How Doctors Without Borders Canada achieved 86% hiring effectiveness using video interviews and skills assessments with Testlify

The hardest part of hiring for MSF was never finding people who wanted the job

Doctors Without Borders Canada (MSF) is the Canadian arm of the international humanitarian organization that delivers medical care in crisis zones across the world. When the people you hire go to work in conflict zones and resource-limited environments, getting the hiring decision wrong carries consequences that go well beyond a bad quarter.

Doctors Without Borders attracts candidates who are motivated by the mission. The harder problem was identifying, from a pool of motivated applicants, who could actually perform under the conditions MSF operates in. Fieldwork for a humanitarian organization means working in resource-limited environments, across cultural and language barriers, under pressure, often far from any institutional support. The skills that predict success there, adaptability, resilience, emotional intelligence, and cultural sensitivity, do not show up on a resume.

 

MSF Canada’s existing hiring process relied on traditional methods that were not designed to assess any of those qualities. Phone screens and interviews gave the team a surface-level read on candidates. There was no structured way to evaluate how someone made decisions under pressure, how they communicated across cultural differences, or whether they had the interpersonal resilience the work demanded. The organization was making high-stakes hiring decisions without the tools to make them well.

 

For an NGO operating under budget constraints and grant dependencies, a mis-hire was costly in more ways than one. The time and resources spent onboarding someone who was not prepared for the realities of the role set back both the team and the mission.

 

“We knew within weeks of deployment whether someone was truly prepared for this work. The problem was that our hiring process gave us no way to know that before we hired them.”

Hiring Manager, MSF Canada

How Testlify was implemented

Real-world scenarios. Video responses. A clearer read on who was actually ready

MSF Canada used Testlify to build assessments specifically for non-technical roles. Rather than generic personality tests, the team designed scenario-based questions drawn from the actual challenges fieldworkers face. Candidates were asked to work through situations that tested decision-making under pressure, interpersonal judgment in cross-cultural contexts, and problem-solving with limited resources. The scenarios gave the hiring team a much clearer signal on readiness than any interview question could.

 

Testlify’s video interview feature added a second layer of evaluation. Candidates recorded responses to set questions, allowing the team to assess communication style, composure, and cultural awareness before any live interview time was invested. Hiring managers reviewed video responses alongside assessment scores, giving them a fuller picture of each candidate early in the process.

 

Detailed performance reports consolidated findings from both the assessments and video responses, enabling data-backed decisions and reducing the subjectivity that had previously made it difficult to compare candidates consistently.

 

“The scenarios we built with Testlify gave us insight we had never had before. We could see how candidates thought through difficult situations before we ever got on a call with them.”

 

Hiring Manager, MSF Canada