How Kin Insurance standardized bilingual hiring for licensed insurance agents with Testlify

Kin Insurance sells home insurance directly to homeowners, heavily in catastrophe-exposed states where getting covered is hardest, using technology and data instead of brokers. As the company expanded its licensed sales and customer service teams, it needed a consistent way to evaluate candidates on the skills required for customer conversations.

Hiring for real customer conversations

That growth rests on the people who answer the phone. Licensed sales and customer-service agents quote policies, handle claims questions, and type customer detail into live systems while a homeowner waits on the line, a large share of it in Spanish. Resumes and generic aptitude tests provided limited insight into the skills that matter most on live customer calls. As hiring volume climbed, Kin needed one dependable way to measure that, the same way, for every candidate.

A test built around the job, in both languages

Kin replaced its incumbent assessment tool, Criteria Corp, with Testlify and built a program shaped like the role itself. Instead of a one-size aptitude quiz, recruiters screen candidates on custom, Kin-specific assessments: a bilingual Spanish mock-call sales test, an insurance-specific typing test, and computer-literacy checks that mirror the systems agents use all day. Testlify's engineering team built the simulation-based mock call and the specialized typing test to Kin's specification, so a candidate is judged on a realistic slice of the job rather than a proxy for it.

Because the program spans ten question formats, from typing tests and ranking to video and voice AI, it helps evaluate how candidates communicate, reason, and perform across different assessment formats. The whole experience runs under Kin's own brand at assessment.kin.com, and results feed straight into Kin's Ashby ATS, so a strong candidate moves forward without requiring recruiters to manually transfer assessment results. Enterprise SAML sign-on keeps the recruiting team in one secure login.

Standardizing bilingual hiring

The program is now how Kin screens its licensed frontline. It has invited 797 candidates and screened 526 candidates to completion, a 66% finish rate on a demanding, multi-part test that includes live typing and a spoken mock call. Candidates have completed assessments across all ten question formats, with typing and ranking exercises among the most frequently used.

Recruiters now use one structured assessment process for licensed hiring across English and Spanish roles. Kin runs Testlify white-labeled and integrated with Ashby from day one, and the team is active daily, with new invitations still going out.

What began as a vendor replacement has become a repeatable screening process that helps Kin evaluate licensed insurance candidates consistently across customer-facing roles.