“In today’s high-pressure, low-margin climate, businesses face growing scrutiny and shrinking tolerance for error. When it comes to leadership hires, the cost of getting it wrong is too high. Robust, evidence-based recruitment isn’t just best practice; it’s business-critical.”
Jon McNeish, CEO of MacGregor Black
For years, the growth of internal HR teams meant testing and assessment of candidates became the ‘ugly duckling’ of the recruitment process. But a fresh fear of failure against a confusing economic backdrop and the emergence of game-changing AI tools mean its demand is on the rise again.
MacGregor Black CEO Jon McNeish looks at the growing trend of clients increasingly requiring robust testing of candidates’ compatibility for executive roles.
Economic Pressure is Shaping Risk Appetite and Business Behaviour
The economy is stretched, regardless of whether you’re looking at things through a UK, European, US or international lens. And with unsettling conflict in Eastern Europe and across the Middle East, the opportunities for the superpowers to prioritise economic growth over peace are understandably diminished. It’s not easy.
And those at the sharp end of business, having to make forecasts and plans and simply run things successfully day-to-day, are collecting the cuts and grazes from that sharp end, which seems to be getting ever more jagged.
This adds pressure on everybody’s shoulders. Productivity and profitability are paramount, and the bandwidth to take risks shrinks daily as the C-suite comes under increasing pressure from stakeholders and shareholders not to fail.
As with countless other industries, the recruitment market faces the same pressures, and those pressures bring in new behaviours, new cycles and the need to find new, fail-safe ways to do things. Nobody can afford to fail.
Executive Recruitment: When Getting It Wrong is Too Costly
Over the last generation or two, we’ve seen a boom in organisations taking recruitment into their own hands. The growth of internal HR leaders and teams under them has brought a welcome focus to recruitment and employment policies in the boardroom. Thankfully, more and more are advocates of the old theory that if you look after your staff, the rest will look after itself.
However, this internal focus also saw a dwindling of externally driven testing and assessment of candidates, especially at an executive level. That lack of attention to getting the big boardroom decisions right threatens to cost companies dearly.
Earlier this year, Entain, the owners of Ladbrokes and Coral betting platforms, gained themselves the most unenviable of records when their new CEO quit after just six months, making it the quickest ever exit of any CEO in an FTSE 100 company. The shockwaves in the city saw Entain lose almost 11% of its share value following the news.
All businesses, but especially big businesses, cannot afford to get the big decisions wrong.
Smarter, Safer, and More Inclusive Hiring
As with more contemporary recruitment methods, so too has the ability to test a candidate and their suitability to perform in the role. Anecdotally, we’ve seen more than one client come to us now asking to plan rigorous testing and assessment of executive candidates. Two individuals for a top-level position have come and gone in quick succession, and they simply cannot afford to get it wrong again.
Unsurprisingly, the tools at our disposal have come on quite the distance since those terrifying days of paper-based psychometric testing, or personality profiling through Myers-Briggs. The Five Factor Model (FFM), which has largely taken over from Myers-Briggs as a method of testing a candidate across traits covering openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (OCEAN), is also perfectly suited to AI and digital enhancement.
Hogan Assessments also offer far more rounded views covering personality traits, personal values and cognitive abilities in order to offer predictive performance forecasts. Hogan assesses bright and dark-side traits to identify individuals’ strengths and weaknesses, the things that will inspire them but also threaten to derail them.
Importantly, digital and AI-driven tools take the guesswork and subjectivity out of results assessments. For instance, who would be psychometrically testing the testers to make sure they weren’t swayed by any conscious or unconscious biases? AI tools can offer, in this instance, a welcome emotion-free and objective view of the strengths and weaknesses of a candidate based on what the requirements are for the role.
According to Universum’s Employer Branding Data Report for 2025, use of AI tools is up across the board year on year, with 70% of businesses now claiming they use some form of AI in their recruitment processes or employer branding.
The report outlines the use of AI-driven candidate search and matching tools has rocketed from 13% in 2024 to 30% in 2025. Equally, the use of generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, has increased in the recruitment process from 43% in 2024 to 58% this year.
Worried about the machines taking over? Don’t be. These are fantastic additions to your human-led decision-making processes, and forward-thinking HR teams are clearly embracing new methods, viewing them as a helpful addition to their team, not as a threat to their own position. In fact, many suggest AI can only succeed with more and more integration into human-led activities, such as interviews and decision-making discussions.
US-based HireVue’s own report into AI use in recruitment supports Universum’s and also outlines how confidence is growing that AI can enhance processes and positively improve efficiencies and outcomes.
On the flip side, candidates are also embracing improved AI and digitally led decision-making tools. Well over half (57%) of those candidates questioned in HireVue’s report believed that AI use in the recruitment process reduces any racial or ethnic biases. That’s up by 6% on 2024. The machines are getting smarter, and with more intelligent deployment, all sides feel more confident in their abilities to play a key role in the decision-making process.
In years to come, we’ll undeniably look back on this period as one of global turmoil, but with a strange mix of huge potential as digital capabilities just start to emerge, completely changing the game on exactly what is achievable. It’s a relatively new adage, but it is already becoming well used.
‘AI won’t take your job, but someone who knows how to use it well? They will.’
Connect with MacGregor Black for a consultation or to explore your tailored recruitment needs. Contact us today.