Dyslexia and pre-employment tests: tailoring your process to support neurodiverse candidates
3 minutes
How to adjust your assessment process for candidates with dyslexia.
Dyslexia is the most common form of neurodiversity, affecting somewhere between 10 and 15% of the population. If your hiring process relies on verbal reasoning tests, there's a good chance dyslexia is already shaping who makes it through, whether you've noticed or not.
Dyslexia affects how someone processes and understands written information. It has nothing to do with overall intelligence, and plenty of dyslexic candidates are strong problem-solvers with a genuine talent for creative and visual reasoning. But put a dense page of text in front of them under time pressure, and their score stops reflecting their actual ability.
A few reasonable adjustments, extra time, compatibility with assistive technology, and gamified assessments, can close that gap and give dyslexic candidates a fair shot at showing what they can do.
Understanding dyslexia and what it means for recruitment
Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty that affects reading, writing, and processing verbal information. It isn't linked to intelligence or general cognitive ability, and a lot of dyslexic people have real strengths in problem-solving, creativity, and visual reasoning.
Where the difficulty shows up is in tasks that lean on reading or interpreting written text. That's exactly what traditional verbal reasoning tests ask candidates to do: read a passage, then work out whether a series of statements is true, false, or can't be determined from the information given.
For someone with dyslexia, reading long passages of text can be slow and effortful, and mistakes creep in that have nothing to do with reasoning ability. Given how common dyslexia is, that's not a small edge case, it's a significant chunk of your candidate pool being tested on the wrong thing.
The limitations of traditional verbal reasoning tests
Traditional verbal reasoning tests ask a lot in a short space of time: read a dense passage, then judge the truth of several statements based on it, all against the clock.
For a dyslexic candidate, each of those elements works against them. Long text is harder to process quickly, verbal analysis under pressure amplifies that difficulty, and time limits leave no room to compensate.
The result is that dyslexic candidates often underperform on these tests in a way that has nothing to do with their reasoning skills and everything to do with a format that was never designed with them in mind.
Making reasonable adjustments for dyslexic candidates
Extra time is the most straightforward adjustment, and it's genuinely effective. Dyslexic candidates typically need longer to read and process written information, and 25% extra time is a reasonable starting point, though some candidates, particularly those with a formal diagnosis, may need more.
It's a fair adjustment because it mirrors reality. Most jobs don't ask dyslexic employees to read and analyse text against a stopwatch, so removing that artificial pressure means you're testing what actually matters.
Beyond timing, make sure your testing platform plays nicely with assistive technology. A lot of dyslexic candidates rely on screen readers, text-to-speech tools, or browser extensions that adjust text size and colour. Rather than building in your own accessibility features, which can end up clashing with what candidates already use, it's usually better to keep the platform flexible enough to work alongside their existing tools.
The benefits of gamified assessments for dyslexic candidates
Gamified assessments are worth considering as an alternative to traditional verbal tests. They tend to be far less text-heavy, relying instead on visual and interactive tasks to measure problem-solving and reasoning.
That matters a lot for dyslexic candidates, because it strips out the reading comprehension barrier almost entirely. Instead of decoding dense paragraphs, candidates engage with the task directly.
They're also more engaging by design, which helps when long blocks of text tend to feel monotonous or exhausting to read. Some employers worry that a new format introduces new problems, but the evidence points the other way: reducing reliance on language and leaning on visual reasoning plays to what dyslexic candidates are often naturally good at.
Best practices for ensuring fairness
Provide extra time. Start with 25% additional time and be prepared to offer more where a candidate's needs call for it.
Support assistive technology. Make sure your platform works alongside screen readers, text-to-speech tools, and other accessibility software candidates already use.
Consider gamified assessments. They cut down on reading demands and give dyslexic candidates a more level playing field.
Keep instructions simple. Clear, jargon-free wording helps avoid confusion that has nothing to do with the skill you're actually testing.
Ask for feedback. Dyslexic candidates can tell you things about your process that an internal review never will.
Conclusion and next steps
Dyslexia is common enough that most hiring processes are already interacting with it, whether that's been accounted for or not. Traditional verbal reasoning tests are exactly the format most likely to disadvantage dyslexic candidates unfairly.
Extra time, assistive technology support, and gamified alternatives are all practical ways to close that gap without lowering your standards. You're not making the bar lower, you're making sure it's actually measuring what you think it's measuring.
If you want help building a process like that, it's something we work on with hiring teams at Test Partnership all the time. It's usually simpler to fix than people expect.
Primary author
Ben Schwencke
Chief psychologist at Test Partnership. MSc in Organisational Psychology with over ten years experience in psychometric testing.
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