The Context
Sigma Labs is a Hire, Train, Deploy business: they recruit graduates, train them in technical skills, and deploy them to clients. Their mission is rooted in social mobility — finding graduates from lower-income backgrounds who are routinely overlooked by hiring processes that rely on the wrong signals.
The existing approach followed a standard application, interview and technical assessment sequence. Identifying strong candidates at the application stage from a handful of written answers was time-consuming, inconsistent, and — given the volume — unsustainable.
The Goal
A new hiring process was needed that could find genuinely talented people that traditional methods routinely miss, without requiring more resource per hire. It had to work at scale too, hiring at least 200 people per year from an assumed 50 applications per candidate. It also had to work well for candidates — providing a good experience that increased the likelihood of strong offers being accepted. And it had to integrate with the company's existing data infrastructure: Airtable, Google Workspace and Slack.
What we did
The first step was defining what we were actually looking for. Too many hiring processes start with qualities like "good problem-solver" or "real team player" — phrases that sound meaningful but can't be consistently assessed, and that tend to push employers back toward lazy proxies like university attended or A-level grades.
After reviewing the evidence, we focused on three qualities with strong research backing: conscientiousness, proactivity, and coachability. Each was chosen because it could be assessed in a structured, repeatable way — and because none of them was correlated with the background factors that traditional hiring systematically disadvantages.
Finding the right assessment tools required the same rigour. Most online assessment providers were selling standardised tests developed thirty years ago, with no meaningful improvement in social mobility outcomes and little interest in the candidate experience. The exception was Equalture — a gamified assessment platform grounded in current research, with fairness and candidate experience central to its design. That alignment made it both the strongest solution and a natural partnership.
Equalture could identify a strong candidate pool, but not narrow it enough for individual interviews. Video interview tools were considered and rejected: asking candidates from communities who already worry their face or voice won't fit to record themselves without any immediate feedback or reassurance would have been directly at odds with what the process was trying to achieve.
Instead, a new online assessment was designed to evaluate ability to follow instructions, attention to detail, curiosity, and perseverance — delivered through Typeform for a dynamic, considered experience. Two questions were added that traditional hiring never asks: what do you wish employers knew about you but never ask, and what do you wish every employer told you about themselves. The responses were consistently illuminating.
This narrowed the pool to candidates suitable for structured interviews: a first conversation focused on communication, critical thinking, and genuine motivation; a second on logical problem-solving and the ability to learn quickly under pressure.
What changed
The new process shifted Sigma Labs away from achievement proxies toward genuine in-the-moment assessment regardless of background. The data gathered as candidates moved through the process revealed which responses predicted strong performance once hired, which predicted offer acceptance, whether graduates from particular institutions outperformed their predicted potential, and whether any demographic group was disadvantaged at a specific stage — allowing continuous improvement to fairness over time.
The outcomes were significant: a higher proportion of interviews focused on high-potential candidates, a more diverse trainee cohort (at least 70% came from low-income backgrounds), and no increase in resource use despite a tenfold increase in applications. Candidate experience was exceptional throughout, with NPS scores ranging from 48 to 75 by stage and consistent direct feedback praising the personal approach.
The hiring process was later recognised at the DataQ Awards, winning Best Data Graduate Employer and Best Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Initiative.
What we learned
Rigorous, independent thinking gives you a substantial advantage — particularly when everyone else has accepted certain assumptions as settled. Many experienced professionals work hard and want good outcomes, but they're trained to treat traditional methods as sufficient without questioning whether they actually are. Taking the time to understand what genuinely matters, and why, leads to processes that serve your stated goals rather than the habits of your industry. This project was a clear example of what becomes possible when you're willing to start from first principles rather than from convention.
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