Designing an effective assessment journey isn’t about running a long checklist of every possible skill. Instead, it’s about combining quality, relevance, and role fit to get the clearest picture of a candidate’s readiness — all while keeping the experience lean and respectful of their time.
This guide walks you through our recommended approach to selecting assessments based on role type, responsibility level, and job function.
Start with the Foundation: Psychometric Assessment
Every assessment journey should begin with Profile Fit, Bryq’s Psychometric assessment, which evaluates:
Cognitive ability (Numerical Reasoning, Verbal Reasoning, Logical Reasoning, Attention-to-detail.)
Personality traits
This assessment provides a baseline understanding of a candidate’s fit for the role before you begin testing specific skills. It reveals how someone might approach challenges, interact with others, and adapt to different environments.
Limit the Total Number of Assessments
To ensure the experience is impactful and efficient for both candidates and hiring teams, we recommend:
A maximum of 5 total assessments
Keep the selection focused and job-relevant, not exhaustive
More assessments can lead to decision fatigue, longer timelines, and unnecessary testing, without improving results. A well-targeted stack of 3–5 assessments delivers better insight and a better candidate experience.
🎯Prioritize fit and function over quantity.
Use a Job-Specific Assessment If Available
If the role you're assessing matches one of our existing Job-Specific Assessments (from either the White-Collar or Blue-Collar library), we recommend using that assessment as your core evaluation.
These assessments combine hard, soft, and hybrid skills into one simulation-based or task-specific evaluation tailored to real workplace scenarios.
Once you’ve included the Profile Fit (Psychometric Assessment) and the Job-Specific Assessment, you can optionally add up to three more assessments to complement the evaluation and fine-tune your understanding of the candidate’s readiness. These additional assessments can help capture role-specific nuances or test cross-functional capabilities that may not be fully covered in the job-specific evaluation.
🎯Keep in mind that Job-specific assessments are pre-calibrated, and do not require level selection.
If There’s No Job-Specific Assessment → Build a Custom Skill Stack
Not every role will match one of our pre-built Job-Specific Assessments. That’s completely fine — our system is flexible enough to support custom-built evaluation paths.
When there’s no direct match, your goal is to build a small, focused set of assessments that reflects the key skills required for the role. This should be based on the actual responsibilities of the position — not job titles alone.
We recommend a combination of:
Hard skills: These are the technical or role-specific capabilities that can be measured objectively — such as working with tools, systems, or software.
Hybrid skills: These involve a mix of technical understanding, strategic or cognitive thinking and soft skills— such as customer success, project management, or risk awareness.
Soft skills: These capture interpersonal effectiveness and behavioral attributes — such as strategic communication, creative thinking or resilience.
Structuring a Custom Stack
Choose a mix that reflects the core function of the role:
For highly technical roles, put more weight on hard skills
For creative, strategic, or service roles, balance with hybrid and soft skills
For operational or support roles, consider hard skills alongside soft skills.
The key is to assess what’s essential, not everything. This keeps the evaluation efficient, relevant, and meaningful for both the hiring team and the candidate.
Use the Role as the Anchor — Not the Skill List
When building an assessment plan, it's easy to get lost in lists of available skills. But the most accurate, effective assessments come from starting with a deep understanding of the role itself — not from browsing a menu of possible options.
The role should always be the anchor.
Ask yourself:
What are the day-to-day responsibilities of this role?
What tools, technologies, or systems are used regularly?
What are the key outcomes or performance indicators for this role?
What would success look like in the first 30, 60, or 90 days?
By answering these questions, you'll know which capabilities are critical to evaluate. From there, the skills will naturally follow — and your assessment plan will be purpose-built, rather than patchwork.
🎯Avoid using assessments to test "nice-to-have" skills. Focus on the skills and behaviors that truly impact job performance.
Quality Over Quantity = Better Insights
It’s a common misconception that more assessments lead to better insights. In reality, adding too many assessments can:
Dilute the focus of your evaluation
Lead to overlapping or redundant data
Extend timelines unnecessarily
Create friction in the candidate experience
We recommend capping the total number of assessments at five, including the Profile Fit Assessment. This limit helps ensure:
A streamlined and respectful process for candidates
Sharper, more actionable data for hiring managers
Easier interpretation of results
More confidence in decision-making
Each assessment should be chosen strategically, based on the role’s core demands. If a skill or behavior is not directly related to performance on the job, it probably doesn’t need to be assessed.
💡 Think of your assessment plan like a diagnostic toolkit — the fewer tools you need to make a confident, accurate diagnosis, the better.
Final Thoughts
To build an effective and efficient assessment journey:
Start with Psychometric to assess profile fit
Add up to 4 additional assessments, based on the job’s actual demands
Keep it to 5 total assessments to maintain clarity and candidate experience
Use levels appropriately for hard and hybrid skills
Anchor everything in the real-world tasks of the role — not in theoretical skill lists