The Arctic Shores assessment is a task-based psychometric test measuring personality and workplace intelligence through interactive tasks used in hiring.
The Arctic Shores assessment is a "task-based" psychometric assessment used by employers to screen job candidates. Instead of answering multiple-choice questions, candidates complete a series of short interactive tasks, and the platform records thousands of behavioural data points as they work. According to Arctic Shores, the assessment measures two broad areas: personality and "Workplace Intelligence," the company's alternative to a traditional cognitive ability score. Employers including Siemens, Capita, Thales, and Molson Coors use it, most often for early-careers and high-volume hiring. This article explains what the assessment measures, how task-based testing differs from question-based tests, which employers use it, and what the experience looks like from the candidate's side.
A task-based assessment, briefly explained
Arctic Shores Limited is a UK assessment company. Records at Companies House show it was incorporated on 28 June 2013 and is registered in Manchester. The company built its platform around a simple premise, summarized on its own homepage: candidates should show how they perform rather than tell you. Where a conventional psychometric test presents a question and records the answer you choose, an Arctic Shores task presents an activity and records what you actually do, including how your behaviour shifts as the task changes and as you learn.
The company reports that more than 350 organizations have used the platform and positions task-based measurement as an answer to a current problem in recruitment: generative AI tools can now produce polished answers to traditional application questions and even some question-based tests, which weakens the signal those methods provide. A behavioural task completed in real time is harder to outsource to a chatbot than a typed answer.
What the Arctic Shores assessment measures
Arctic Shores describes two measurement areas. The first is personality, meaning a candidate's natural behavioural tendencies in work-relevant situations. The second is Workplace Intelligence, which the company defines in its glossary as "a set of cognitive traits that can predict an individual's job success, regardless of prior experience," including problem-solving, learning, and emotional intelligence. The company presents Workplace Intelligence as its replacement for a conventional cognitive ability test.
During an assessment, the platform captures a large volume of raw behavioural data. The homepage states that over 12,000 data points feed the scoring, and that candidates are scored on how they think and learn during the tasks rather than on self-descriptions or on whether they picked a single right answer. Results are then compared against a representative "norm group," a reference sample of previous assessment-takers, so that an individual profile has context. In the candidate feedback report, each measured behaviour is placed on a 1-to-10 spectrum, and Arctic Shores emphasizes that on many of these behavioural scales there is no universally better or worse position; different roles favour different profiles.
On the science side, Arctic Shores says its tasks draw on a body of neuroscience research, that its researchers conduct dozens of studies a year, and that it keeps reliability in line with British Psychological Society (BPS) standards. The company also makes a strong fairness commitment on its science page: "no adverse impact, regardless of ethnicity or gender. Ever." These are the publisher's own claims, and employers evaluating the tool should ask for the technical documentation behind them.
How task-based assessment differs from question-based tests
The practical differences between the two formats come down to what gets measured and how.
• Behaviour instead of self-report: A question-based personality inventory asks you to describe yourself, which invites socially desirable answering. A task-based assessment observes behaviour directly, which Arctic Shores argues is much harder to fake.
• Process instead of right answers: Traditional cognitive tests score whether you answered correctly within a time limit. Task-based scoring uses the full record of how you approached the task, including learning across attempts, so many tasks have no single correct response.
• Data density: A 20-item questionnaire yields 20 data points. Arctic Shores reports capturing over 12,000 behavioural data points per assessment, which allows scoring models built on patterns rather than totals.
• Candidate anxiety: Arctic Shores states that removing right-or-wrong questions reduces test anxiety, and its glossary argues that question-based tests tend to underestimate candidates affected by "stereotype threat," the anxiety of confirming a negative stereotype about a group you belong to. The company claims a task-based approach can add around 20 percent more candidates to a talent pool.
Some caution is warranted alongside these claims. Question-based cognitive tests carry decades of accumulated validity evidence; the major meta-analytic reviews of personnel selection, most recently revisited by Sackett and colleagues in the Journal of Applied Psychology, are built largely on that traditional testing literature. The peer-reviewed literature on game-based and task-based assessment is younger and thinner. Early studies are encouraging, and research by Georgiou, Gouras, and Nikolaou published in the International Journal of Selection and Assessment found support for the construct validity of a gamified selection assessment, but independent public evidence specific to any single commercial platform remains limited. Arctic Shores belongs to a broader wave of behaviour-based hiring tools that includes the pymetrics test and the HireVue assessment, and the same evidence questions apply across the category.
Which employers use the Arctic Shores assessment
Arctic Shores publishes a client list that includes Siemens, Capita, Thales, Molson Coors, Kantar, the Adecco Group, WSP, CBRE, Burness Paull, Frazer Nash, and SGN. Its case-study library reports several outcomes from these deployments. Siemens reduced hiring time for critical roles from 200 days to 41 days. Capita processed 12,000 applications through the platform. Holcim UK reports that female representation in the relevant hiring population rose from 3 percent to 27 percent, alongside 442 saved recruiter hours. Entain reports saving 9,000 hours of screening time while retail attrition fell from 40 percent to 25 percent. These figures come from the company's own case studies rather than independent audits, so treat them as vendor-reported results.
The typical use cases the company describes are early-careers programmes such as graduate schemes and apprenticeships, high-volume hiring where recruiters face thousands of similar CVs, and hard-to-fill technical roles where employers want to look past experience to underlying capability. Whether behavioural screening of this kind belongs in a hiring process at all is a separate question, and our overview of the pros and cons of using cognitive testing in hiring walks through the evidence on both sides.
What candidates experience
The candidate-facing process is deliberately simple, and Arctic Shores publishes guidance for test-takers on its site.
• Format: The assessment consists of up to nine short interactive tasks. The exact set and overall timing vary with the role and the version the employer has licensed, and the main site does not publish one fixed duration.
• Setup: The company recommends a device no more than four years old, a stable connection, a charged battery, and completing everything in one sitting where possible, with notifications switched off.
• Preparation: Arctic Shores offers a practice assessment and recommends completing it beforehand to get comfortable with the format. Beyond that, its guidance is to approach each task in the way that feels most natural, because the scoring reads behaviour rather than rehearsed answers.
• Feedback: After finishing, candidates receive a personal feedback report showing where they fall on a 1-to-10 spectrum for each measured behaviour, benchmarked against the norm group. Feedback for every candidate is unusual in high-volume hiring, where most applicants otherwise hear nothing.
The company reports strong candidate reactions to this design: on its candidate guidance page it states that 91 percent of surveyed candidates enjoyed the assessment, 84 percent found it less stressful than traditional tests, and 88 percent felt more excited about the employer afterward, and its homepage cites a 91 percent completion rate. As with the case-study outcomes, these are the publisher's own survey figures.
How it compares with a traditional IQ test
The Arctic Shores assessment is not an IQ test, and it does not produce an IQ score. Workplace Intelligence is a proprietary construct scored against the company's norm groups for hiring purposes, and results are reported as behavioural spectrums rather than on the familiar IQ scale with a mean of 100 and a "standard deviation," a measure of score spread, of 15 points. If an employer invites you to take it, your goal is a genuine performance in a low-pressure setting, since there is little content to study.
If what you actually want is a measured cognitive ability score, a purpose-built instrument is the better tool. The RIOT IQ test, the Reasoning and Intelligence Online Test, was developed by RIOT IQ with psychometrician Dr. Russell T. Warne for adults 18 and over. It uses 15 subtests across six cognitive indices (verbal reasoning, fluid reasoning, spatial ability, working memory, processing speed, and reaction time), takes about 52 minutes, and reports scores on the standard mean-100, SD-15 scale. It does not replace an individually administered diagnostic evaluation, but it provides a normed, interpretable measure of general cognitive ability. You can take the RIOT IQ test at riotiq.com.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Arctic Shores assessment an IQ test?
No. It measures personality and the company's Workplace Intelligence construct through behavioural tasks. It does not report an IQ score on the mean-100, SD-15 scale used by standardized intelligence tests.
Can you fail the Arctic Shores assessment?
There is no pass mark in the traditional sense. On many behavioural scales the company says no position is inherently better or worse. In practice, employers compare your profile against the profile they are hiring for, so you can be screened out without having answered anything incorrectly.
How long does the Arctic Shores assessment take?
It varies. The assessment involves up to nine tasks, and Arctic Shores recommends completing them in one sitting. The company does not publish a single fixed duration on its main site because task sets differ by role and employer.
Can you practise for it?
Arctic Shores provides a practice assessment and recommends taking it to get familiar with the format. Content preparation offers little advantage because scoring is based on natural behaviour during the tasks rather than on knowledge.
Which companies use the Arctic Shores assessment?
The company's published client list includes Siemens, Capita, Thales, Molson Coors, Kantar, the Adecco Group, WSP, CBRE, Burness Paull, Frazer Nash, and SGN, with heavy use in early-careers and high-volume hiring.
Do candidates get their results?
Yes. Every candidate receives a feedback report by email showing each measured behaviour on a 1-to-10 spectrum, benchmarked against a representative norm group.
References
1. Arctic Shores. (2026). Task-based assessments for recruitment.. arcticshores.com
2. Arctic Shores. (2026). Support for candidates.. arcticshores.com
3. Arctic Shores. (2026). What is Workplace Intelligence?. arcticshores.com
6. Georgiou, K., Gouras, A., & Nikolaou, I. (2019). Gamification in employee selection: The development of a gamified assessment. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 27(2), 91-103. doi.org
7. Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., & Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection: Addressing systematic overcorrection for restriction of range. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11), 2040-2068. doi.org
Hero photo: an adult using a tablet at home. Photo by picjumbo.com via Wikimedia Commons / Pexels, CC0 public domain dedication (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/), cropped.
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