Communication & Behaviour Assessment
Situational-judgement and STAR-based behavioural assessments generated from your real job — the soft-skill evidence a CV can't show, scored into the same pipeline as everything else.
Technical screening tells you whether a candidate can do the work; it says nothing about whether they'll communicate a blocker before it becomes an outage, handle a frustrated stakeholder, or own a mistake. Those are the qualities most exit interviews cite when a hire doesn't work out — and the part of the pipeline most teams still assess with nothing more structured than "seemed nice on the call". The Communication & Behaviour Assessment closes that gap with the same machinery as the technical assessment: an AI-generated, job-calibrated question set, delivered by link, locked to your real applicants, scored into your pipeline.
The generated mix is deliberately different from a technical test: roughly 35% multiple-choice, 25% situational-judgement questions ("your deploy broke staging an hour before the demo — what do you do first?"), 20% short answers, and 20% open scenario questions asking how the candidate would actually communicate or act. Behavioural questions are STAR-friendly by design — they ask about real past situations, not hypothetical ideals, which is what makes the answers scoreable rather than performative.
On this page
- How it fills the pipeline gap — a typical flow
- One evidence trail, not three tools
- Honest scoring for soft skills
- What it costs — and what it doesn't
- Architecture: where it sits in the platform
- Data model and dependency map
- Operational considerations
- Interaction contract
- Interface blueprint & interaction flow
- Frequently asked questions
01How it fills the pipeline gap — a typical flow
In the Python Developer example, the eight candidates who passed the technical test look similar on paper. A 12-question behaviour assessment separates them on a different axis entirely: the situational-judgement MCQs score themselves on submit, and the open answers — how each candidate says they handled a real conflict, a missed deadline, an ambiguous spec — sit side by side for your team to score against per-question guidance. Two candidates who were mid-pack technically turn out to be exceptional communicators; one technical star writes two-word answers to every scenario. That's exactly the information a panel usually discovers three interviews too late, surfaced before anyone booked a meeting room.
02One evidence trail, not three tools
Because behaviour assessments use the same applicant lock as every Expertini assessment — candidates must start with the email they applied with — every score lands on the application record next to the CMS score, the technical result, and the video interview review. The candidate's audit report PDF then reads as one coherent evidence trail: matched on requirements, verified technically, assessed behaviourally, interviewed — each step scored, attributed, and timestamped. For regulated hiring or any process that might be challenged later, that single document is the difference between "we followed a process" and being able to show it.
03Honest scoring for soft skills
Soft-skill scoring is where assessment tools most often overclaim, so this one is explicit about its layers: machine-checkable questions score deterministically; open answers are scored by humans (free) or AI-reviewed against the marking guidance the generator wrote per question (2 credits), and every AI-proposed score is overridable. The assessment never produces a personality verdict or a psychometric label — it scores specific answers to specific job-relevant scenarios, which is both more defensible and more useful.
04What it costs — and what it doesn't
Generation is 3 AI prompt credits; AI review of one attempt is 2; manual scoring and custom questionnaires are free — all inside your existing plan. Standalone situational-judgement and behavioural testing platforms typically price per candidate; here the capability is native, unlimited by headcount, and its results live where your decisions do.
Platform architecture & operations
A1Architecture: where it sits in the platform
Communication & Behaviour Assessment is a first-class module of the Interviewing suite inside the authenticated Expertini ATS workspace. The platform is deliberately server-rendered: every view is prepared by the application server and shipped as complete HTML, with no client-side framework, no third-party CDN scripts, and no build pipeline between the data and the page. What renders is what the server computed — the property that makes the interface auditable.
All persistence runs on a single search-native document store; every query carries the organisation's identifier as a mandatory filter at the lowest query layer. Tenant isolation is therefore structural — a property of how every request is composed — rather than a policy that relies on application code remembering to check.
Availability is governed by the platform's tool registry: this tool is registered from the Growth plan, and access is enforced server-side by the registry gate on every request — never by hiding a button. Plans also carry a monthly distinct-tool quota (3 / 5 / 15 / 30 / 45 across Trial→Business, unlimited on Enterprise), counted at the same chokepoint. The pricing page states both honestly: what is available, and how much of it the month includes.
A2Data model and dependency map
In production the tool reads and writes assessment definitions (ats_assessments), assessment attempts (ats_assessment_attempts). Documents are plain, explicitly-mapped fields — mappings are provisioned ahead of first write, so term filters and aggregations behave deterministically instead of depending on inferred types.
Every distinct open is journalled to the tool-activity store — and that journal, not a parallel analytics system, is what the Reports section aggregates. The usage numbers you see are the numbers the platform actually recorded.
Anything that leaves the request path — notification fan-out, webhook delivery, activity journalling, mail — runs in fire-and-forget background threads. A slow external endpoint can never make the interface hang, and a failed side effect is logged rather than silently retried into inconsistency.
A3Operational considerations
Organisation-level settings, destructive actions, and connections are gated to owner and admin roles; recruiters operate the tool on the records they can see. Role changes apply on the next request — enforcement is at the route, not in the menu.
Failures are surfaced, not swallowed: server-side validation returns the exact field and reason, vendor errors are quoted verbatim where integrations are involved, and every write either confirms or reports. Exports regenerate on request rather than being cached — a report you download reflects the store at the moment you asked, not last night's snapshot.
Everything written is yours to take: CSV exports and the Data Export app cover the same stores the product itself reads. The exit is as open as the entrance — by design, not concession.
A4Interaction contract
The interface follows the platform's search-and-select convention: any field that names a real record — a candidate, client, or job — is a type-to-search picker over live data, never a free-typed string, which is what keeps activity trails and deduplication trustworthy. Static choices are filter-as-you-type combos rather than native dropdowns, and state transitions give explicit feedback: server confirmations surface as toasts, validation errors name the exact field, and nothing is shown as done that the server has not confirmed.
The wireframe and flow below document the structural contract of the surface — what panels exist, what order the states occur in, and what happens at every edge — rather than pixels. The layout is composed with native CSS grid and flexbox and adapts from wide desktop to a single column without separate mobile views.
Dependency map
Interface blueprint
Interaction flow — states, validations, feedback
Neighbouring tools — Interviewing
Frequently asked questions
How is this different from the Technical Assessment?⌄
Is this a personality test?⌄
Who can take it?⌄
What does it cost?⌄
At a glance
- Situational-judgement + STAR behavioural questions from your real job description
- Surfaces communication and ownership signals CVs and technical tests miss
- Locked to applicants — scores land on the application and audit report
- MCQs auto-score; open answers scored by your team (free) or AI-reviewed
- No personality labels — scenario answers scored against explicit guidance
- Native feature: no per-candidate fees, no separate assessment vendor
See communication & behaviour assessment on your own hiring.
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