Why Organisations Like Rituals, EY & ASICS Are Replacing Traditional Assessments

Game-based hiring is going through a real shift at the enterprise level. For years, organisations relied on tools like personality questionnaires and classic cognitive tests to evaluate candidates. These formats still serve a purpose, but many enterprise companies are now running into their limitations: poor completion rates, inconsistent predictive value, vulnerability to AI, and experiences that don’t always feel inclusive or accessible.

As a game-based assessment platform, we at Equalture have seen this shift first-hand. Companies across industries, from retail brands like Rituals and Hunkemöller, to professional firms like EY, customer-facing organisations like VodafoneZiggo, and global sports brands like ASICS, have moved to game-based hiring at the enterprise level. And because all of these clients use Equalture as a pre-screening step, we’ve learned a great deal about what they value and why this shift keeps happening.

1. A More Comfortable & Enjoyable Candidate Experience

Candidate experience isn’t a “nice-to-have” anymore at the enterprise level. It’s a business variable A poor, outdated, or overly burdensome assessment can cost you high-quality applicants long before you’ve had a chance to meet them, especially at the pre-screening stage, where all of Equalture’s enterprise clients place the assessment.

Traditional assessments often create exactly that experience:

• long personality questionnaires
• abstract cognitive tests
• repetitive or tedious tasks that don’t feel connected to the job

In contrast, game-based assessments offer candidates a format that feels:

• simple
• intuitive
• modern
• mobile-friendly
• and even enjoyable

And the enterprise data backs it up. EY sees a 4.22/5 candidate experience rating, despite requiring every candidate to complete the assessment before the interview. ASICS sees an even higher 4.53/5 across roles from trainee to senior executive.

Rituals sees a similarly strong 4.63/5, despite placing the games right at the start of the funnel, a stage where satisfaction typically drops fastest. VodafoneZiggo sees comparable results in its customer-facing hires. A great experience at the pre-screening stage compounds: more applicants complete the process, more talent enters the pipeline, and the employer brand benefits visibly.

2. Ideal for High-Volume Hiring: Pre-Screen Without Dropoff, With Full Automation

This point is simple, and crucial. Game-based assessments work well at enterprise scale precisely because they’re low-barrier, engaging, and quick, which means they can sit at the very start of a high-volume hiring funnel without causing drop-off.

That’s exactly why Rituals, VodafoneZiggo, and Hunkemöller, all high-volume hirers, use Equalture for pre-screening.

The value comes from two combined effects:

1. Low dropoff → suitable for pre-screening

More than 30,000 candidates have gone through Rituals‘ redesigned hiring flow, with over 80% completing the assessment on mobile, leading to more than 1,600 hires so far. A long or tedious assessment would have caused drop-off at this stage, making it unusable for pre-screening.

2. Automated workflow decisions → essential for efficiency

Equalture delivers a high/medium/low fit score for every applicant. These scores allow companies to automatically:

• fast-track high-fit applicants
• progress medium-fit applicants to hiring manager review
• reject low-fit applicants automatically

This automation is essential when an organisation like Rituals is processing close to one million applications a year to make around 18,000 hires. Without it, recruiters would need to manually review everything, which simply doesn’t scale.

Together, low-friction candidate experience and automated decision-making create the efficiency high-volume teams absolutely require.

This isn’t just a scoring shortcut, either. Each fit score is measured against a Success Model built from that organisation’s own top performers via Equalture’s Success DNA Engine™, not a generic industry benchmark. A competitor can copy the claim “we score candidates automatically”. They can’t copy the model built from a client’s own workforce data.

3. Resistant to AI Manipulation & Training

The rise of generative AI has created new challenges for traditional assessments, particularly cognitive tests and questionnaire-based formats. Candidates can:

• use AI to land on the right answer to multiple-choice questions, or to help formulate answers
• train on the same cognitive test repeatedly until scores improve, without any real change in ability

None of this reflects genuine ability, but it can significantly inflate results. This is a concern we hear directly from EY, where cognitive ability plays a critical role in hiring, and where the move away from traditional testing was driven partly by exactly this risk.

Game-based assessments offer a more reliable alternative because they measure:

• real-time behavioural patterns
• split-second decision-making
• dynamic cognitive processing
• micro-behaviours that unfold within milliseconds

These signals can’t meaningfully be outsourced to AI, nor “memorised” through repetition. For enterprise clients focused on validity and integrity, that reliability is a major advantage.

4. Resistant to Social Desirability & Self-Reporting Bias

Many traditional personality or behavioural assessments rely on self-reporting:

• Personality questionnaires ask candidates to describe themselves
• Motivational questionnaires rely on self-perception
• Open questions invite coached or polished responses

These formats are highly susceptible to social desirability bias: the tendency to answer in a way that looks good rather than reflects reality.

Game-based assessments reduce self-reporting bias because they measure:

• how candidates act
• how they think through problems
• how they respond under time or information pressure
• how they prioritise, plan, and adapt

This gives enterprise hiring teams a more genuine view of a candidate’s cognitive and behavioural tendencies, without relying on self-description.

5. A More Inclusive Assessment Method

This was one of the strongest, most unanimous reasons across every enterprise client we spoke to.

Traditional assessments can unintentionally disadvantage candidates based on:

• age (certain formats favour younger digital-natives or penalise older workers)
• gender (confidence-based tasks often favour men)
• ethnicity (language-heavy or culturally biased items introduce inequity)
• neurodiversity (some formats penalise autistic or ADHD candidates)

These biases rarely show up explicitly, but they accumulate in outcomes.

Game-based assessments reduce these effects because they:

• avoid cultural interpretation
• minimise reliance on confidence or presentation
• reduce time-pressure stress where irrelevant

ASICS’s data makes this concrete: neurodivergent candidates reported no accessibility barriers, and the platform’s highest-rated group was its most senior candidates, not its youngest, directly challenging the assumption that game-based formats only appeal to digital natives.

Enterprise Results at a Glance