Therese Sharp
Evolving from In-Person Virtual Reality to Scalable Virtual Assessment
Cappfinity has long prided itself on delivering highly authentic and immersive hiring experiences, with VR playing a central role in its flagship assessment centre offering. Delivered on-site by dedicated technicians, the VR assessments allowed candidates to express themselves in highly contextualised, engaging environments, offering employers unique insight into the “real” person behind the CV.
Then the pandemic hit.
With travel restrictions and health concerns making in-person VR assessments impossible, the business faced a stark choice: evolve quickly or lose a critical product offering. I was brought in to help reimagine this immersive experience as a scalable, accessible, and digital-first product, without compromising on Cappfinity’s core principles of authenticity and engagement.
Success Measures
Context: An Expanding but Fragmented Product Landscape
Cappfinity’s in-person Virtual Reality assessments were a cornerstone of their premium offering, designed to provide candidates with highly immersive, authentic scenarios. Delivered by on-site technicians using bespoke VR setups, these experiences gave employers unparalleled insight into candidate behaviour in realistic work-like situations.
However, the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic made in-person assessments unviable overnight. The business needed a fast and thoughtful pivot that could retain the essence of the VR experience—authenticity, engagement, and emotional insight, within a remote, digital-first format.
Objectives
Design an immersive, branded assessment experience that mirrors the energy and authenticity of VR—delivered entirely through Zoom and Cappfinity’s proprietary CMS.
The digital product needed to:
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Be low-bandwidth and accessible via standard devices
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Maintain the immersive, candidate-first spirit of VR
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Lay the foundation for a scalable virtual offering
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Support ongoing product evolution and reuse
We identified three guiding questions to measure success:
1.
How do we create a truly immersive experience in a digital format?
2.
Can we make our CMS flexible enough to deliver this assessment at scale?
3.
Can we make this accessible in a way that VR assessments weren’t?
Challenge 1: How do we create a truly immersive experience in a digital format?
VR assessments are built on deep immersion and contextual storytelling, hard to replicate in a browser. The challenge was to build an experience that felt alive, surprising, and rich, even within the functional constraints of Zoom and a legacy CMS.
What we did:
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I drew directly on my own experience as a prior VR assessment participant to map the emotional arc of the experience.
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Collaborated closely with the VR team to source media assets and understand the storytelling cues that made their experience feel real.
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Designed assessment flows on paper, identifying moments for delight and friction, then brought them to life using game-like visuals and rich thematic cues.
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Created original branded illustrations and media in-house, blending graphic and product design to sustain user engagement throughout.
What changed:
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We launched two assessments built on the same framework but with distinctly different themes, tone, and feel.
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For the first time, Cappfinity used in-house rich media to elevate the experience.
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Candidates praised the visual quality and engagement of the assessments, and the client renewed their contract for another two years based on its success.
Challenge 2: Can we make our CMS flexible enough to deliver this assessment at scale?
Cappfinity’s CMS was never designed to handle highly branded, media-rich experiences. Built for basic assessments, the tool required serious creativity to adapt without extensive engineering support.
What we did:
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Led the development of a lightweight Design System to support scalable builds within the CMS’s technical constraints.
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Partnered with Engineering to understand the system’s limits and collaboratively define a sustainable design-development workflow.
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Took an iterative, test-to-failure approach to strike the balance between visual richness and system performance.
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Established a replicable model for building future assessments, reducing design and build effort over time.
What changed:
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Despite technical limitations, the final product delivered seamless, immersive assessments that ran smoothly even on low-spec devices.
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Post-launch metrics showed higher candidate engagement and comparable completion rates to both the VR and traditional digital assessments.
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The success of the new approach laid the groundwork for an ongoing Virtual Assessment product line.
Challenge 3: Can we make this accessible in a way that the original VR assessments weren’t?
While immersive, the original VR experience wasn’t accessible to many users, including those with physical, cognitive, or sensory differences. Moving online presented an opportunity to raise the bar on inclusivity.
What we did:
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Engaged with a disability access charity to conduct a full audit of the assessment journey.
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Defined accessibility baselines: screen-reader compatibility, colour contrast compliance, font sizing, media captioning, and cognitive load considerations.
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Worked closely with Engineering to implement these across the build, ensuring no visual or functional detail was lost in the process.
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Created an alternate, de-branded greyscale version of the experience for users requiring simplified visuals.
What changed:
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While not fully WCAG-compliant due to CMS limitations, the digital assessment was a step-change in accessibility.
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Candidates with declared accommodations reported better usability and a more navigable experience than in previous formats.
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Accessibility became an active design pillar in future assessment builds, shifting internal expectations of what inclusion should look like.
