Three hours of tests before a human read the application

When the tests are already paid for, the number of them stops measuring rigour and starts measuring whose time counts as free.

A working-student applicant in Europe set out what the first round of an entry-level application actually consisted of, and then did the arithmetic on it.

Round one was three assessments, in sequence, before anyone at the company had read a word of the application:

round one, before a single human saw my application, was three assessments back to back: a Predictive Index behavioral assessment, a CCAT cognitive test (via Criteria), and a Technical Employment Test on HackerRank. Call it 2–3 hours of work.

What came back was not a person either:

The result is the automated rejection below no-reply address, no feedback, no way to see how I actually did.

Two to three hours in, and the candidate still cannot say which of the three tests ended it, or whether any of them did.

Then the observation that lifts this above a complaint. The applicant reads the incentive behind the volume, and reads it in a specific direction:

these testing platforms are just flat annual subscriptions for the company, they don’t pay per candidate. So making everyone sit through 2–3 hours of tests costs them basically nothing, and I’m the only one actually losing anything here (time).

That is the applicant’s reasoning about why the process is shaped this way, not a statement about anybody’s contract terms. But it points at the question worth asking of any screening step: who pays for running it? A step that is free to run gets run on everyone. A step that costs the employer something per candidate gets rationed — and rationing is what turns a filter into a judgement rather than a default setting.

The comparison is the applicant’s own, and they offer it as a first-timer:

For context, I’m applying from Europe, where the first step in most processes I’ve seen is just a CV and a cover letter that a person actually reviews.

It is worth something precisely because it is naive. Someone meeting this for the first time expected the cheap step first and the expensive step later, and found the order reversed.

None of which is an argument about whether behavioural or cognitive assessment measures anything. Grant the tests everything their vendors claim; the sequence is still upside down. The candidate spends hours before the employer spends minutes, and what the employer spends to ask for those hours is a subscription it was paying anyway.

A recruitment process that front-loads three hours onto an entry-level candidate before anyone reads the application is not demonstrating rigour. It is spending the one budget nobody makes it account for.