How Group Bayport cut phone interview time by 52% and improved hiring effectiveness by 86% with skills-based assessments

Resumes told the team what candidates had done. Not whether they could do the job.

Group Bayport is a printing and branded merchandise company operating across six countries with over 1,450 employees. The business serves a diverse customer base and moves quickly. The team that makes that possible needs to be collaborative and adaptable, qualities that are easy to claim on a resume and hard to verify through one.

As the company grew and opened roles across multiple regions simultaneously, the hiring process became a bottleneck. Recruiters were working through large pools of applicants using resume screening and phone interviews, neither of which gave them reliable signals on practical skills or cultural fit. Screening consumed significant time. Decisions were made on incomplete information. The HR team was spending most of its bandwidth on early-stage filtering that wasn’t producing confident outcomes.

For a company competing across six countries and building teams that need to operate well together, a process that could not assess fit before the interview stage was a problem that compounded with every new hire.

“We were spending hours sifting through applications without a reliable way to know whether someone could actually do the work or thrive in our environment.”

Talent Team, Group Bayport

How Testlify was implemented

Practical skills and cultural fit assessed before a recruiter gets involved.

Group Bayport used Testlify to automate the early stages of candidate evaluation. Candidates completed role-specific assessments testing the practical skills each position required before any recruiter time was invested. For soft skills like communication, collaboration, problem-solving, and creativity, the team used Testlify’s pre-built test library to evaluate cultural fit at the same stage. Where pre-built tests did not fully reflect Group Bayport’s specific requirements, the team used Testlify’s customization tools to build assessments around the traits they were actually hiring for.

By the time a candidate reached the HR team, they had already been evaluated against the actual requirements of the role. Recruiters stopped spending time on applicants who were unlikely to succeed and redirected that time toward meaningful conversations with candidates who had already demonstrated they were worth pursuing.

Results

Faster hiring. Stronger candidates. An HR team no longer buried in screening.

Phone interview time dropped 52%. Time to candidate activation fell 47%. Hiring effectiveness improved 86%, driven by better skill and culture match across every role. The shift from volume-based screening to targeted engagement changed what the HR team spent their time on and improved the quality of the decisions they were making.

“The quality of candidates coming through changed noticeably. Our recruiters were spending their time on people who were already proven, not trying to figure out if someone was worth a conversation.”

Talent Team, Group Bayport