The Working-Style Assessment

Fit is not a property of a candidate. It is a relationship between two working styles, so we measure both on the same instrument and match on the result.

• The Halloway Profile: the operator's own traits, plus what the seat demands of whoever sits in it. Together they define a scored range, the fit band.
• The Kane Profile: the candidate's traits on the same five factors, scored against that band rather than a generic ideal.

A mismatch is not a failure: it is information, delivered before anyone has signed an employment contract. Rejection is role specific, and candidates who clear the tests but miss on fit stay in the database for the next operator. Chemistry is verified last, in a live session.

The assessment measures five domains of working style, each built from six facets, each facet from four items: one hundred and twenty questions in total.

• Execution: how work actually gets done: order, duty, ambition, follow-through and deliberation. The difference between a tidy CV and a tidy operation.
• Drive: energy toward people and reward: warmth, sociability, assertiveness and tempo. What a room feels like when this person is in it.
• Composure: stability under load: calm, even temper, optimism and resilience. Visible only on the bad days, which is when it matters.
• Collaboration: orientation toward others: trust, candour, service and accommodation. Whether the truth reaches you early or late.
• Exploration: appetite for the new: imagination, variety, intellect and open-mindedness. How a person meets a problem they have not seen before.

Both profiles are built on the five-factor model, using public-domain IPIP scales. The instrument is ours; the underlying research is not proprietary to anyone. Results are reported in bands rather than raw numbers, from Very Low to Very High, so a profile reads as a description of a working style rather than a school report.

Most workplace assessments were built to describe one person. Ours is built to describe a relationship, and that single decision changes everything downstream: the mathematics, the report, and what a client can actually do with the result on Monday morning.

• The relationship is the product: most instruments hand you two documents and a highlighter. Our flagship output is the comparison: the Halloway Profile and the Kane Profile analysed as a single working relationship, with the friction points and strengths of the pairing named plainly.
• Open foundation: many instruments rest on a framework invented by the company selling them. We build on the five-factor model, the most extensively replicated framework in the field, owned by nobody. The instrument is ours; the theory beneath it can be examined by anyone, including your own advisers.
• Scores built for comparison: some widely used instruments produce relative scores, where scoring higher in one area mathematically forces a lower score in another. Those describe one person's internal distribution and were never designed for comparing two people, which is precisely what a hiring decision requires. Our dimensions are measured independently, so two results placed side by side mean what they appear to mean.
• Thirty facets, not four categories: two people can hold an identical headline score and be entirely different to work with, because one is carried by orderliness and the other by sheer drive. Our friction analysis runs at the facet level, because pace mismatch, authority collision and absent pushback are invisible from headline scores.
• Weighted by the relationship: what matters between an executive and an assistant is not what matters between an executive and a salesperson, and neither resembles a partnership between peers. Same instrument, different lens.
• Readable without a translator: no certified consultant is required to interpret a report. Reports are written to be read by the people they describe, and comparisons and team analysis are products, not licence tiers.

And we do not issue verdicts. No hire or do-not-hire recommendation, no compatibility percentage, no ranking of candidates. No assessment, ours included, is a good enough predictor of a single individual's performance to justify that authority. What you receive instead is more useful: a specific account of how two people will work together, the working agreements to put in place, and the signals to watch for at ninety days.

We are equally plain about what we do not claim. We do not claim the instrument is independently peer-reviewed; it is our own, built on an open and well-established framework. We do not claim to predict job performance; nobody can do that reliably from a questionnaire. And we do not claim a profile is permanent; it is a description of now, not a life sentence. We would rather be trusted on the things we do claim.

You sign in with your email address; a one-time code, no password. The assessment takes most people around twenty minutes. Your answers save as you go, so you can leave and return without losing anything.

There are no right answers and no benefit in guessing what an employer wants to read. The integrity checks are designed to notice performances: sessions completed implausibly fast, flat answer patterns and heavy gaps are flagged, and a session with more than twelve unanswered items is invalidated rather than scored.

On completion you receive a result code in the form HK-XXXX-XXXX. The code lets anyone you choose verify your headline bands, and reveals nothing more than your first name, your domain bands and a completion date.

Taking the assessment is free. The written reports are paid products, produced for each specific profile rather than assembled from stock paragraphs.

• Individual report: a full written account of one person's working style: how they execute, what steadies and destabilises them, how to manage them well and where they will need cover.
• Comparison report: two profiles read against each other in the context of a real working relationship, with the friction points and strengths of the pairing named plainly. This is the reading behind every match we make.
• Team report: three to twenty profiles read as a system: where the team is strong, where nobody holds the system, and what the next hire needs to bring.

All prices are quoted in US dollars. See pricing, or enquire privately if your requirement is broader.