A brief introduction to Experis Academy
Experis, part of the ManpowerGroup family of brands, is widely seen as a global leader in professional resourcing and project-based workforce solutions.
The company applies deep cross-sector knowledge to first understand and then align with its clients’ specific business needs. From interim and permanent support through to managed services and consulting, Experis delivers high-impact solutions that enable its clients to achieve their strategic goals by hiring the best talent.
The Academy is Experis’ “‘recruit, train and deploy” solution offering. Drawing on its recruitment expertise and working in close collaboration with clients, it helps them to hire more effectively by providing them with candidates who have the technical and soft skills needed for each role. It achieves this through a “train-to-fit” model, where training is customised to each company’s unique requirements.
Experis Academy is a career catalyst. It’s helping promising professionals to retrain or upskill, while also helping companies from a range of industries – including IT, engineering, and defence – to build the talent pipeline they will need to bridge the skills gap of the future.
Experis Academy’s success depends on finding the right people. It then provides them with accelerated learning to ensure they have the in-demand skills required to succeed in their roles, and that clients have ready-to-deploy individuals.
“It’s essentially a shared risk model with our customers,” explained Michael Noone, Head of Experis Academy UK. “Our academy cohorts are employed by Experis for at least 14 months, so they become our employees first. The success of our relationships, and our customer programmes, is therefore dependent on hiring well.”
Experis Academy was keen to move beyond the limitations of CVs and traditional assessments, and towards a more innovative and interactive approach, to find people with the right attitudes and behaviours to learn quickly and effectively.
Its incumbent in-house assessment process was seen as very traditional, as it required candidates to answer question after question.
But the research shows that this assessment format is now vulnerable to AI manipulation. This meant candidates could inflate their scores using LLMs like ChatGPT, leading to a spike in scores at the start of the funnel — before a marked drop in quality towards the end of the process, when these candidates’ true abilities came to light.
A traditional approach can also fall short when assessing candidates’ ability to learn and their problem-solving skills. I.e. the core strengths and capabilities that would indicate someone is a good fit for Experis Academy.
“We felt that only so much could be achieved by screening and assessing people in these traditional ways, where we were asking candidates to tell us how they think and behave, rather than showing us.
We couldn’t always understand someone’s ability to learn or problem solve, and some of the other cognitive skills that help people to succeed.” Michael Noone, Head of Experis Academy UK
The Experis Academy team were very much ahead of their time in identifying these concerns and recognising that their process could benefit from an upgrade.
In short, the team was looking for a partner that could provide more meaningful, relevant insights about candidates while mitigating the impact of AI.
In early 2024, Experis Academy partnered with Arctic Shores to incorporate its task-based psychometric assessment into the hiring process, primarily for career switchers: i.e. junior to mid-level professionals with two to five years’ experience.
Michael believed the Arctic Shores assessment would be a particularly powerful tool when it came to re-skilling. “We wanted to put teachers into project management roles, and people from a scientific background into the defence domain,” he said. “A lot of the time we are assessing someone’s transferable skills and experience and moving them into completely different career paths. Arctic Shores supports that enablement.”
Instead of simply asking candidates questions about how they would behave, which ChatGPT can answer quickly and effectively, Arctic Shores’ assessment presents them with a series of interactive tasks adapted from cognitive neuroscience.
The interactive nature of the tasks means they can’t be completed by AI models — making them the most AI-resilient way of assessing candidates at the top of the funnel.
But the team also recognised that a task-based approach offers a more engaging candidate experience compared to question-based alternatives.
“By integrating Arctic Shores with our business solution, we’ve seen a real rise in candidate engagement.” Emily Buttifant, Experis Academy Operations Lead.
Perhaps most importantly, because this approach requires candidates to demonstrate their real behaviours and problem-solving skills, it provides a more accurate measure of a candidate’s potential to succeed in the role, compared to simply asking them how they think and behave.
By analysing how candidates interact with the tasks, Arctic Shores would help Experis Academy to gather thousands of data points on candidates’ cognitive abilities and personality traits, providing a deeper prediction of their likely performance in the role.
Finally, the partnership would help to remove elements of unconscious bias from the hiring process by reducing reliance on CVs and traditional application forms. CVs alone are known to introduce over 150 biases into the hiring process. Removing them would help to create a more representative and inclusive talent pipeline.
“Arctic Shores has become a key part of our refreshed hiring process, and this is now achieving remarkable results. It’s very much a human-focused process, but underpinned by this fantastic piece of technology.” Michael Noone, Head of Experis Academy UK
As well as the above, the team are now confident their first sift is as AI-resilient as possible.
“When we’re explaining our screening process, we get asked about AI a lot. It’s great to be able to talk about the Arctic Shores platform, and how the assessments mitigate the prospect of people being able to use GenAI to misrepresent themselves, or gain an unfair advantage.”
Arctic Shores has become an integral part of Experis Academy’s business solution and value proposition.
It has helped the team provide a more objective, engaging, and inclusive hiring process by focusing on natural behaviours rather than self-reported skills or AI-augmented CVs.
Experis Academy plans to continue scaling the use of the Arctic Shores platform across wider skill sets and in larger volumes.
“We know Arctic Shores is continually iterating its product and we’re excited to see how we can continue to benefit from that. We’re confident we’ve found the right assessment partner, and we’re keen to continue doing what works well and to scale what we do.” Michael Noone, Head of Experis Academy UK