The Arctic Shores Task-Based Assessment - An Overview

As you well know, the journey of applying for jobs is very involved, requiring time and effort, in addition to the emotional toil of really wanting a role, being nervous about putting yourself out there etc.  You’re most likely reading this because you’ve been asked to complete our Arctic Shores Assessment as part of a recruitment process and you’re curious about the Assessment. To help you understand what the assessment is all about, it’s important you understand what we’re trying to do as a company: we want to help create a world of work where potential matters just as much as skills or experience.

Too often companies use biased, subjective methods e.g. CVs, to identify which candidates should progress to the next stage of a recruitment process. So our aim is to provide a fair opportunity to candidates to demonstrate their potential and provide a reliable and valid way for companies to identify good fit candidates efficiently and effectively.  We’ve designed our assessment to do just that, drawing from the wealth of peer-reviewed research from the fields of psychology, cognitive neuroscience and psychometrics.

Tests can be found all over the internet giving you insights into your personality, preferences etc, but the majority of these free tests have not been designed in a valid or reliable way by psychometricians with years of experience and produce quite arbitrary results. Our Assessment has been designed by expert psychometricians, cognitive psychologists and business psychologists with PhDs and MScs from the Uni of Cambridge, Uni of Cardiff,  UCL, Cardiff, Uni of Coventry, Uni of Sheffield to name a few. The research papers used to inform the theory and approach underpinning our assessment come from peer-reviewed journals such as The Journal of Personality, The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence, Personality processes and individual differences Journal. If a paper is peer-reviewed it signals a stamp of approval from other experts in the field to say, ‘yes, this is robust and meaningful research’ - this is what our assessment is based on. We are part of the BPS Committee of Testing Standards and adhere to the European Federation of Psychologists’ Associations (EFPA) guidelines for test development, ensuring everything we do is guided by the highest professional standards.

Our assessment measures the core psychological constructs that fundamentally shape the way individuals think and behave. Rather than asking what capabilities and skills a candidate believes they have, our assessment objectively measures the underlying ‘enablers’ that make acquiring workplace skills possible. It explores how you focus, consider emotions, work out problems, learn, handle tasks, apply yourself amongst other behaviours; all of which are important to varying degrees for different roles. For example, in a customer service role it’s important to be able to interact with people effectively, which is likely to require a capability to work with people.  

When designing tools to help describe people it’s really important that the assessment tool accurately measures what it’s intended to. E.g. if a role requires problem-solving, the assessment tool used for that role includes a measure of problem-solving.  As well as measuring what it’s supposed to, an assessment tool needs to perform this measurement reliably i.e. it produces very similar results when the same person completes it at two different times.  We work to the standard outlined by the British Psychological Society. This is where our very experienced and clever psychometricians and cognitive scientists come in. Before any element of our assessment is launched our team progresses through the steps of a detailed development and testing process over a period of months. This involves prototype design, pilot testing, user testing and statistical analysis to determine validity and reliability properties

So if you’re preparing to complete the assessment we always recommend finding a quiet space with stable internet access. Think about the time of day you feel most alert and able to give it your all and aim to complete during this period. As with all assessments, read the instructions carefully, make use of the practice opportunities available within the assessment be yourself, given the assessment the concentration it deserves. Our Customer Support team is here to help with any questions you may have. We recommend starting with our Help Centre, where you’ll find a wide range of helpful articles and insights. If you’re unable to resolve your issue there, you can easily submit a support form, and a member of our team will be in touch.

Thank you for taking the time to learn more about the assessment and for being part of the 2 million-plus candidates who complete it. We hope you find it to be an engaging experience and wish you the very best of luck with your application and career journey.