Hiring for potential: a fairer, faster way to find the right people

Hiring for potential means selecting candidates on what they are capable of learning and doing, measured directly, rather than on the jobs they have already held. It is a different answer to the question every recruiter faces: of all these applicants, who will actually succeed in this role?

Most hiring still relies on resumes, and resumes answer a narrow question. They tell you where someone has worked and what titles they have held. They say much less about how that person will handle work they have never seen, or whether they will still be doing well in the role three years from now.

This post draws on a recent TMA Performance webinar with Edward Overzee Gallas, CEO of BrainsFirst, a TMA Group company that measures cognitive potential with short, game-based assessments grounded in neuroscience. It covers three things: why hiring for potential is a stronger long-term strategy than hiring for experience alone, how it reduces bias, and how it solves the problem recruiters now face every day, which is far more applications than anyone can read.

Why recruiters can’t keep up with applicant volume

Recruiters are screening more applications with fewer people, and AI has made the applications harder to tell apart. Application volumes have climbed sharply over the past few years while talent acquisition teams have shrunk. A large share of candidates now use AI tools to write and tailor their resumes, so the documents in an applicant tracking system are more polished and more keyword-aligned than they used to be, and less revealing of the person behind them.

That creates two problems at once.

The first is capacity. When one opening draws hundreds or thousands of applications, nobody can read each one carefully. Screening turns into pattern matching: scanning for the right employer names, degrees, and years of tenure.

The second is signal. Resume screening was never a strong predictor of how someone performs on the job, and a resume an AI helped write tells you even less. Questionnaires and self-report assessments have the same weakness, since candidates can use the same tools to produce the answers an employer wants to see.

The result is a hiring funnel that is expensive to run and unreliable at the top. Strong candidates get filtered out because their background looks unconventional, and weaker candidates move forward because their paperwork looks right. Hiring for potential addresses both problems by replacing the resume as the first filter with an objective measure that every candidate completes on the same terms and that cannot be gamed.

What is hiring for potential?

Hiring for potential is the practice of assessing a candidate’s learning capacity, the natural ability to take in information, process it, and act on it toward a goal, and matching that capacity to what a role demands. Neuroscience describes this capacity through the brain’s executive functions: working memory, sustained concentration, divided attention, task switching, anticipation, and the trade-off between speed and precision. Every job draws on these functions, and the particular mix a person has shapes which kinds of work will come naturally and which will cost more effort.

Two properties make executive functions useful for hiring.

They are stable. The brain keeps developing through adolescence, but from roughly age 18 these capacities settle. A measurement taken once stays valid for years.

They can be measured without asking the candidate to describe themselves. BrainsFirst began in professional soccer, where clubs had data on nearly every physical attribute of young players but no reliable way to measure the one that most separates elite performers: how early they see the play developing and how quickly they anticipate it. Early research used EEG and lab equipment. The company translated those measurements into four short games, played remotely in about 45 minutes, that it calls the NeurOlympics.

How the games work

The games measure what a person can do rather than what they report about themselves. There are no questionnaires and no socially desirable answers. Each game adapts to the player and gets progressively harder, and the only instruction that matters is to play well rested and without distraction.

There is also no right or wrong profile. High working memory is an asset in some roles and irrelevant in others. The ability to hold concentration for hours is essential for an air traffic controller and far less important for a consultant who switches context all day. Because each person is compared with relevant peers rather than against a single standard, the output is a picture of fit, not a ranking of raw ability.

That is what makes hiring for potential a distinct strategy. A recruiter can assess a 22-year-old graduate with no work history on the same footing as a 15-year veteran, and see which of the two is better suited to the demands of the role in front of them.

How hiring for potential reduces bias

Hiring for potential reduces bias by removing the proxies that let it into the first stage of selection. Most bias in hiring enters through shortcuts. A prestigious employer stands in for competence. An uninterrupted career stands in for commitment. A particular degree, a familiar name, or fluent writing in the hiring manager’s first language becomes a stand-in for judgments the screener has no time to make directly. None of these proxies measures the work, and each one favors candidates who already had access to opportunity.

A direct measure of potential has none of those shortcuts in it. A game that tests working memory does not know where the candidate went to school. It depends very little on prior knowledge or language ability, so a candidate who is new to the country or the industry is not penalized for vocabulary. It cannot be flattered with a socially desirable answer, because there are no questions to answer. And every applicant plays the same four games under the same instructions, so the comparison is made on identical terms.

Independent audits

Fairness also has to be tested, and BrainsFirst has put its assessments through two external reviews. The first is an Impact Assessment for Human Rights and Algorithms, which examines what data enters the system, how it is processed, and how match scores are produced, with specific attention to whether any group receives systematically false positive or negative results. The second is an independent bias audit under New York City’s Local Law 144, which governs automated employment decision tools. For organizations hiring in the United States, that audit trail gives HR teams documented evidence that the tool treats candidates equitably and a defensible basis for using it.

Reducing bias is also a sourcing benefit. When the first filter stops rewarding pedigree, the pool that reaches a recruiter’s desk is more varied in background, more representative of the labor market, and better matched to the actual demands of the job.

Why hiring for potential is a better long-term strategy

Experience-based hiring optimizes for day one. Hiring for potential optimizes for the years after it, and the difference shows up in retention, development, and how easily an organization can adapt.

Retention and wellbeing

The core idea in BrainsFirst’s model is distance. Every role has a cognitive profile, and so does every person. The closer the two sit, the less energy it costs that person to do what the role requires. When the distance is large, the work is still possible, but it drains people, and over time that drain shows up as burnout and turnover.

The webinar gave an example. A company hired a group of senior engineers for their technical depth, then expected them to grow into client-facing, sales-oriented work as they advanced. The cognitive gap between the two kinds of work was too wide, and most of the group eventually left. Their technical skills were real. The mismatch was with where the career path led.

Development

A potential measurement does not expire when the hiring decision is made. The same data that screened a candidate can inform onboarding, guide a manager’s coaching, and feed performance development. Every candidate also receives a personalized report with practical advice, whatever the hiring outcome. Someone who struggles to concentrate in an open office learns that about themselves and gets concrete strategies for managing it.

Adaptability and internal mobility

Organizations that know the cognitive profiles of their workforce can plan around them. BrainsFirst calls this flipping the funnel: instead of starting from a job description and searching for people who fit it, start from what each person is equipped to learn and match them to the roles where that capacity will be used.

Deloitte does this at scale, using cognition-based profiles across its workforce to route applicants to better-fitting roles, inform team composition, and plan for the capabilities it will need in coming years. Air traffic control in the Netherlands uses the same assessment as the first step in a selection process that also includes simulations and interviews. It screens roughly 4,000 applicants a year before committing to a two-year training program that costs about 2 million per trainee, so filtering early on the ability to sustain concentration and precision matters a great deal.

In each case the strategic value is the same. A hire made on potential is one the organization can keep developing, redeploying, and promoting. That is a better return than a hire who fits the job as it was written on the day the requisition opened.

How hiring for potential works in practice

The assessment sits at the top of the funnel. Candidates complete it remotely as the first step of the application, before anyone reviews a resume, so the people who reach a recruiter already fit the work. Everything after that stays human: the conversations, the interviews, the judgment calls. The webinar was explicit that AI should not run recruitment end to end. Its job is to make the early filter objective and the later conversations better informed.

The workflow has four steps.

1. Define the target role. The recruiter enters a job title and a short description. The platform maps it to established skills frameworks (O*NET, ESCO, and Singapore’s skills taxonomy) and proposes the key cognitive requirements. The recruiter adjusts those for their own context, then ranks the three that matter most. That ranking is a deliberate constraint. The brain cannot be both the fastest and the most precise, so the role profile has to reflect real trade-offs, and the platform flags combinations that are unrealistic.
2. Invite candidates to play. Applicants receive a link to the four games and complete them on their own schedule. Results can live in the BrainsFirst platform or flow into the organization’s existing ATS or core HR system.
3. Review the match. The recruiter sees the candidate’s profile plotted against the target role and against other roles in the organization. Proximity indicates fit. Where a candidate is a poor match for the role they applied for but a strong match for another, the organization can redirect them instead of rejecting them. Deloitte handles this with a short note to the applicant explaining the better fit and offering a conversation.
4. Use the insight downstream. Because the measurement is stable, it carries into onboarding, coaching, and development without being repeated. Organizations that want more precision than the standard skills-based profiles can assess people already performing well in a role and build data-driven profiles from their own population, as Deloitte has done.

What implementation takes

Standard role profiles can be in use within a day, and a recruiter needs about two hours of training to read and interpret results correctly. Most organizations start with a pilot on one high-volume role, then review after about three months to see what the data shows and decide where to expand.

Where cognitive potential fits with TMA Talents

Cognitive potential is one half of a fuller picture of a person. TMA Talents captures what drives someone: their motivations, preferences, and natural behavioral tendencies. BrainsFirst captures what the brain can do. Together they describe both the will and the capacity behind performance, which gives organizations a better basis for decisions in hiring, development, and team design.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between hiring for potential and hiring for experience?

Hiring for experience selects on what a candidate has already done, usually read from a resume. Hiring for potential selects on what a candidate is capable of learning and doing, measured directly through their cognitive capacities, and matches that to what the role requires.

Can a cognitive assessment replace interviews?

No. It replaces the resume as the first filter so that recruiters spend their time on candidates who already fit. Interviews, simulations, and reference checks continue as before, with the added benefit that the recruiter goes into them with a clearer picture of the candidate.

How long does the BrainsFirst assessment take?

The four games take about 45 minutes in total and are played remotely. Because the games adapt to the player, strong performers may take longer.

Is a game-based cognitive assessment fair?

It is designed to be, and it has been tested. The assessment has no questionnaires, so it cannot be gamed with socially desirable answers, and it depends very little on language or prior knowledge. BrainsFirst’s assessments have passed an Impact Assessment for Human Rights and Algorithms and an independent bias audit under New York City’s Local Law 144.

Does the assessment need to be repeated?

Usually not. Executive functions are stable from about age 18, so a single measurement remains valid for years and can be reused for onboarding, development, and internal mobility.