A skills-first hiring story from one of AbilityMap’s most methodical clients.
A different kind of AbilityMap client
Most companies buy an assessment. Deswik built a method around one. Over several years, the team has learned the platform deeply, designed its own role profiles, applied consistent thresholds, and tellingly reaches out to understand the data whenever something doesn’t look right rather than just accepting or ignoring it. It is capability-based hiring practised with unusual rigour, and it now runs across the whole employee lifecycle.
“The way you use it is so methodical and considered. When things don’t quite look right, you not only recognise it, you reach out to understand it. I can’t ask for more.”- Vanessa Goryl, Outcomes Director – AbilityMap
Why Deswik chose AbilityMap
Deswik had always used behavioural and cognitive assessment in hiring – so this was a switch, not a first purchase. Their previous tool was an Australian product that was sold to an overseas owner and re-engineered into a US version. Over time the quality of its responses and feedback grew inconsistent, prices were hiked significantly, the terms of use changed, and support deteriorated. The team reviewed the whole market and chose AbilityMap. Many years later, the partnership continues.
“They hiked the prices quite significantly and changed the terms of use, and support was terrible. So we looked at the whole market and settled on AbilityMap.” – Kylie Simonds, Deswik
Graduate hiring: capability first
Deswik’s graduate challenge is one of scale and sameness. A week-long ad pulls in 1,000–1,200 applicants, and graduate CVs are near-identical same degrees, similar experience, with only GPA and the odd internship to separate them. GPA, the team recognised, rewards circumstance as much as capability: the student who never needed a part-time job has more time to study than the equally capable one who did.
So the graduate funnel was rebuilt around objective data. The 45-minute AbilityMap assessment moved to the front of the process, ahead of the phone screen. Studying their best graduates revealed a shared cluster of behavioural capabilities, which the team turned into two role profiles one including cognitive capability and one behavioural-only letting them narrow a thousand-plus applications into a workable shortlist before spending human time on anyone. As a bonus, simply completing an unsupervised, 45-minute assessment from home filters for genuine intent: the candidates who bother are the ones who actually want to be there.
The cognitive threshold that saves everyone time
One of Deswik’s most quietly powerful practices is a hard cognitive threshold: graduates who score below a certain threshold across the three cognitive measures don’t progress. It sounds strict, but it rests on years of evidence.
The link the team has observed is remarkably clean: if a candidate’s cognitive scores aren’t strong on AbilityMap, they won’t pass Deswik’s technical test and that has held 100% of the time. Occasionally a manager insists on progressing someone who “said all the right things” in interview; the AbilityMap result has been right every time.
“If their cognitive scores aren’t strong in their AbilityMap, they’re not going to get through the code test and that’s 100% of the time. I’ve had managers push candidates below the threshold based on a good impression, but the AbilityMap data remains consistent.” – Tasmin Stewart, Deswik
The economics are compelling in both directions. The 45-minute assessment spares Deswik the cost of running poor-fit candidates through a 2.5-hour technical test and spares those candidates two and a half hours of their own time on a process that was never going to work out. It’s not just about passing the tests: the thresholds have been set based on evidence that passing both give candidates the best chance of becoming high performing employees in their new role.
Beyond hiring: promotion and sales
Deswik’s use of capability data doesn’t stop at the front door. The team revisits profiles when considering internal promotions, checking for leadership traits and comparing candidates against the profiles of existing leaders in the business.
The clearest example is sales. Deswik isn’t a traditional sales organisation you can’t sell mine-planning software without understanding mining, or the software, so its best sellers are engineers by trade who developed an aptitude for customer relationships. Capability profiling makes that aptitude visible. When one candidate interviewed for a mining-consultant role, his profile matched the sales team better than the consulting team; offered a key account manager role instead, he now leads a highly successful sales team nearly five years on. And when Deswik recently needed a sales director and two sales managers, only internal applicants were assessed and all three roles were filled from within.
One data point, used responsibly
For all the weight Deswik places on capability data, the team is disciplined about its limits. Results are held tightly visible only at engineering-manager level and in HR and treated as one input among several.
“It’s one data point in the recruitment process. Usually it’s a combination of everything the interview, the technical testing, the AbilityMap, the HR screening that feeds into our hiring decisions.”- Kylie Simonds, Deswik
The outcome
Confident in the quality it can now hire for, Deswik has scaled its graduate program from roughly four or five hires a year to fifteen and more per intake. Regretted attrition is near zero and graduate terminations stand at none. Capability-first hiring is embedded from the graduate pipeline through internal promotion to sales leadership, a practice most organisations are only now beginning to understand.
