Sequencing: What to Assess and When

Sequencing is usually inherited rather than designed. It determines which candidates reach the stage where you actually learn something.

The principles in “Sequencing: What to Assess and When” become easier to maintain when ownership and time spent are visible. Teams evaluating timesheet and task tracking can use it to coordinate the administrative work around assessment, identify stages that repeatedly expand and plan capacity, while keeping the hiring decision tied to job-relevant evidence instead of raw activity totals.

For an independent benchmark, compare the process with U.S. OPM assessment resources; the useful test is whether the local method remains job-related, proportionate and explainable.

The principle

Cheap for both sides early, expensive later.

Cheap for you and expensive for them is the arrangement to avoid, and it is the most common: a long take-home task before any human contact.

A workable order

Application: minimal. Name, contact, and a short answer to one or two questions that matter.

A short screening assessment: twenty to thirty minutes, a work sample or knowledge check, with a generous threshold.

A structured interview.

A longer work sample or a final conversation, for a small number.

Three or four stages, most candidates seeing two.

What to put first

Something that screens on capability rather than on presentation.

A short exercise placed before CV review is a genuinely different process, and organisations that do it report a candidate pool that looks different from the one their CV screening produced.

The threshold at this stage should be low: you are removing people who clearly cannot, not choosing.

What not to put first

A long unpaid task.

A personality questionnaire, which irritates people before any contact and predicts weakly.

Cognitive tests at volume, where the adverse impact falls hardest and the information is least.

And CV screening alone, which is the default and which selects on background, wording and career continuity more than on capability.

The CV problem

CVs carry names, addresses, school names, career gaps and employment dates, all of which affect judgement in documented ways.

Anonymising the early stages is cheap and changes who progresses.

Where full anonymisation is impractical, moving the CV later helps: look at the work first, then the history.

Rejection points

Decide in advance where rejections happen and communicate at each.

Candidates left waiting after a long exercise is the most common complaint in candidate surveys, and it is entirely a process design failure rather than a resourcing one.

Scheduling

Compressed processes lose fewer candidates.

Three weeks from application to offer is achievable for most roles and rare.

Every week of delay loses candidates with options, which means slow processes select against the people you were competing for.

What to check

What is your first filter actually selecting on?

How many stages does a typical candidate see?

Is the CV read before or after any assessment of capability?

And how long does your process take from application to decision?

The point

Cheap for both sides early, expensive later.

Cheap for you and expensive for them is the arrangement to avoid and the most common.

Underlying all of this

Almost everything in this collection reduces to one discipline: write down what the job requires, assess that thing directly, record the evidence, and look at your own outcomes afterwards. None of it requires buying anything, and organisations that do those four things consistently outperform ones running longer processes built from instruments chosen before the requirements were known.

The recurring pattern

The recurring failure across every section here is the same: measuring what is convenient rather than what matters, then never checking whether it predicted anything. The check is an afternoon of work once a year, and it is the step that separates a process that improves from one that merely persists.