How Higgs LLP built a trainee assessment that 96.5% of candidates rate positively.

Legal recruitment has a structural problem the sector rarely says out loud: it runs on networks. CVs, referrals, and polished interviews reward candidates who have the right contacts and the confidence that comes from privilege, and quietly disadvantage capable people from less conventional paths. For a trainee programme, that’s exactly backwards. Potential should be the priority, and the traits that predict a good trainee — resilience, organisation under pressure, accountability — are often built in places a CV never mentions. Someone who’s cared for younger siblings while balancing part-time work may have developed precisely the multitasking and composure the role demands, and no paper screen will ever see it.

Higgs knew its process had the standard version of this problem. Screening ran on CV reviews, application questions, and competency interviews: workable, but offering limited opportunity to see real-world behaviour early, and heavily dependent on judgement calls. The volume made it worse. With 150 to 200 applications per scheme and a recruitment function that until recently was a single person, manual screening consumed the team, and with significant investment in every trainee’s development, the cost of a mismatch was high — financially, culturally, and reputationally. Higgs had tried other assessment tools and found them clunky, time-consuming, and disconnected from the actual job.

The brief to ThriveMap was to measure real potential, not privilege: a scalable, fair, and predictive way to see capability wherever it comes from.

The work began with a job analysis workshop that Higgs describes as a turning point. Current trainees reviewed and refined a set of success attributes from their own lived experience of the role, and those were then tested with Heads of Department to make sure they reflected the real pressures of practice. The final framework centred on six capabilities: time management and organisation under pressure, written communication tailored to audience, practical problem-solving, attention to detail, accountability and initiative, and resilience and adaptability. Qualities Higgs had always valued, but never had a consistent, early-stage way to measure at scale.

ThriveMap built those into a Realistic Job Assessment: timed, scenario-based tasks mirroring the actual work of a trainee solicitor, from case-study judgements to written communication under pressure. Every applicant completes the same scenarios and is scored blind, with results reviewed relative to the cohort rather than against arbitrary cut-offs. Candidates get a week, clear instructions, and a named contact for questions or reasonable adjustments. The top 40 to 50 performers go to interview, arriving with a report of demonstrated strengths and weaknesses, so the conversation starts from evidence.

The efficiency result reshaped the team’s week: around 90% less time spent manually reviewing applications, for a function that previously screened everything by hand. The 5% of candidates who opt out during the assessment act as a built-in filter, having used the realistic preview to decide the role isn’t for them — an empowering exit, not an exclusion, and a time-saver for everyone. Engagement holds up at the other end too: 87.4% of candidates who start the assessment complete it, exceptionally high for early-careers recruitment, where drop-off is usually the norm.

The quality signal followed. Higgs reports clear alignment between assessment performance and interview strength, and candidates arriving at interview more grounded in the reality of the trainee role, making for richer, more focused discussions. The freed capacity has changed what the team does with its time: instead of reacting to application piles, they’re identifying high-potential candidates early and building pipelines for future training contract years.

When Higgs reviewed its two most recent vacation scheme cohorts, an estimated 54% of final-stage candidates were from racially or ethnically diverse backgrounds. As with every strong diversity outcome ThriveMap has measured, nothing in the process targeted it. No quotas, no adjusted thresholds. Every candidate faced the same scenarios and the same blind scoring; the assessment simply stopped measuring the things that don’t predict trainee success — polish, connections, the “right” university trajectory — and the shortlist changed on its own.

The detail that makes the point sharpest: the process began surfacing strong second-year undergraduates who would previously have been overlooked entirely, candidates earlier in their journey whose capability outran their credentials. In a profession under sustained scrutiny for who it lets in, Higgs is building a trainee pipeline that’s more representative of the clients and communities the firm serves, not as an initiative layered on top of hiring, but as a property of how hiring works.

And the candidates noticed. 96.5% rated the experience positively, and the comments read less like feedback on a screening tool than on a recruitment brochure: “By far one of the easiest and most engaging assessments I’ve done.” “It made me even more confident that Higgs is a firm I’d love to be part of.”