Dyspraxia and pre-employment tests: tailoring your process to support neurodiverse candidates
3 minutes
How dyspraxia affects pre-employment testing, and what to do about it.
Dyspraxia doesn't get talked about nearly as much as dyslexia or autism, but it still matters in a hiring context. Also known as Developmental Coordination Disorder, dyspraxia mainly affects motor coordination: fine motor control, balance, and hand-eye coordination.
That might not sound like it has much to do with pre-employment testing, but it does. A lot of modern assessments, gamified ones especially, rely on quick clicks, precise mouse movements, or fast reactions. None of that is a good fit for someone with dyspraxia, and none of it tells you anything about whether they can do the job.
Dyspraxia has nothing to do with intelligence or general capability. With the right adjustments, extra time chief among them, you can stop your process from penalising candidates for a coordination difficulty that's got nothing to do with the role.
Understanding dyspraxia and its impact on coordination
Dyspraxia affects how someone plans and carries out motor tasks. It often shows up as difficulty with coordination, whether that's writing, typing, operating machinery, or anything that needs precise, controlled movement.
The severity varies a lot from person to person. Some people experience only mild difficulties, while for others, everyday tasks involving typing or navigating a complicated interface can be a genuine struggle.
What dyspraxia doesn't affect is intelligence or cognitive ability. People with dyspraxia are often highly capable and bring plenty to a role, the difficulty is specifically physical and coordination-based, not cognitive.
How pre-employment testing can work against dyspraxic candidates
The clearest problem area is gamified assessments. They're popular because they're engaging and give useful insight into problem-solving, but a lot of them lean heavily on fast reaction times and fine motor control.
Tasks that ask candidates to click on objects quickly, or navigate a virtual environment with a mouse or touchscreen, can be genuinely difficult for someone with dyspraxia. The coordination required doesn't come easily, and the resulting score says more about motor control than about problem-solving ability.
Reaction-time-based tasks are a particular sticking point. Someone with dyspraxia may simply need more time to complete them than a neurotypical candidate, and if the test doesn't account for that, it's measuring the wrong thing entirely.
The importance of reasonable adjustments
Extra time is the most straightforward and effective adjustment here. Because tasks involving coordination or fine motor control can take dyspraxic candidates longer, giving them more time stops them being penalised for something outside their control.
This applies just as much to traditional formats, like written tests or typing tasks, as it does to gamified assessments.
It's also worth remembering that once someone's actually in the role, they're rarely expected to work against a stopwatch. Extra time during recruitment isn't lowering the bar, it's making sure the bar reflects how the job actually works.
Where gamified assessments need extra care
Gamified assessments aren't a bad idea for dyspraxic candidates, but they do need a closer look than usual. If a task depends on speed or precise movement rather than the underlying skill you're trying to measure, it's worth asking whether that's really testing what you think it is.
Where possible, favour tasks that assess reasoning and judgement over ones that reward quick clicking or precise cursor control. Allowing flexible input methods, keyboard alternatives to mouse-based tasks, for example, can also make a real difference.
The goal isn't to avoid gamified assessments altogether. It's to make sure the coordination demands of the format aren't accidentally becoming the thing you're actually testing.
Best practices for an inclusive process
Offer extra time as standard. Coordination-heavy tasks take dyspraxic candidates longer, and extra time accounts for that without changing what's being measured.
Review gamified tasks for coordination demands. If speed or precise movement matters more than reasoning, reconsider the format or offer an alternative.
Provide flexible input methods. Keyboard alternatives to mouse-heavy tasks reduce the disadvantage that fine motor difficulties can create.
Ask for feedback. Regular input from dyspraxic candidates will flag issues that an internal review is likely to miss.
Conclusion and next steps
Dyspraxia creates a different kind of challenge to most other forms of neurodiversity in a testing context, because the barrier is physical rather than cognitive. That makes it easy to overlook, especially in gamified assessments designed with speed and precision in mind.
Extra time and flexible input methods go a long way towards fixing that, and neither asks you to compromise on what you're actually assessing.
If you want to talk through how to build a more inclusive process, it's something we help hiring teams with at Test Partnership regularly. It's usually a quicker 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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