As of 13 August 2026, AI can create a take-home assessment for candidates.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open the current job description and gather the role level, essential skills, realistic work context, candidate time limit, submission format and permitted resources.
   2. Paste those details into the prompt, including the skills the assessment must not test and any known accessibility requirements.
   3. Ask the chatbot to create the candidate brief, rubric, model answer outline, follow-up questions and pilot checklist in one response.
   4. Copy the draft into your recruitment documents and replace every assumption with facts from the role, team and actual work.
   5. Ask a colleague who understands the role to complete the assessment within the stated time, then compare their experience and answer against the drafted rubric.
   6. Check each criterion for direct relevance to the job, remove unnecessary barriers, add reasonable adjustment instructions and confirm that no confidential or protected information is requested.
   7. Send the final brief and scoring guide to the assessors, keeping the candidate version separate from the internal marking materials.

   Prompt

   Create a take-home assessment for the role described below.
   
   Role and level: [ROLE AND LEVEL]
   Job description: [PASTE JOB DESCRIPTION]
   Core skills the assessment must test: [LIST THE SKILLS]
   Skills the assessment must not test: [LIST THEM]
   Realistic work context: [DESCRIBE THE BUSINESS SITUATION]
   Candidate experience level: [LEVEL]
   Maximum candidate time: [TIME LIMIT]
   Submission format: [FORMAT]
   Resources candidates may use: [LIST THEM]
   Resources candidates must not use: [LIST THEM]
   Assessment stage: [STAGE IN THE HIRING PROCESS]
   
   Produce:
   1. A clear candidate brief with the objective, scenario, task, deliverables, time limit, permitted resources and submission instructions.
   2. An assessor scoring rubric with observable criteria, scoring descriptions and weighting. Keep every criterion directly related to the listed skills.
   3. A model answer outline showing what strong, adequate and weak evidence looks like. Do not create a single supposedly perfect answer where reasonable alternatives could be valid.
   4. A short list of follow-up interview questions that test whether the candidate understands and owns their submission.
   5. An accessibility and fairness check covering unnecessary time pressure, language demands, disability adjustments, access to tools and any requirement unrelated to the job.
   6. A pilot checklist for a colleague to complete before the assessment is sent to candidates.
   
   Use plain British English. Do not require personal, protected or irrelevant information. Do not use confidential company information in the exercise. State any assumption separately. Do not claim that the assessment predicts job performance unless evidence is supplied. Flag decisions that require human judgement rather than presenting them as settled. Make the exercise realistic but possible within the stated time.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.