Arctic Shores

Operations

The idea behind Arctic Shores and its game-based assessments was born out of the recognition that traditional recruitment processes had several limitations, including potential biases and a heavy reliance on CVs or resumes that might not provide a full picture of a candidate's abilities or potential.

Robert Newry, the founder of Arctic Shores, sought to develop a more innovative approach to talent assessment. He and his team believed that by leveraging technology and game mechanics, they could create engaging assessments that offered a more holistic view of a candidate. This would not only help companies make better hiring decisions but also provide a fairer and more objective process for candidates, reducing potential biases and barriers to entry for diverse candidates.

Game-based assessments provide an immersive environment where candidates' cognitive, emotional, and personality traits can be observed in a more natural and less stressful setting than traditional tests. This approach also makes the recruitment process more enjoyable for the candidate.

The overall aim was to disrupt the traditional recruitment industry by offering tools that could provide deeper insights into a candidate's potential, ensuring that talent was recognised beyond just what was written on a CV.

What's the mission of the company?

Arctic Shores' mission is to provide more objective, engaging, and fair ways to assess potential employees, going beyond the traditional CV to give every candidate a chance to showcase their true potential.

The game-based assessments they developed are designed to measure cognitive and emotional abilities, as well as personality traits, in a more engaging way than traditional psychometric tests. By doing so, they aim to reduce biases in hiring decisions and improve the diversity and quality of hires.

Team

CEO & Co-Founder

Robert Newry, MA (Oxon), MBA, is the CEO and Co-Founder of Arctic Shores and a passionate advocate for social mobility and hiring for potential. He has spoken on the topic of psychometrics, HR technology, and AI, appearing on national television BBC (twice) and has been quoted in several national newspapers in the UK including The Times, CityAM, and The Guardian. He has also written articles and blogs on the topic of gamification and behaviour-based assessments for many of the leading HR media outlets such as HR Grapevine, HR Today, HR News, HR Magazine, the HRDirector and Talint International.

He is campaigning for companies to Scrap the CV as the method to decide if to interview someone or not. His research through the company and discussions with multiple employers underpins his belief that the CV is a barrier to social mobility and hiring for potential.

Career pathway

Robert has a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics but his passion has always been for business. He started work on the shop floor in Birmingham working as a graduate trainee for an engineering company ending up as UK and Developing Markets Sales Manager. After completing his MBA, where he was a double Prize Winner, he worked in Hong Kong for Inchcape Plc, ultimately leading their document management business in China and the Philippines. He set up his first company, NewField IT in 2003, which after 8 years of growth he sold to Xerox. He co-founded Arctic Shores with his friend Dr. Safe Hammad in 2013 after a coffee discussing the inequalities of graduate hiring and the lack of innovation in the world of psychometric assessment.

Qualifications and Professional Development

He is a PRINCE 2 Practioner and certified at ITIL Foundation.

Co-founder and advisor

Safe Hammad.

Chair of the Board of the Directors

Adam Hale.

Chief Growth Officer

As our Chief Growth Officer, Estelle drives the business forward.

Estelle is passionate about equality and diversity, improving social mobility and removing bias from the workplace and the recruitment process to make sure people get opportunities based on potential rather than privilege. Working at Arctic Shores means she can help customers address these challenges and see the positive impact that they achieve using our assessment.

Estelle is a regular contributor to various podcasts and conferences, focusing on the themes of social mobility, and ED&I in the tech and HR industry. More recently she has been a guest on Hyperengage: The Customer Success podcast.  She spoke at the IHR Diversity and Inclusion conference in June and was a guest speaker at the LATAM 2022 Talent Attraction and Selection Congress in August.

Career pathway

Her role at Arctic Shores sees her draw on 15 years spent winning hearts and minds in the consultancy space – where she co-owned and scaled a firm, pre-acquisition.

She first started her career in law before moving into political and public policy consultancy - always finding career opportunities that allow her to work towards missions she feels passionate about. Working on topics such as Olympic legacy, sustainable aviation, women in tech and engineering, and now, at Arctic Shores, she is working with our customers  PwC, BBC, and Airbus helping them to combat bias and improve social mobility by hiring for potential.

Her transition from professional services consultancy to the world of HR tech is a story of hiring for potential in its own right. Setting up and leading a Customer function in a SaaS business were completely new challenges for Estelle, but our co-founders Robert and Safe saw the potential she had to be a great CCO.

Outside of work she has held number of non-exec roles in the charity and art sectors. Her current role as Chair of ZooNation: a dance company working to reach and represent diverse audiences, allows her to combine her passion for performance and commitment to equal opportunity.

Qualifications and Professional Development

Law degree from Edinburgh University

Chair of ZooNation

Named by Cranfield University as 100 Women to Watch in 2020

Chief Product Officer

As a product leader, Claire has successfully created, scaled and developed global product offerings and product teams from startup to scale-up and post acquisition, ensuring she puts the customer at the centre of all that she does.

Bringing together the disciplines and expertise of Product Management (PM), Psychometrics and User Experience (UX), the product team at Arctic Shores utilises its knowledge of neuro and data science, emerging trends, design thinking, and both customer and user needs to bring innovative, market-leading products and features to market that solve customer’s critical pain points and deliver value.

"I’m so proud to be part of the talented team at Arctic Shores and our mission to discover potential and give employers the means to see it."

Today, Arctic Shores’ assessments help the world’s most progressive businesses see beyond skills and experience and understand the potential of every candidate enabling them to counter natural bias, and build the diverse, successful, extraordinary teams to achieve their goals.

Career pathway

Claire began her career as an IT consultant at PwC. Thriving in client-facing roles including business analysis and project management on large-scale engagements aimed at driving business change through technology for media-telco organisations e.g. BT, O2, Three, Sky.

It was her desire to empower and better enable project teams that was the catalyst for moving into a new career - leveraging a multitude of transferable skills and retraining as an HR practitioner in the professional services industry.  Her role as Head of People at MakePositive (a platinum Salesforce Consulting Partner) in the late 2000s and early 2010s also provided her with a unique opportunity to bear witness to the ‘Software as a Service’ evolution from a disruptive tech to becoming a ubiquitous business model during this period.

Her move into product management with Sage / Sage People (formerly Fairsail) resulted from recognising her potential to add value to subscription software for talent acquisition and talent management - exploiting her understanding of cloud technology and agile development practices and combining this with her empathy for the pain points of an HR customer / user, to develop award winning SaaS products in the HR tech space.

Qualifications and Professional Development

Alongside her Post-Graduate Diploma (PgDip) in HR Management Claire is a Chartered Member (MCIPD) of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

VP Finance & Operations

Craig qualified as a Chartered Accountant over 10 years ago with an educational background in medical science.  Craig oversees the Operations function of Arctic Shores including, Finance and Accounts, Investor Relations, Company Secretarial, People (HR), IT and Business Operations.  All these functions support Arctic Shores' operational efficiency as it quickly scales.

Career pathway

After training as an auditor at RSM UK, Craig moved into his first industry role at a mid-sized listed software company and then a large multinational corporate travel management company (TMC).

Qualifications and Professional Development

BFP ACA Chartered Accountant (ICAEW).

VP Marketing

Hannah Garner.

VP Sales

Kurtis-Daniel Winn

Director of Professional Services and Support

Jill Summers is passionate about potential, diversity and the customer experience. She is a huge advocate of our ‘Scrap the CV’ initiative and believes it will accelerate social mobility and is a solution to the skills crisis. She’s worked in the field of occupational psychology for nearly 20 years; however, in this time, Arctic Shores is the only organisation where she’s seen all of her passions come to life through the company mission: ‘discover potential and give employers the means to see it’.

Jill’s role means she has the privilege of leading our Professional Services and Community & Support Teams and works with talented Business Psychologists, Programme Managers and Community Support Representatives to onboard and support customers using our products. She’s proud to be part of the team at Arctic Shores and is excited for more customers to embark on the journey of looking beyond the CV and hiring the right people, in the right way.

Career pathway

Jill began her career in 2004 in NHS Scotland’s Occupational Health Department to provide public and private sector customers with support in sickness absence management, occupational stress management and soft skills training. In 2008, Jill moved to London to work in Consulting and innovated recruitment and development practices (for graduate through to CEO level roles), across numerous Government Departments (i.e. Security Services, Home Office, Ministry of Justice etc.) and private sector companies (i.e. Capita, HSBC, RBS etc.).

In 2012, she then moved to Amberjack Global to be the Head of Assessment & Development and led a team of 8 Psychologists and Project Managers (and 100+ freelance Psychologists / Assessment Specialists). This role allowed Jill to work on global redesign projects which delivered ROI and secured renewals for companies such as GSK, Unilever, Tesco, EY etc. After nearly 5 years at Amberjack, Jill joined Arctic Shores as the Head of Customer Solutions and then as the Director of Professional Services & Support to combine her passions of potential, diversity and customer experience.

Qualifications and Professional Development

Jill studied at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Northumbria at Newcastle for her BSc in Biological Sciences (Hons. in Psychology) and MSc Occupational Psychology respectively. During her MSc she completed Test User qualifications for ability and personality tests and is trained to use a number of tools across early career & Board level roles. Jill also has training in coaching, assessment centre management and project management.

Director of Engineering

Alex Richardson.

Head of Customer Success

Federica Rusmini.

Head of Psychometrics Output

Fiadhna McEvoy

Senior Psychometrician

Luke Montuori is a psychometrician at Arctic Shores. Psychometrics is the field of study that’s concerned with measuring psychological constructs. Psychometricians can be found in a range of industries - from health, to education, and of course people management - building new ways to measure things about people, refining pre-existing measurement tools, or exploring what these instruments tell us about people’s behaviour.

"Being a psychometrician at Arctic Shores comes with a broad set of responsibilities. First, we need to identify psychological constructs that are both meaningful and commercially relevant. Once we’ve identified a construct of interest, we then have to figure out how to measure those constructs. From there I work with a team of colleagues in areas such as UX, software development, data science, and customer services, to build products that provide value to our users - candidates and clients alike."

Arctic Shores has been the ideal place to pursue a career in psychological product development. Building truly innovative product requires the ability to explore new ideas, a degree of independence, and the safety to fail. At the same time, getting a product built requires a commitment to collaboration and compromise. All of these (sometimes competing) endeavours are really enabled by the culture at Arctic Shores, where we explicitly value Making a difference, Growing together, and Exploring always.

Career pathway

After completing his Psychology degree at the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia), Luke found himself compelled to carry on further research into the neurobiology of learning and memory. To him, these processes are some of the most fundamental to understanding how people behave. So from there he moved to the United Kingdom, and completed his Ph.D. in behavioural neuroscience at Cardiff University. There he conducted research into the nature of representation formation, answering questions about how the most basic and unassuming perceptual experiences are themselves able to change the way we see the world.

After completing his Ph.D. he made the decision to move into a more commercial setting, and began working as a psychometrician at a traditional psychometric test publishing company. There he picked up the skills and knowledge required to be a psychometrician.

A few years into his career change Luke was attending the annual conference of the British Psychological Society’s Division of Occupational Psychology. It was there he first met some of the Arctic Shores science team, conversing late into the night about the history and philosophy of psychology as a science, and what that meant for commercial applications of psychology. Soon after, he was recruited by Arctic Shores to work on legacy aptitude products. Since then the opportunities available to him and the scope of his role have only increased. Most recently this can be seen in the roll out of our next-generation fluid intelligence levels. Currently, he is driving the development of new levels designed to measure novel psychological constructs in innovative ways. Here, he has had the opportunity to contribute to peer-reviewed journals and cultivate sides of me that wouldn’t necessarily be valued in other organisations. Working at Arctic Shores gives him the perfect opportunity to combine his specific academic background with the skills he has developed as a psychometrician.

Qualifications and Professional Development

In addition to his BSc (Psychology honours first class), and Ph.D. (Psychology: Behavioural Neuroscience), Luke is also a BPS Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol.), and holds the BPS Test User certificates (Ability, Personality). Outside of his work at Arctic Shores, he runs his own consulting business.

Though most of his published works reflect his Ph.D. topic, Luke has recently begun to publish again, as a result of research activities at Arctic Shores. In addition to his publications, he has been fortunate enough to present some of his previous research at international conferences, such as the meeting of the Spanish Society for Comparative Psychology, and the Associative Learning Symposium

Competition

Arctic Shores operates in the talent assessment and HR tech space, offering game-based assessments for recruitment. In this domain, they face competition from both traditional psychometric test providers and other innovative assessment tool providers. Some potential competitors or companies in related spaces might include:

1. Pymetrics: Uses neuroscience-based games and artificial intelligence to match candidates' emotional and cognitive abilities with company profiles.
2. HireVue: Offers video interviewing software and also uses AI-driven assessments to evaluate video interviews.
3. CodinGame: While primarily focused on the tech recruitment space, they offer gamified coding challenges and assessments for programmers.
4. Revelian: Offers a range of assessment tools, including game-based assessments that evaluate cognitive ability and emotional intelligence.
5. Traditional psychometric test providers: Companies like SHL, Aon's Assessment Solutions, and Talent Q, which provide more traditional forms of cognitive and personality testing.
6. Other startups and tech companies in the HR tech space that are continually innovating and might introduce game-based or other novel forms of assessments.

It's important to note that the competitive landscape in tech-driven industries like HR technology can evolve rapidly. New competitors can emerge, and existing ones can pivot or expand their offerings. For the most current and detailed analysis of Arctic Shores' competition, one might need to consult industry reports or market research specific to the talent assessment sector as of 2023 or later.

Market

TAM (Total Addressable Market):

The global recruitment industry is vast, with thousands of companies worldwide hiring millions of employees each year. If we consider the entire global market for talent assessment tools (including traditional assessments, psychometric testing, and more innovative solutions like game-based assessments), it is likely worth several billion dollars. For example, the HR tech industry in its entirety (which includes recruitment, employee engagement, training, and more) was estimated to be worth over $400 billion in 2020. The talent assessment segment is just a portion of this.

SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market):

If Arctic Shores focuses on multinational corporations in developed countries with substantial hiring volumes and interest in innovative HR solutions, this would represent a significant slice of the total market, but not its entirety. The exact value would depend on the number of such corporations, their average spending on recruitment tools, and other factors. A rough guess might put this in the tens of billions, but this is a broad estimate.

SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market):

Arctic Shores' SOM would be a subset of their SAM, and would depend on their competitive positioning, product efficacy, marketing efforts, and other factors. Without specific data on their market share and the adoption rate of game-based assessment tools, it's challenging to provide a numeric estimate. It could be anywhere from several million to several billion, depending on the aforementioned factors.

Financials

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	2014	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022
Fixed assets
Tangible assets	0	1,578	4,709	11,391	28,075	29,816	23,208	10,922	15,471
Investments	0	0	0	27,175	27,175	0	0	0	0
	0	1,578	4,709	38,566	55,250	29,816	23,208	10,922	15,471
Current assets
Debtors: amounts falling due within one year	984	48,304	24,033	330,032	770,097	460,046	539,983	810,434	701,411
Cash at bank and in hand	107,538	7,231	113,894	295,829	1,250,069	2,959,316	2,850,864	1,990,652	5,480,754
	108,522	55,535	137,927	628,861	2,020,166	3,419,362	3,390,847	2,801,086	6,182,165
Creditors: amounts falling due within one year	(2,284)	(53,029)	(45,887)	(436,957)	(967,424)	(1,307,807)	(2,023,016)	(2,738,249)	(3,449,005)
Net current assets	106,238	2,506	92,040	191,904	1,052,742	2,111,555	1,367,831	62,837	2,733,160
Total assets less current liabilities	106,238	4,084	96,749	230,470	1,107,992	2,141,371	1,391,039	73,759	2,748,631
Creditors: amounts falling due after more than one year	(50,165)	(51,178)	(637,575)	(54,339)	(55,160)	(56,274)	(451,783)	(1,362,136)	(754,295)
Net assets/(liabilities)	56,073	(47,094)	(540,826)	176,131	1,052,832	2,085,097	939,256	(1,288,377)	1,994,336
Capital and reserves
Called up share capital	2	2	2	3	4	5	5	5	7
Share premium account	77,979	77,979	77,979	2,058,639	3,759,612	7,321,532	8,133,377	8,175,743	14,418,145
Profit and loss account	(21,908)	(125,075)	(618,807)	(1,882,511)	(2,706,784)	(5,236,440)	(7,194,126)	(9,464,125)	(12,423,816)
Shareholders' funds	56,073	(47,094)	(540,826)	176,131	1,052,832	2,085,097	939,256	(1,288,377)	1,994,336

Risks

As with any investment, investing in Arctic Shores carries a level of risk. Overall, based on the key risks highlighted below, the degree of risk associated with an investment in Arctic Shores is higher than in a company that's trading on a public market.

Early-stage investment

Arctic Shores is at one of the earliest stages of the business lifecycle, and the failure rate of companies at that stage is usually much higher than those at a later stage.

Illiquid investment

The number of transactions in shares of private companies is usually significantly lower than in public companies, typically resulting in it taking longer to sell shares in private companies at a price that is at least equal to the price that the shares were bought at. Accordingly, the Arctic Shores investment opportunity is considered to be higher risk than more liquid companies.

Valuation

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Firm valuation: $30—46m (Dealroom.co estimates Jan 2023.)

Appendix

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Arctic Shores Funding

Date	Investors	Amount	Round
-	Home	N/A	- (not yet verified)
Dec 2017	N/A	N/A	Seed (not yet verified)
Sep 2019	Beringea, Candy Ventures	$5.5m	Series A
Feb 2020	Tech Nation	N/A	Support Program
Jan 2022	Standard Treasury	£1.5m	Debt (not yet verified)
Jan 2023	Beringea, Calculus Capital, Praetura Ventures	£5.8m	Series B
Total Funding		$13.1m

Date	Number of issues shared	New shares	Class of shares	Comments
28/06/2013	2	2	Ordinary
28/01/2014	2,000,000	N/A	Ordinary	Sub-division of shares.
10/12/2014	2,169,521	169,521	Ordinary
23/06/2016	2,386,883	217,362	Ordinary
23/06/2016	2,864,189	477,306	Ordinary
08/02/2017	2,976,372	112,183	Ordinary
20/06/2017		119,343	Ordinary
04/08/2017		190,945	Ordinary
10/10/2017		102,635	Ordinary
09/07/2018		204,375	Ordinary
18/10/2018		376,052	Ordinary
22/08/2019		55,780	Ordinary
28/08/2019		874,045	A Ordinary
20/04/2022		202,740	Ordinary
20/04/2022		2,387	Ordinary
20/04/2022		7,860	Ordinary
20/04/2022		80,000	Ordinary
20/04/2022		624	Ordinary
20/04/2022		2,048	Ordinary
21/04/2022		249	Ordinary
21/04/2022		249	Ordinary
05/01/2023
05/01/2023
05/01/2023
05/01/2023
05/01/2023
05/01/2023
05/01/2023
05/01/2023
24/02/2023
11/04/2023
25/05/2023
29/08/2023
27/09/2023

References and notes

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