If you're shopping around for alternatives to Arctic Shores, you've probably already run into a few of the common frustrations: the assessments can feel a bit unserious, candidates sometimes push back on them, and because they're built around behavioural traits rather than cognitive ability, they're not as predictive of actual job performance as they could be.
The good news is there are a handful of decent options out there, each with their own trade-offs. Here's a breakdown of the main ones worth considering.
Pymetrics (Harver)
Pymetrics, now part of Harver, sits in similar territory to Arctic Shores. It uses game-based tasks (the balloon pump game being the most well-known example) to measure behavioural and emotional traits, so if you're looking for something similar to Arctic Shores, this will offer much of the same.
The face validity problem is at least as bad as Arctic Shores. Candidates are often left wondering what blowing up a virtual balloon has to do with the job they applied for, and that confusion tends to show up in candidate feedback. Like Arctic Shores, it's measuring behavioural traits rather than cognitive ability, which means it's less predictive of job performance than a cognitive assessment would be.
If you're moving away from Arctic Shores because of candidate experience or predictive validity concerns, Pymetrics isn't really solving either of those problems.
Neurosight
Neurosight is another behaviourally-focused tool, measuring personality and behavioural attributes through a gamified format.
Behavioural traits aren't worthless to measure (they can tell you useful things about culture fit and likely retention), but it's worth knowing that personality has a meaningfully weaker correlation to job performance than cognitive ability does. General mental ability is one of the strongest predictors of job performance across virtually every role type, and personality measures trail some way behind.
The gamification here also raises a question worth asking: why gamify a personality assessment? A well-designed personality questionnaire does the same job more reliably, and candidates generally understand what it's for. There's no strong scientific reason to dress it up as a game beyond wanting something that looks novel.
SHL interactive
SHL's interactive assessments are a meaningfully different proposition. They're not as heavily gamified as Arctic Shores, and that's actually one of their strengths: they look and feel much closer to a traditional assessment, which candidates tend to find more credible and easier to take seriously.
They also measure cognitive traits like numerical reasoning and verbal reasoning, which makes them considerably more predictive of job performance than anything focused purely on behavioural traits.
The two downsides are worth being aware of though. SHL are at the more expensive end of the market, which can be a sticking point depending on your volume and budget. And while the interactive format adds some engagement, the underlying reasoning tasks are still close enough to a standard assessment that a candidate could lean on AI assistance for the actual thinking and just use the drag-and-drop interface to submit the answers. The interactive element isn't doing much of the AI-resistance work.
Test Partnership (Mindmetriq)
Test Partnership's Mindmetriq suite takes a different approach. It measures cognitive abilities (numerical, verbal, and inductive reasoning) in a fully gamified format, which puts it in similar territory to SHL Interactive on predictive validity but with a couple of important differences.
Because the assessments are genuinely gamified rather than just interactive, they require fast and continuous input throughout. You're not reasoning through a question and then clicking an answer. The tasks are built in a way where delegating the thinking to an AI doesn't really help, because the format itself demands real-time engagement that AI assistance can't replicate in the way it can with a more static assessment.
That makes Mindmetriq probably the strongest option if you want the predictive validity of a cognitive assessment, the candidate experience of something engaging and modern, and some meaningful protection against AI-assisted cheating.
Conclusion and next steps
If you're looking for an Arctic Shores alternative, the choice really comes down to what you're trying to fix.
If the concern is predictive validity, you want something measuring cognitive ability, which rules out Pymetrics and Neurosight in most cases. If face validity and candidate experience are the issue, SHL Interactive and Mindmetriq both score better than Arctic Shores on that front. And if AI resistance matters to your process, Mindmetriq is the only option here that's genuinely built for it.
If you'd like to see how Mindmetriq works in practice, you can demo the assessments and find out more about the different tests on offer and their validity.
Sources: Arctic Shores, Arctic Shores on G2, Harver, Harver on G2, Neurosight, SHL, SHL on G2.
Joshua Hancock
Digital Marketing Manager at Test Partnership. Over 7 years experience as a writer, content strategist, SEO and digital marketer.
