Most hiring starts with vague qualities — "good problem-solver," "team player" — that can't be consistently assessed and push employers back toward lazy proxies like university or grades. We started from the evidence instead, and settled on three traits with strong research backing and no correlation to the backgrounds traditional hiring disadvantages: conscientiousness, proactivity, coachability.

Finding tools that could actually assess them took the same rigour. Most assessment providers were selling thirty-year-old tests with no real interest in fairness or candidate experience. Equalture was the exception — gamified, evidence-led, candidate experience built in from the start — and became a natural partner.

Equalture narrowed the field but not far enough for interviews. Video interviews were considered and rejected: asking candidates already worried their face or voice won't "fit" to record themselves with no feedback would have undercut the whole point. Instead we built a new assessment — instruction-following, attention to detail, curiosity, perseverance — delivered through Typeform, including two questions traditional hiring never asks: what do you wish employers knew about you but never ask, and what do you wish employers told you about themselves. The answers were consistently revealing. Feedback at every stage was non-negotiable — every candidate, hired or not, was meant to leave closer to a job than they arrived.

That narrowed the pool to structured interviews: one on communication, critical thinking and motivation; one on problem-solving and learning speed under pressure.