How can employers identify potential rather than privilege when recruiting early-career talent? Laura Boyle, Head of Emerging Talent at Publicis Groupe UK, shares what they learned from moving beyond CVs to assess the skills that matter most in an AI-driven workplace.
A CV is a record of experience, and for people at the start of their careers, experience is rarely accumulated on equal terms. Access to internships, professional networks, careers advice and extracurricular opportunities varies considerably. Using these as early indicators of ability can favour candidates who have already had more opportunities to build a strong application.
At the same time, the qualities employers need are changing. Our recent Future Skills research with Kingston University London identified judgement, creativity, curiosity and critical thinking as increasingly valuable as AI changes how work gets done. We call these “fusion skills”, human capabilities that help people use technology effectively and make good decisions around it.
There is a gap between those findings and the way early careers recruitment has traditionally worked. Educational background and previous experience have long been convenient ways to narrow a large applicant pool, even though they offer limited evidence of qualities such as curiosity or judgement.
We encountered this challenge at Publicis Groupe UK, where our emerging talent team recruits around 350 people into entry-level roles each year from tens of thousands of applications across our agencies. At that volume, we needed a consistent way to identify people with the skills we were looking for without relying so heavily on what they had already had the opportunity to do.
We began by reconsidering the role of CVs and educational experience in the initial sift. Two candidates with similar ability can arrive with very different applications because one has had access to internships, industry contacts or guidance that the other has not. Allowing those differences to determine who reaches the next stage can narrow the pool before candidates have demonstrated how they think or approach a problem.
We also needed a new approach to work at scale and give hiring managers useful information about the candidates reaching the interview stage. Fairness alone could not tell us whether a different method of assessment was working. We needed evidence that it was identifying people with the potential to succeed.
This is why we partnered with Arctic Shores to introduce task-based behavioural assessments at the start of the recruitment process. Applicants complete a series of interactive tasks designed to assess behaviours linked to success in our business, including collaboration, problem solving, resilience and creativity under pressure. This gives us information that is difficult to draw from a CV alone.
Generative AI has made that distinction more relevant. Candidates can use it to improve a cover letter, tailor an application to a job description or present their experience more effectively. Written applications therefore give employers less certainty about what they are assessing. Behavioural assessment provides an additional source of evidence about the candidate.
Since introducing the new process, our emerging talent team has spent less time on early-stage screening and more time engaging with candidates later in the process. Hiring managers have reported greater confidence in the candidates reaching them, and our analysis found that higher assessment scores were predictive of a candidate’s likelihood of receiving a final offer.
We also tracked what happened to representation during the initial assessment. The diversity of the applicant pool was maintained as candidates progressed through this stage. Alongside our wider outreach and inclusion work, we have since seen the number of hires from underrepresented groups triple.
Candidate feedback gives us another measure of how the process is working. Eighty-eight per cent reported being satisfied with the experience, with feedback describing it as fairer, less stressful and more reflective of our culture.
The data has been important in bringing hiring managers with us. Moving away from familiar signals such as education and previous experience requires confidence that the alternative tells you something useful. Being able to compare assessment performance with eventual hiring outcomes gave us evidence that the behaviours being measured had a relationship with who ultimately received an offer.
Our Future Skills research also prompted us to think about skills well before someone joins the workforce. Employers who expect to need more judgement, curiosity, creativity and critical thinking will need recruitment processes capable of recognising those qualities in people who may have little professional experience to point to. For us, changing the initial assessment has given candidates more scope to demonstrate their ability and given our teams more evidence on which to make early hiring decisions.
Paula Cunnington is Chief Talent Officer at Publicis Groupe, UK.
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