How Kimp reduced poor hiring fits by 35% and cut turnover by 20% with skill-based assessments

High application volumes. High turnover. The two were connected.

Kimp is a design services company based in Markham, Ontario. They were receiving large volumes of applications for design and creative roles, hiring from that pool, and watching too many of those hires underperform or leave within months. The problem was not the volume of applicants. It was that the selection process could not tell the difference between a strong candidate and a weak one.

Kimp provides ongoing design services to clients, which means the quality and output of its creative team is directly tied to client satisfaction. The company was growing and hiring frequently, receiving large numbers of applications for each open role. On the surface, that looked like an advantage. In practice, it created a screening problem the team did not have a reliable way to solve.

Resumes and cover letters for design roles told the team very little. Anyone could describe themselves as experienced in a tool or style. The actual quality of someone’s design judgment, their ability to work at pace, their capacity to handle client briefs in a fast-moving environment, none of that was visible in an application document. The team was conducting time-consuming manual reviews and interviews without a shared benchmark for what a strong hire actually looked like, and the outcomes reflected it. Candidates who looked promising on paper underperformed once in the role, required more training than the team had capacity to provide, and often left within months.

Each early departure meant the cost of hiring was absorbed again. The cumulative effect on team morale and productivity was significant, and the HR team was spending too much time re-hiring for roles that should have been filled once.

“We kept bringing in people who looked good on paper and struggled in the role. We had no way to evaluate design ability before they started, and by the time we knew it was a bad fit, the damage was done.”

Senior acquisition leader, Kimp

How Testlify was implemented

Skill assessments were filtered on actual design competency before any interview took place.

Kimp used Testlify’s assessment library to deploy role-specific tests that evaluated candidates on the design skills and competencies each position required. Rather than filtering based on how a candidate described their experience, the team could now see how they performed on relevant tasks. Candidates who did not meet the required standard were filtered out early, before any recruiter time was invested in them.

The shift from subjective resume review to performance-based shortlisting changed the composition of candidates reaching the interview stage. The people who came through had already demonstrated the skills the role demanded, which made interviews faster, more focused, and more predictive of how the hire would actually perform.

The downstream impact showed up in retention and team performance. Poor hiring fits dropped by 35%. Turnover fell by 20%. Team productivity improved by 15% as new hires who were properly matched to their roles contributed effectively from the start rather than requiring extended onboarding or eventually leaving.

“Once we could assess design skills before the interview, the whole process changed. The candidates we hired were ready to contribute from day one, and our team felt it.”

Senior acquisition leader, Kimp