How MasTec standardized technical hiring with Testlify’s custom skills assessments

MasTec builds the energy, utility, and communications infrastructure the country runs on. It hires for hundreds of technical and field roles across dozens of job sites. For most of them, a resume cannot show whether a person can actually do the work. To make hiring more consistent across teams and locations, MasTec needed a way to evaluate candidates on demonstrated skills rather than resumes alone.

Why a resume could not answer the real question

MasTec’s talent & workforce are spread across many sites and business lines, and each hiring manager screens in their own way. The bar for a good candidate moved from place to place, so two people with the same title could be held to very different standards.

A claim like proficient in Excel or Oracle Primavera” also tells a manager very little. On live project work, a hire who cannot really use the tools is slow, error-prone, and in some roles, a safety risk.

Together, these assessments replaced resume-based assumptions with practical demonstrations of job readiness, making hiring decisions more objective and role-specific.

With hiring happening across multiple projects and locations, MasTec could not afford to discover critical skill gaps after someone had already joined.

A unified test for the tools the work actually runs on

Rather than screen for general aptitude, MasTec built its own assessments using Testlify’s custom assessment builder and made many of them hands-on, so candidates work in the actual tool (like a real workplace simulation) instead of answering questions about it. Each assessment was customized to reflect the skills required for specific roles, giving hiring managers a consistent way to evaluate candidates before interviews.

Among 21 custom tests, the core ones map straight to their jobs:

• MS Excel simulation. Candidates work in a real spreadsheet, for the finance and analyst roles where it matters.
• Oracle Primavera. Scheduling proficiency tested directly, for the project managers who live in it.
• GIS assessment. Mapping and geospatial skill for the specialist roles that depend on it.
• CMV/CDL driver English. Verified English for commercial drivers, a compliance requirement, not a nice-to-have.

One bar, applied the same way everywhere

MasTec now hires on demonstrated skill, and does it the same way across every site. Of candidates invited, 76% finish the assessments, so managers compare people against a defined standard rather than a stack of resumes, and the strongest candidates stop slipping through an uneven process.

More than 20,000 responses have run through 15 question formats, which is what makes the standard real rather than aspirational: at that volume, screening is doing the work of sorting, not a box a recruiter ticks.

A standard that grows with the business

Following successful adoption, MasTec continued the partnership into a second year and expanded its assessment library as hiring needs evolved. The partnership has held on into a second year, and MasTec keeps adding tests as it opens new kinds of roles. Because the assessments are built in-house and run on its own site, extending the standard to a new role is a matter of authoring one more test, not renegotiating how the company hires.