Step 1: Define what a great hire looks like in your firm
The build starts with a working session. We sit down with you and surface the signals that genuinely predict success in your environment. We map the role as it is actually performed, especially during the first 6-12 months.
Together, we work through questions such as:
- Business objective. Where will the simulation sit in your hiring process, and what decision should it help you make?
- Critical moments. What are the high-stakes situations junior hires face early in the role? Which moments separate strong performers from the rest?
- Real workflow. What work should candidates complete individually, what requires team collaboration, and where do they need to influence or negotiate across teams?
- Performance gaps. Where do mis-hires usually struggle - technical execution, attention to detail, prioritisation, communication, client handling, or responding to feedback?
- Non-negotiable skills. Which 5-7 behaviours genuinely improve outcomes? We deliberately avoid the long competency lists nobody reads.
- Pressure and complexity. What makes the role difficult in practice - incomplete information, changing priorities, tight deadlines, competing stakeholders, or compliance constraints?
- Candidate experience. What should candidates learn about the role and your firm while completing the assessment? What prior knowledge can reasonably be expected, and what adjustments or alternative formats may be needed?
- Assessment outputs. What evidence will recruiters and hiring managers need afterward - a ranked shortlist, competency breakdown, risk flags, interview questions, or a simple progression recommendation?
What this surfaces is specific. In one session, a managing director told us the analysts who fail are not the ones who cannot model - they are the ones who do not accurately communicate and lack attention to detail. That single sentence became a scored moment: the scenario now puts every candidate in front of that pushback and measures what they do.
The outcome is a clear, shared, written view of the metrics and behaviours to measure. It removes ambiguity from the selection process before anything gets built - and it becomes the backbone of the assessment: it dictates what goes into the simulation and what gets scored. The evidence base for which behaviours predict early-career performance sits on our assessment science page.
Step 2: Co-design a scenario that mirrors your work
Once we know what to measure, we co-design the simulation around your real work. We translate your brief into a measurable, candidate-friendly experience that includes the pressures of reality: limited time, incomplete data, and real challenges and tasks.
Together we define the assessment duration:
| Lightweight build (~60 mins) | Deeper build (90-150 mins) |
|---|
Best for | Large-scale attraction and early pre-screening | High-precision, final-stage selection |
What it measures | Analytical work, prioritisation, written communication, core collaboration | Adds live negotiation, conflict handling and resilience under sustained pressure |
What it replaces | CV screens and first-round interviews | The traditional assessment centre - with far less logistics |
You decide how involved you want to be. Some teams co-write the content line by line, while others prefer to review drafts and flag anything that feels off. Both approaches work. It is also normal for your priorities and requirements to evolve during the process.
Step 3: Launch, read the data, sharpen it
When you launch, we manage the logistics and technical support end to end. How candidates enter the simulation depends on how you are using it:
University outreach campaigns. If you want to attract students from specific universities, we can activate our university network, promote the opportunity, and build interest around a series of simulation events. Students register for the dates that suit them, giving you a broader, more relevant pool without your team having to manage the outreach.
Your own candidate outreach. If you prefer to run the campaign through your own channels, we help you create a branded registration page explaining the opportunity, the available simulation dates, and what candidates should expect. You promote the page through your universities, talent communities, social channels, or existing applicant pool, while we manage registrations and access.
Late-stage assessment. If the simulation is being used as a virtual assessment centre or later-stage hiring exercise, there is no need for an open registration campaign. The shortlisted candidates can be added directly to the platform and given access to complete the simulation on the date and time you select.
Once the simulation runs, what comes back to you is actionable data:
- Immediate shortlists. Clear rankings based on the priority competencies you defined in step one.
- Readable profiles. A concise view of each candidate's strengths and likely ramp-up needs - written for hiring managers, not data scientists.
- Cohort insights. Patterns on where candidates typically struggle and which tasks best differentiate high performers.
That last output is what makes the assessment better every iteration. If the data shows nearly everyone passed the modelling task while the client-pushback moment split the field cleanly, you now know one task is not earning its place and the other is. Next cycle, cut one and deepen the other - at configuration cost, not rebuild cost.
What the three steps ask of your team
Step | What happens | Minimum involvement | Typical timing |
|---|
1. Define | Working session surfaces the 5-7 behaviours that predict success in your roles | One session with hiring managers; sign off the metrics | Week 1 |
2. Co-design | We map your workflows, documents and decision points into scenario and scoring | 1-2 sessions plus draft reviews | Weeks 1-3 |
3. Launch | We run delivery, support and scoring; shortlist and cohort report delivered | Attend the debrief | From week 3-4 |
The impact at scale
If you are hiring 100 graduates, using the simulation as a pre-screen can cut first-round interviews by around 90% - saving your team 200-300 interview hours and reducing early attrition, which pays for the build several times over in the first cycle. In our engagements we have seen exactly this pattern at smaller scale too: a boutique moving first-round screening into a bespoke simulation dropped from roughly 22 first-round interviews per hire to 2-3, with the interviews that remained finally focused on fit and motivation - because capability was already evidenced.
Where the simulation fits your talent pipeline
The engine is flexible: we adjust length and depth to match your capacity and hiring stage.
- Attraction and early engagement. Run a 60-90 minute simulation as a flagship event to pre-qualify large student populations. Candidates "step into the job" first; you fast-track the top 1-10% and eliminate the manual sifting of applications. At full scale, this is what a branded campus recruitment campaign does across your target universities - and if you would rather start from candidates already assessed, that is the pre-screened talent pool.
- High-precision final review. Use a deeper, multi-part scenario for final selection. Your team can review the structured reports afterwards, or join live to observe and interact with candidates as they work. You get the behavioural depth of an assessment centre with a fraction of the logistics.
Start with the working session
Book a short call and we will run a compressed version of step one on one of your roles - the critical moments, the failure modes, and the 5-7 behaviours worth scoring. You will know within an hour whether this fits your hiring.
Explore custom assessments
Questions? Contact us or email info@finsimco.com. To see what happens inside a session, see how our simulations work.