01:25 – Intro
02:30 – Ice Breaker
The oddest interview questions Kraig has faced.
04:00 – Why companies buy assessments
Short-term fixes vs future-proofing.
07:30 – The importance of baselines
Why ROI has to start from the beginning.
11:00 – The TA trilemma
Time, cost, quality, and why you can’t optimise all three.
13:30 – Time-to-hire vs hiring on time
Why speed isn’t the whole story.
17:00 – Productivity as ROI
The metric that resonates with leadership.
19:45 – Inclusion and fairness
The harder-to-measure but still vital part of ROI.
21:00 – Science or Fiction
Debunking myths about ROI.
25:30 – Key takeaways
Baselines, simplicity, and productivity.
Caroline Fry (00:00)
Welcome to The Score, where we make sense of hiring trends, we sort science from fiction, and find out what's new in talent acquisition from top experts in the field.
Nicola Tatham (00:08)
I'm Nicola Tatham. I'm a chief IO psychologist. I've got two decades of experience designing fair, predictive and science-backed talent assessments. I'm here to cut through the noise and talk about what actually works in hiring.
Caroline Fry (00:21)
And I'm Caroline Fry, Head of Product. I spend my time turning smart assessment ideas from Nick into tools that work scalable, inclusive, and ready for whatever AI throws at us next.
Nicola Tatham (00:31)
Each episode we're joined by a guest to unpack a big question in hiring.
Caroline Fry (00:39)
Because talent deserves better than guesswork.
Nicola Tatham (00:41)
Today we're joined by Kraig Payne. Kraig is the Customer Success Director at Sova. Kraig started his career in talent acquisition, so he knows firsthand the challenges facing TA and HR teams from making do with shrinking budgets to proving the value of their investments. After a decade on that side of the fence, he co-founded Foresight.
That's a TA SaaS business that grew globally and was acquired in 2025. Now at Sova, he's focused on helping clients measure the impact of their projects, ensuring talent acquisition investments translate into business outcomes. He's the perfect person to help us tackle today's big question. How do you really measure ROI in assessments? Welcome, Kraig.
Kraig Payne (01:25)
Thank you very much. Good to be here.
Caroline Fry (01:26)
Okay Kraig, so to kick things off with a light one. What's the strangest, most unexpected question you've ever been asked during an interview?
Kraig Payne (01:34)
So I've had a fair few interviews in my time. I don't think I've ever had a really crazy one. I remember being a kind of fresh grad and being asked the question, do I want a profession or a career? Which at the time really flummoxed me because I didn't know a great deal about a great deal and I didn't know that there was a difference. I'm not actually sure there is a difference even now. So that was a bit of an odd one.
I'm pretty sure I had the very famous one years ago about a manhole cover as well. Have you ever heard that one? Okay, so I'm pretty sure this came out of one of the big tech houses back in the early 2000s, but there was a question that did the rounds that was about why are manhole covers round?
Caroline Fry (02:02)
No, please tell us.
Nicola Tatham (02:14)
Is this a joke or an interview question?
Kraig Payne (02:15)
Anyone know?
No, it was an interview question. Yeah. Well, it's supposedly so they don't fall in on themselves because they can't physically fall down the hole. So it's a safety thing. But yeah, I knew the answer because I knew the question before. But yeah, that was a bit of a daft one, to be honest.
Nicola Tatham (02:18)
It's like, did the chicken cross the road? Go on.
Caroline Fry (02:20)
Did you get the job from knowing that question?
Kraig Payne (02:36)
Honestly I can't remember. Probably not.
Nicola Tatham (02:38)
So we will move on to slightly more serious questions. The real reason why we've got you here today. So I'm going to ask the first question. When you think about why organisations buy assessments in the first place, what do you think is really at the heart of that decision? Is it about fixing today's problems or is it future-proofing hiring?
Kraig Payne (02:59)
I think it can be both. I think that if you think about talent acquisition, generally speaking, it's very reactive. As functions go, it's very hard to plan. I spent a lot of my working life trying to help companies get better on that side and it's tricky to do, it really is. So I think the reality is the reactivity brings almost a firefighting mentality to talent acquisition at times.
The conveyor belt or the hamster wheel that so many TA teams are on means that it's very hard to see much above the here and now and far into the future. So I do think through no fault of most TA teams themselves, a lot of the buying decisions around most TA enabling products, including assessment where we obviously sit, is normally based around solving sort of the here and now and the immediate 12 months ahead.
There are issues, which are synonymous across the industry still. It's still typically time, cost, quality with a few other bits around the edges, which no doubt we'll chat about today. But yeah, I think ultimately people are still buying to solve them. That said, there's always exceptions. There are organisations out there either in an industry that allows them to be a bit more strategic and a bit more planful, or they're just in a more mature space and perhaps are buying for the site further ahead, in which case from an assessment perspective, clearly it's about predicting better hires and talent into the future for an organisation. I would say both, but my gut would say a bigger proportion in just the here and now.
Nicola Tatham (04:31)
So it would be fair to say that ideally it would be about the future-proofing, but in the reality it tends to be about fixing the immediate term problems and plugging the gaps.
Kraig Payne (04:41)
Yeah. I think so. But I think it's multifaceted, isn't it? Because from an assessment perspective, we can try and add predictability to help drive better talent and better quality that stays longer, reduces attrition, et cetera. But linked to that, to be able to do that, you need to know what you need to hire, which is the real challenge for a lot of organisations.
In the age of AI and everything that is getting so much attention at the moment, sometimes we don't know all the skills that we're going to need. So it's difficult to predict the hires we need, let alone whether they're going to be good hires if we don't know what we're hiring for necessarily. To give TA teams their defence in this very rapidly changeable world, I think it's difficult to buy for more than 18 months out into the future at the moment because we still don't know what we don't know sometimes.
Nicola Tatham (05:09)
So I guess, yeah, exactly where I was going, which is why it's so important to think about what will still be around in the future. And what we know will still be around is change. So it's looking for those people that are agile and keen to learn, all of that great stuff that you're looking for in your talent, even if you might be recruiting for the here and now because you need people that can do the job, but longer term, if they're going to thrive.
Kraig Payne (05:32)
Which is why skills hiring helps as well.
Nicola Tatham (05:59)
Then you need to be looking for those characteristics and those skills that are going to be around for the longer term. And yeah, with any of the assessments, we're designing assessments with clients, we always do try to build that element of future proofing in, acknowledging that there is the recruiting for the here and now, but what's this job going to look like in two, three, four years’ time?
We'll bring in visionary interviews where we'll speak to leaders that can see what the strategic direction is of the business. So in a contact centre, for example, off the top of my head, it might be about problem solving right now, but the problems that contact centre staff are going to be resolving in two years won't be the same because AI is going to pick up a lot more of that. So we can look at what those longer-term qualities are that we're looking for. So yeah, it's a really interesting subject, but I completely take on board what you're saying there.
Kraig Payne (06:48)
Yeah, definitely.
Nicola Tatham (06:52)
I think Caroline's got the next question.
Caroline Fry (06:54)
I do. In a way, it's kind of related. That kind of ambiguity sometimes of what you need now and in the future, of fixing those problems — ROI is kind of another element of that. What is the true ROI, or is it different in different contexts? And a lot of TA leaders obviously have to measure ROI, but also the day job gets in the way when you're in that firefighting mode.
My question would be: what's a realistic step for someone who's never measured ROI before? And I know that's a huge question, because first you have to ask, what quite could be ROI in all these different scenarios?
Kraig Payne (07:22)
ROI is huge for us on this side of the fence because obviously we want to help a customer understand that there was a point to them working with us and the consequence has been far better than the starting point, and ROI is one of the mechanisms to do that. Put it this way, I've never had a conversation with a peer or a TA leader where they don't get why ROI is so important.
I still feel sometimes it's not in the nice-to-have camp, but it can be pushed into the too-difficult-to-figure-out-right-now camp. So everybody appreciates they should have it, they want it, and at some point in a buying cycle they're going to need to do something around it when procurement or finance come knocking and asking for justification around spend. But in my mind, it needs to be at the forefront right from kickoff and right from the start.
What are we trying to demonstrate? What are we trying to measure? And how do we know if we've done well? What is the return? Whether that's pounds and pence, dollars and cents, or it's a different sort of metric — whatever it is should be unique to that individual organisation. So I think as a first step for me, it's trying to hold that idea central so that it's not an afterthought. It's the thread that goes throughout the engagement with any service provider or tech, or in our case, an assessment partner that you utilise.
So right from the very beginning, you're understanding what it is you're trying to achieve, what the “why” is, and how you're going to measure it so that you can legitimately think about ROI. And it's not a very difficult exercise because you're retrofitting it all at the end, trying to make sense of some data that maybe isn't aligned to what it was you were trying to do in the first place. So that's the first thing.
The bit alongside that is it's very hard to do a return on investment or a measure of success if you don't have a benchmark or a baseline. If you think about anything that you want to compare, what are you comparing to? So if you don't have that mindset right at the beginning, I would argue — and I've seen it play out many times — it's very hard to measure progress if you don't know what you're measuring it against. And if you don't measure it at the beginning, you quite often lose your baseline because it's then moved and you can't go back in time to reset it.
So they would be my two things: get your baseline, and by getting the baseline, you're probably going to start thinking about it from the very beginning, which is why I think that's really important as well.
Nicola Tatham (09:35)
Thanks.
Caroline Fry (09:46)
That's such a good point. I mean, it sounds simple when you say it, but I can imagine that there have been many times you've experienced with clients where they've sort of forgotten that step and then got halfway through the process and said, okay, now we can't evidence the progress that's been made because we didn't capture that right at the outset.
And when you're talking about it, to me, that's product language — what problem are we solving? It's the same thing, right? The same thing on both sides.
Kraig Payne (10:02)
Yeah. Yeah.
Caroline Fry (10:12)
That's what your ROI becomes if you can tackle those issues with whatever solution you put in place. Great. Okay. Over to you.
Kraig Payne (10:18)
Interestingly, I think assessment is a category now. If you think about talent acquisition teams, traditionally they will spend money on possibly four things: a core system (so an ATS of sorts), attraction, assessment, screening, and recruitment agencies. They're trying to reduce spend on some of those and are happier to spend on others.
And I think assessment is one of those core categories where it's almost now a given that you do spend money on assessment, particularly if you're running early careers or you're running volume campaigns and so on. I wonder sometimes if some organisations have forgotten the why. Because it's become a repeatable thing. For most organisations they spend money on LinkedIn every year, but they probably don't stop very often and think: why do I spend money on LinkedIn versus somewhere else? How many things do I need of this and that and the other?
Caroline Fry (11:02)
Question.
Kraig Payne (11:09)
And it's our job to really challenge those perceptions and get back to that why again, because then everything gets easier from that point on.
Nicola Tatham (11:17)
Is the assessment that we're providing them with doing what it was set out to do and having that data?
Caroline Fry (11:26)
Keeping with one more question on ROI — and obviously working in product and platform, we do have to think ahead. We think in roadmaps, in years hence. If we fast forward a couple of years, what do you think ROI in assessments will look like? What will organisations be measuring that maybe they aren't today? Or do you think there are some core fundamentals that persist — evergreen?
Kraig Payne (11:49)
Yeah, I do think there are core fundamentals. So even regardless of what I've just said, time and cost per hire and quality of hire — maybe that's not the language that we'd use with our leadership team — but when you boil some of those down, what do they relate to? It's generally efficiency and cost. And as business drivers, they're not going anywhere fast. So I think there will always be a requirement to talk about efficiency and cost.
The next one for me is productivity. We don't talk productivity very much in talent acquisition. It's quite a hard beast to nail down with the data we can get our hands on, but productivity is generally king within a business context. So where we can dovetail into a productivity measure or return, the better. One hundred percent. Because that starts to move the needle for a leadership team in respect to talent and how you assess and bring talent through.
If we can build linkages and start to show a correlation between better assessment predicting better hires, those hires bringing more outcomes, higher productivity generating more output — you're starting to hear language that isn't talent language. This is production language. It's business language that drives a totally different conversation, in my opinion. Very tricky with where we sit within the talent process.
So back to the question: I don't think we're losing the cost, time, quality, experience, and efficiency stuff, but I think it's wrapped within cost and efficiency. And I think if we can move the conversation into productivity, then things get really interesting.
Nicola Tatham (13:34)
Have you seen that done well?
Kraig Payne (13:39)
No, don't get me wrong. I think there are a lot of people now on that path, thinking this way. From a hiring perspective, which we plug into and do our part, there's more talk now about hiring on time and hiring when needed, rather than reducing time to hire.
I mean, I have a bit of a bugbear with time to hire. I think it's just a vanity metric that was created to help TA teams 10 years ago explain “we're doing better — time to hire is going down.” Really it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if your time to hire is 30 days or 300 days. What matters is hiring somebody when a business needs it to deliver output, whether that's project or growth or whatever it may be.
And we in assessment play a part in that, don't we? So it's about how we figure out how we can tell that story through our bit as part of the process chain that helps organisations start to hire people when they need them.
Caroline Fry (14:40)
It's that talent intelligence concept, where all of those data points come together. If we can share some of that data more comprehensively across the journey, then we get that story to tell from where we're involved, with the outcomes included and baked in. But I haven't come across an organisation ready to share data in that way across the piece. Right now maybe ATSs harvest it, but it's patchy, I think.
Kraig Payne (15:06)
No, and it needs it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. And it needs the TA leader to be fully bought in as well because we need the data that goes end to end in the process and it does exist. Some of it will be within our platform, a lot of it exists within the wider platform. But we play a big part in that within any recruitment process that assessment is a contingent part of. So it's coming one way or another, and we're trying to drive the conversation with our clients around it as best we can at the moment.
Nicola Tatham (15:44)
I think moving back into TA speak, moving away from that sort of more leadership speak. Sometimes showing ROI might focus on efficiency, other times it's more about inclusion or quality. How can TA leaders balance those competing priorities without losing credibility by talking about all of them?
Kraig Payne (16:05)
Well, I don't think you lose credibility as long as you're focusing on the ones that are important to your organisation. Forget changing the wording so much at the moment, but there's probably not a business out there that isn't interested in improving all of them to some degree. Given the chance, why wouldn't you reduce time, improve costs, improve quality, improve experience and increase efficiency? You just would, wouldn't you?
But there's normally two or three that are more prevalent than others, so they naturally get your attention and dictate where most of the effort is expended. With the big three — I used to call it the TA trilemma: time, cost, quality — you kind of can't improve all three massively at the same time. There's always a casualty. If time and cost improve, quality will go down. If quality and time improve, cost will go up, and so on. So there's always a trade-off and there's always a consequence of focusing on one or the other. But I don't think you lose credibility if you're focused on what your organisation needs and you're going after that.
Nicola Tatham (17:15)
Yeah, exactly what I was about to say — you were talking about taking the organisation's key directions and filtering that down. It's factoring that into how you prioritise the triangle and beyond. Looking at what the strategy is and then linking your key metrics to that. That's how your credibility is retained, because you're moving in the right direction. You're going in the same direction as the wider organisation.
Kraig Payne (17:41)
Yeah, exactly.
Nicola Tatham (17:43)
Thank you.
Caroline Fry (17:43)
So I've got one thinking maybe beyond the trilemma. What's something you've learned from working with clients that surprised you? Maybe a way that they thought about value or success that was different from the norm.
Kraig Payne (17:53)
It probably was the first couple of customers that were going down the productivity route. And if I think back, they were probably when I was in the first part of my career working in TA, some of my roles were in manufacturing, FMCG-type businesses. I spent quite a lot of time talking to production teams and manufacturing engineers and supply chain management, Lean Six Sigma specialists, all that kind of stuff.
I used to have a lot of analogies going through my head between supply chain and talent acquisition as processes. You can get quite geeky on it — talking about waste and so on — but there are a lot of similarities. Obviously there's a huge human element with TA, but the actual process side of it is similar. That's where I started to really pick up on the need for productivity over certain metrics that maybe weren’t talking the same language.
So I think some of the early clients or organisations I worked in at the time were talking productivity years ago. As a sector, I think we're catching up to that now and seeing it not just as talk coming out of a Rolls Royce or a Unilever, but also from retailers and tech businesses.
The other surprise is more that it's not the first thing people think about — return on investment. How do I measure? How do I know this is working? I'm going to spend this money, I'm going to embark on this journey, I want to know from day one that the foundations are set. And then in a year or six months or whatever, I can have a knowledge of whether it's going in the right direction or down or sideways.
Nicola Tatham (19:36)
Why do you think that is?
Kraig Payne (19:40)
I think it's a bit of what we've covered. When the house is on fire, it's hard to look at those kinds of things — and sometimes TA is like that. It's so reactive and so up and down. Some of it might be just skill and experience. It's not traditionally been… but TA as a function is evolving pretty rapidly. Ten years ago, it was almost exclusively an admin coordination type function. It's becoming more strategic. The maturity is going up and up and up. And with that comes different pressures and different requirements from leadership teams and CPOs.
If you get the transactional stuff better, you move into a different space, don't you? So I think some of it is just the general maturity curve that TA is on. And some of it is maybe picking up on the learnings from aligned functions. ROI is language that finance understands and talks about. Procurement understands and talks about it. The more collaboratively TA works across functional boundaries internally, the more you're working to these kinds of ideas, and maybe then you start to drive them yourself rather than reacting to them.
Nicola Tatham (20:51)
It's maybe taken us a while to get to the point where we can make that tangible, and we know what those outcomes are that we can and should measure within the context of that as well. Yeah, really interesting.
Right, it's time for a little game now that we call Science or Fiction. We're going to throw a few statements your way. Some are grounded in reality, others not so much. Your job is to tell us which is which and to help us set the record straight. So I will start with the first one, which is: inclusion sells, but time and cost are still the real ROI currency.
Kraig Payne (21:21)
Okay. Fact, absolutely fact. Inclusion’s super important. Well, DE&I — super important, obviously, and it's had huge attention in the last couple of years. But yeah, I would say the main currency is still those two, and still will be for some time, which we've spoken about, haven't we?
Caroline Fry (21:44)
Do you think some of the — not to get political — but some of the real-world events happening at the moment in the space of DE&I are going to have an impact there? Five, ten years ago it was really a hard focus in the world of TA. It felt to me, working in this industry, things have changed recently. There's been de-emphasis across some rather significant world players. What impact do you think that might have?
Kraig Payne (22:08)
My personal opinion, yes, definitely. The shifting landscape in the broader context is having an impact for sure. More generally, I think diversity and inclusion is difficult to measure. It's a different sort of outcome that you're trying to drive.
Cost and time or efficiency are hard data, aren't they? You can grab hold of some stuff and crunch numbers and churn out results. I think a DE&I agenda is harder to meaningfully measure success against because it can be qualitative as much as it is quantitative, in my opinion. It's trickier. But would I say there's a lesser focus internally within most talent teams? No, I can't imagine that, because people are bought into the reason behind DE&I being so important, regardless of who's in whatever position of power.
Nicola Tatham (23:08)
Data speaks for itself, doesn't it? Organisations that have got a bigger focus on DE&I are more likely to be ahead of the game on so many of those metrics that the board might be more interested in.
Kraig Payne (23:10)
Yes. Hopefully the cultural stuff has taken over now, so that even if you can't advertise it to the same degree, it's just culturally embedded in a lot of places. But I suppose we will see the consequence in a couple of years of that.
Caroline Fry (23:36)
Science or fiction: if you can't show value from assessments fast, you're wasting budget.
Kraig Payne (23:41)
Fiction. Yeah, fiction. Particularly with assessments, because there's some stuff you can probably learn quickly, but some of it is slower burn. At the end of the day, a lot of people buy assessments for validity and prediction. Prediction is inherently about the future.
When it comes to assessment validity, it's linked to quality of hire. Quality of hire is a difficult metric to get your head around, and it relies on following those hires through the course of their career, doesn't it? That sort of return you can't possibly know within a couple of months. It does take time. Which, coming back to the ROI thing, needs to be embedded at the beginning and followed through. You can't stop. It needs to be an evergreen kind of initiative.
Nicola Tatham (24:19)
Yeah. Yeah. The next question comes from me: TA leaders love shiny tools more than solid outcomes.
Kraig Payne (24:30)
Am I allowed to say both? Both. I think it depends on the TA leader. I've definitely met TA leaders where, yeah, one shiny tool to the next without really embedding them properly and getting to understand the value. And I know plenty that are the opposite of that, and it is all driven through outcomes. So, yeah, both.
Caroline Fry (24:33)
Absolutely.
Nicola Tatham (24:54)
That's what we're all trying to demonstrate to our customers. Just because something is new and shiny, it doesn't mean that it doesn’t produce a solid outcome. So I think that does support what you're saying around the “both” answer.
Kraig Payne (25:01)
No. Absolutely.
Caroline Fry (25:11)
Okay, next one, science or fiction: finance teams, not TA, are the ones who really decide what ROI looks like.
Kraig Payne (25:18)
Both. I think historically more so — historically fact. Nowadays hopefully more fiction. In another couple of years, hopefully completely fiction. How about that for an answer?
Caroline Fry (25:28)
Yeah, okay, I'll take it. ROI is really complex. We've spoken about it, threaded throughout this, and it looks different in pretty much every organisation. Yeah, I think there are probably some… yeah, both. I buy into your vision, hopefully, with TA teams getting there.
Kraig Payne (25:45)
Fingers crossed. They can, I know they can.
Nicola Tatham (25:49)
Final one: no success metrics equals guaranteed project failure. Science or fiction?
Kraig Payne (25:56)
So I'm going to say science for this one, only because if you don't have metrics and measures, you can't know if something has succeeded or not. So if you can't know if something has succeeded, it is inherently a failure — that would be my argument towards that.
However, if you think about something like a recruitment campaign…
Kraig Payne (26:17)
Success ultimately is hiring the bodies you need in the roles you need when you need them. So that is a success, even if you haven't necessarily done the work we've been talking about in terms of tracking and ROI.
It's almost that might be an initial success that leads to somewhat of a failure that's never really realised because attrition’s through the roof or whatever after 12 months. But yeah, in its truest form, if you can't demonstrate success, how can you say it's anything other than failure?
Nicola Tatham (26:48)
Thank you.
Caroline Fry (26:49)
Okay Kraig, thank you for your insights, and thanks for showing your perspective on many things — ROI, how TA leaders can be strategic with their leadership teams or boards, if they ever get in there. If there's one thing that you want listeners to remember from this episode, what would it be?
Kraig Payne (27:02)
Yeah. The ROI is important. Try and embed it right from the beginning. Don't overcook it. Start simple and set your baseline as quickly as you can. If you don't set your baseline that you're measuring against, you can never really measure return. So definitely set your baseline, definitely get on the front foot with it, and be proactive with it. And it will then inform everything thereafter.
Nicola Tatham (27:51)
So I guess, I mean, I just support what you’ve been saying. It's been great listening to your perspective, Kraig. Just to reiterate what you were saying there about keeping it simple and understanding what your baseline is. And let's hope that this is a real growth industry. Let's keep having those conversations in the roles that we're in, working in partnership with our clients to help them identify what those metrics are.
Finding ways to make them measurable so that we can link them to the processes that we're putting in place for them. Yes, interesting times.
Caroline Fry (28:28)
Thanks, Nick. Yeah, and Kraig, I really liked your thoughts on productivity. I think that's something that could be really engaging to get into. Again, I see the challenges because from the brief conversations we've had about those kinds of measures and getting the data, it's not easy. But it's something to aim for.
I think going beyond that kind of… yeah, what you said about time to hire as well really resonates. Right on time, real time — that make sense, not just a metric for a metric’s sake that you're meeting repeatedly. And I think that goes across everybody who ever has to work to metrics. What are we trying to prove? What are we trying to identify? What outcome can we base off measuring this? I think is really key to me.
Nicola Tatham (29:11)
And that is a really, really good point. That's the metric for the sake of a metric. When we're doing research studies with our own clients and they go, “We've got this metric, throw it into the pot.” It's great, but it's a metric that's got two points on the scale and it's not really relevant to the skills that we're measuring in the assessment.
You might have it, but it's not necessarily useful for the research that we're doing to try and help you prove that this assessment is doing what it's meant to do. That can sometimes look like a fail when you're not seeing the figures that you want to come out. But it's about identifying those metrics upfront that are really important, not just using some data because it happens to be sitting on a database somewhere.
And that's about having these really good conversations with our clients and our partners early on in the process.
Kraig Payne (29:56)
Yeah, absolutely.
Caroline Fry (29:57)
Yeah, all data for data’s sake isn't really helpful if you don't know what you're measuring or why you're measuring it, and what you're going to do with it.
Yeah. Okay, great. Well, thanks for hanging out with us on The Score, Kraig, and to anyone listening, you're welcome. If you enjoyed this conversation on ROI and the value of assessments, don't miss what's coming next. New episodes drop every two weeks on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your talent acquisition insights.
Kraig Payne (30:08)
Thank you very much for having me.
Measuring return on investment in recruitment isn’t easy. Most talent acquisition leaders know that assessments should improve hiring, but proving it with numbers is where things get tricky. In this episode of The Score, Nicola Tatham, Caroline Fry, and Kraig Payne discussed why ROI matters, where organisations go wrong, and how TA teams can make it work in the real world.
The biggest reason ROI projects fail is that they forget the baseline. If you don’t measure where you started, you can’t show progress. Too often, ROI gets bolted on at the end, when stakeholders ask for evidence. By then, it’s too late.
The simple fix is to build ROI into the project from day one. Before launching an assessment, define what you’re measuring and capture the starting point. Whether it’s cost per hire, time taken, or attrition, you need that “before picture” to prove the “after.”
Time-to-hire has been the darling of recruitment metrics for years, but it can be misleading. Filling a role quickly doesn’t always mean filling it well. It can sometimes be a vanity metric - something that looks good on paper but tells you very little about the quality of the hire.
A better question is: did we hire on time? In other words, did the person join when the business needed them, and are they able to deliver value once they arrive? Shaving a week off the process doesn’t count if the wrong candidate ends up in the job.
Every TA leader knows the “trilemma”: you can cut costs, reduce time, or improve quality, but you can’t maximise all three. Something has to give.
The takeaway here is to be deliberate. If cost is the biggest pain point, focus on reducing agency spend. If quality is critical, prioritise predictive assessments that improve long-term fit. The trick is to be clear about which lever matters most to the business and measure ROI against that priority.
Looking ahead, productivity is the metric to watch. Cost and speed will always matter, but leadership teams care most about output: are new hires helping the business perform better?
That’s harder to measure, but it’s where assessments can really prove their value. A fair, predictive assessment doesn’t just fill roles, it should lead to people who stay longer, perform better, and contribute more. Linking hiring decisions to productivity moves TA leaders out of the operational weeds and into conversations that matter at board level.
Diversity and fairness are not always easy to track with neat numbers, but they still matter. Inclusive assessments help broaden the talent pool and improve fairness in decision-making. Even if the ROI isn’t a simple cost saving, the cultural and reputational benefits are significant. TA leaders should resist the temptation to leave DEI out of ROI conversations just because it’s not as straightforward to measure.
The temptation is to over-engineer ROI projects with complex models and endless spreadsheets. Kraig’s advice was to start small and keep it simple. If you can show clear improvement on one or two agreed measures, you’ve already made the business case.
ROI in assessments doesn’t have to be a mystery. By setting a baseline, focusing on outcomes that matter, and speaking the language of productivity rather than just process efficiency, TA leaders can finally prove the value of what they do.
Assessments are more than a tick-box exercise, they’re a way to connect hiring decisions with long-term business success. And that’s a story every leadership team wants to hear.
Sova is a talent assessment platform that provides the right tools to evaluate candidates faster, fairer and more accurately than ever.
.webp)
.webp)
.webp)
