Cost of a Bad Hire
A mediocre senior hire costs six to nine months of salary. A mediocre hire in a high-leverage role reshapes culture, forecast, and reputation. Structured assessment reduces mis-hire risk.
Psychometric assessment for high-stakes roles
Interviews reward fluency; performance requires character. Mint Psychometrics identifies the quiet behavioural markers that actually forecast success in leadership and sales roles.
Sample output — ELA
Illustrative example. Two independent methods — an online form and a structured verbal assessment — are weighted evenly, then reviewed by a person before anything is released.
Why Mint Psychometrics
A mediocre senior hire costs six to nine months of salary. A mediocre hire in a high-leverage role reshapes culture, forecast, and reputation. Structured assessment reduces mis-hire risk.
These decisions shape real lives — the candidate, their family, and the team they join. When relocation, stability or livelihood is on the line, employers have a duty to remove as much uncertainty as the process allows. Better evidence is part of that duty.
Interviews reward fluency—a performance skill distributed unevenly. Unexamined intuition is the enemy. We give your judgement something honest to argue with.
Our Two Assessments
For Senior Leadership Appointments
A dual-method assessment (online + structured verbal interview) designed for senior director, VP, SVP, and C-suite roles. Measures leadership capability, judgement quality, and behavioural risk across six core expectations.
Learn More About ELAFor Sales Volume Hiring & Team Design
A fully online assessment (40 minutes) designed for sales team hiring and design. Measures eight sales dimensions, identifies quiet behavioural markers of sales success, and supports both individual and cohort hiring.
Learn More About STAHow We're Different
For ELA, we combine online scenarios with a structured verbal interview. Both are scored independently and weighted equally. Where they diverge, that divergence itself is reported—it's a signal, not noise.
Every result carries consistency, effort, and pattern checks. You're told how much confidence a result deserves before you're told what it says. No automated decisions.
AI-assisted scoring produces a draft. Nothing reaches a decision-maker until a trained reviewer has confirmed or overridden it, with a recorded rationale.
Polish, pace, and pedigree are easy to notice and weakly predictive. We measure the quiet signals with long shadows: trade-off behaviour, response to refusal, attention to others, self-correction.
Why this matters
Companies model pricing to two decimal places and choose leaders on a feeling. The asymmetry is remarkable: the decision with the longest consequences is often the one made with the least structured evidence.
6–9 months of salary
The commonly cited cost of replacing a senior hire
Search fees are the visible part. The invisible part is the quarter that stalls, the team that waits, and the decisions nobody makes while the seat is warm but not working.
Under 30 minutes
How long most senior interview judgements actually take to form
The rest of the conversation is usually spent gathering evidence for a conclusion already reached. Confident, coherent, and frequently wrong.
One decision, years of consequence
Why leadership and sales hires deserve better evidence
A mediocre hire in a quiet role costs money. A mediocre hire in a role with leverage reshapes culture, forecast and reputation.
Our view
Interviews reward fluency. Fluency is a performance skill, and performance skills are distributed unevenly across people who would do the job brilliantly. Structured assessment does not replace your judgement — it gives your judgement something honest to argue with.
"The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea."
Two candidates can succeed in the same role for entirely different reasons. Good assessment tells you which reasons each one has, not which one is generically better.
Polish, pace and pedigree are easy to notice and weakly predictive. What a person does with a trade-off, how they describe someone who disappointed them, whether they correct themselves unprompted — these are quiet signals with long shadows.
We do not ask you to switch instinct off. We ask you to hold it next to structured evidence collected the same way for every candidate, so the two can argue in public rather than in private.
Anyone can claim resilience. Far fewer can demonstrate it while ranking six imperfect options against a deadline. Our assessments put people in situations and read what they do.
Predictive markers
A marker is a behaviour that is cheap to observe and expensive to fake. Each of our assessments is engineered to surface several of them, from more than one direction, so a single lucky answer cannot carry a profile.
| Marker | What it reads | What it tends to predict |
|---|---|---|
| Trade-off behaviour | What a person gives up when they cannot have everything. | Prioritisation quality in the first ninety days. |
| Response to refusal | How quickly momentum returns after a firm no. | Pipeline persistence and quota consistency. |
| Attention to other people | Whether individuals are described in specifics or in types. | Retention and development of a team. |
| Self-correction | Whether a person names their own error before being asked. | Coachability and governance risk. |
Sample output — STA
Illustrative example. Forty minutes online, eight dimensions, three risk sub-indices and a validity layer that tells you how much confidence the pattern deserves.
The assessments
ELA · selection, succession and development
A 50–60 minute online form of judgement scenarios, forced-choice blocks, trade-off rankings, written responses and risk indicators, combined with a structured verbal assessment. Both strands are scored against six defined leadership expectations and weighted evenly.
Vision and strategy
Predicts whether a leader can hold a direction long enough for other people to follow it.
Individualised perception
Leaders who see people as individuals rather than types retain and grow them. It is the single most reliable early marker of team stability.
Decision-making under ambiguity
Senior work is a series of decisions with missing information. Speed alone is not a virtue; reversibility awareness is.
Accountability and courage
Distinguishes leaders who surface bad news early from those who manage upwards until the problem is unfixable.
Talent focus and investment
Shows whether a leader builds successors or dependants — the difference between a function and a bottleneck.
Motivation and intensity
Explains what a person is actually running towards, which predicts how long they stay and what they will trade for it.
STA · volume hiring and sales team design
A fully online 40 minute assessment across eight sales dimensions, three risk sub-indices and a validity layer. Suited to volume pipelines: candidates can pause and return, written answers are AI-scored and then reviewed by a person, and reports export as a branded PDF.
Commercial curiosity
The habit of asking one more question before pitching. It separates consultative sellers from catalogue readers.
Resilience under refusal
Sales is refusal management. How quickly momentum returns after a firm no predicts quota consistency more than charm does.
Achievement drive
Internal standard-setting, measured through behaviour rather than claims about being competitive.
Process discipline
Forecast accuracy lives here. Strong drive with weak discipline produces exciting quarters and unreliable years.
Relationship depth
Whether accounts are grown or merely held, and how a seller behaves when the relationship stops being easy.
Integrity in selling
The commitments made to win a deal are the commitments someone else has to keep. This is a risk marker as much as a talent one.
Rigour and governance
For ELA, an online form and a structured verbal assessment are scored separately and weighted 50/50. Where the two disagree, the divergence itself is reported rather than averaged away.
Every sitting carries consistency, effort and pattern checks. You are told how much confidence a result deserves before you are told what it says.
AI-assisted scoring produces a draft. Nothing reaches a decision-maker until a trained reviewer has confirmed or overridden it, with a recorded rationale.
Our tools never accept or reject anyone. They give structured evidence to the people who are accountable for the decision.
Defined measurement frameworks, consistent scoring rules, reasonable adjustments, audit trails on every access, and data held per organisation in isolation.
Anonymised cross-organisation cohorts give context for a score, with small cohorts suppressed so nobody can be identified.
More detail on design principles, fairness and adjustments is in our approach to fair assessment.
Contact
Send a short note about the roles you are filling and what keeps going wrong. We will reply with a view on whether assessment helps, an example report, and what a pilot would look like.