Assessments have helped improve the opportunity for all job applicants to demonstrate their skills and talents. Assessing candidates using the same objective standards gives everyone a fair chance.

Yet those from underrepresented groups still cannot access fair assessment. Some hiring managers still choose to override the results and ignore the best candidates. And highly talented candidates are left outside the job market because of hiring algorithms and biases.

The consequences of this are far reaching:

• For society, as a large proportion of the population remain excluded from the workforce.
• For companies, as they miss out on highly talented people.
• For individuals, as some are unable to land the jobs in which they can thrive.

This must change.

• It takes on average 8 years before immigrants with higher education gets a job which matches their qualifications (Statistics Sweden, 2022).
• People over 45 years old are considered ‘obsolete’ in the workplace (Carlsson & Eriksson, 2019).
• Having a disability reduces the chance of getting the job by more than 48% (Bjørnshagen & Ugreninov, 2021).
• 27 million workers are underemployed or locked out of the job market - all because of hiring algorithms (Fuller et al., 2021).

Assessment providers do care deeply about reducing bias and in levelling the playing field for all candidates. They invest in developing the best assessments they can. They focus on standardization and objectivity. They investigate adverse impact. They try to make tests easier to use. And this, we believe, has strengthened hiring practices.

But it is not enough. There are major problems which the assessment industry has not yet tackled. With decades of experience in developing assessments, analysing data and understanding what needs to change, Fairsight is now targeting the assessment industry’s biggest blind spots.

We believe that assessments should be accessible to everyone – and this is at the core of what we do.

• We treat each candidate as an individual and tailor the assessment experience to their individual needs.
• We validate our tests to ensure that underrepresented groups are not negatively affected by our assessments.
• We guide the user and help decision makers make the best possible talent decisions by avoiding irrelevant information.

Coming in 2023 – as the first of its kind, Fairsight provides an intelligent assessment platform that actively ensures everyone is given a fair chance.