apply assessment piecemeal at a tactical level, with no real strategy to speak of.? This may then evolve to focus on the key role categories, particularly for volume hiring.? Leaders in the space though are able to move beyond this to a strategic approach to talent which is well-aligned with wider business strategy and is embedded throughout the organisation.
• Assessments: The start point on this aspect often involves over-reliance on CVs and poorly structured interviews, which research has consistently shown to be two of the least predictive and most biased methods.? More mature organisations transition to using standardised, then tailored tools, ultimately reaching highly contextualised, AI-enabled methods that align with business needs whilst delivering a more natural, immersive experience for candidates.
• Technology: Technology may be non-existent or just using basic applicant tracking systems. This though needs to grow into seamlessly integrated platforms with highly personalised tools to optimise the hiring and talent management processes.?
• People and capability: Many TA teams are undertrained in assessment, and this is even more the case for hiring managers who may also lack training and development more widely.? Developing capability in this area is critical for objective assessment, ultimately reaching a stage where there are strong assessment skills with systems that support reliable, objective decision-making, personalised onboarding and consistent assessment practices.
• Processes: This often begins with fragmented processes across teams and managers, and needs to evolve to streamlined, comprehensive, end-to-end approaches that ensure consistency and support the entire hiring and talent journey.? Critically, amongst real innovators these are right-sized rather than cumbersome or over-engineered.
• Analytics: Data analytics is often largely non-existent at the outset, improving over time to offer real-time dashboards and sophisticated insights, supporting data-driven decisions that support effectiveness and ROI.?? Within this, skillful management of that data is increasingly critical.

Measuring Impact

Closely linked to the above, there are three key outcomes that together provide a lens on whether investments in assessment are genuinely delivering value for an organisation.?

Firstly, there is the EXPERIENCE.? Is the candidate and hiring experience fragmented across disjointed steps and solutions?? Or has it progressed to an immersive and engaging journey, providing a seamless experience for both candidates and hiring managers?? Measurable through candidate feedback and NPS scores, this is subject to increasing user expectations of consumer-level interactions. It is an ever-moving challenge for organisations to impress and attract candidates.

Secondly, what is the EFFECTIVENESS of assessment?? Is it stuck in a world of traditional techniques, poor accuracy and unverified ROI?? Or is there clear evidence being gathered demonstrating sophisticated, validated methods that deliver fairness and demonstrate a clear return on investment in terms of hiring great talent, supporting retention and driving performance.

Lastly but critically, is EFFICIENCY an afterthought as the organisation suffers at the hands of slow and labour-intensive processes?? Or has it progressed to highly efficient systems that ensure fast, cost-effective hiring without compromising quality.? Cost per hire and time to hrie should be supported by assessment, in particular by creating efficient hiring funnels.? If it just feels like a cost, then something isn’t working and it needs fixing.

Summary

In the ongoing arms race between evolving assessment techniques and methods available to candidates to get through them, the pace of change has never been faster. ??By benchmarking an organisation’s assessment capabilities against this framework, TA leaders can identify their position on the Assessment Maturity Curve and uncover areas for targeted improvements that would significantly enhance workforce capability and overall organisational impact. For some, reaching a solid foundational level may be the priority, while others may be able to skip past legacy solutions and implement contemporary strategies to get the greatest benefit.

A thoughtfully crafted roadmap is vital for success, whether assessment is being introduced for the first time or legacy approaches requires updating.? The approach allows for quick wins that make a meaningful difference in hiring quality and efficiency, helping organisations do more with less and getting much improved value for money.?

We help organisations evaluate where they are on the Assessment Maturity Curve and provide learning and enablement for TA teams and hiring managers to enhance their business impact.? Through this support, most organisations can typically save 10-20% of costs across their spend on assessment products and labour in this area, whilst significantly improving the business benefit they can deliver.

If you’d like to find out more about the Assessment Maturity Curve and ways you can build your capability in this area, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at ommati.com