In the modern hiring landscape, ensuring assessment security has become a complex challenge as advancements in AI and participant familiarity with tools designed to undermine assessments have increased. We aim to provide a secure environment that accurately measures a participant’s abilities while maintaining a respectful and non-invasive experience.
The Security Spectrum
Assessment security exists on a broad spectrum:
- Low-Level Measures: These include warnings and requests for participants to respond honestly. Research indicates these can be modestly effective in encouraging participants to avoid using external tools.
- Mid-Level Measures: Having tools and systems in place to discourage and monitor suspicious assessment activity (e.g., disabling copy and paste, time limits on problem solving assessments, documenting instances of participants “losing focus” on the assessment window by navigating away).
- High-Level Measures: These involve proctored assessments in which participants must visit a physical facility to complete assessments under direct supervision.
Our approach sits in the middle of this spectrum, utilizing robust digital protections that do not require physical proctoring.
Key Security Measures
To protect the integrity of our assessments, we have implemented several layers of security:
- Restricted Copy and Paste: Participants cannot copy and paste directly out of the assessment platform. This prevents the transfer of questions or images into external systems or AI tools.
- Time Pressure: Particularly for cognitive ability assessments, time limits help protect assessment integrity while measuring how efficiently participants can solve problems without relying on outside resources.
- Session Monitoring: We monitor mouse movements within the assessment window to detect suspicious activity. Our system can also identify the presence of AI helpers within the assessment’s window active during the session.
- Experience Recreation: If necessary, we can recreate a specific participant’s assessment experience to review it for evidence of suspicious behavior.
- Completion Time Tracking: We monitor how quickly participants advance through individual items and the overall assessment. By analyzing completion times alongside assessment scores, we can determine whether a participant may be attempting to undermine the system.
Balancing Integrity with Experience
While security is paramount, we are committed to a positive participant experience. We purposefully stop short of more invasive measures used by some vendors, such as:
- Recording participants via their cameras.
- Tracking eye movements.
- Locking down participant browsers.
Ultimately, our position is to ensure assessment integrity without creating an uncomfortable or overly invasive environment for the participant.