I recently met with Thomas Marks, who joined eSkill as VP of Marketing post-acquisition as part of the new executive team installed by Scaleworks. The discussion provided a fascinating window into how a 22-year-old assessment company is reinventing itself.
After testing 19 million candidates across two decades, eSkill found itself at a crossroads when Scaleworks acquired them in June 2024. The venture equity firm’s “grow narrow to grow big” philosophy has pushed the company to make hard choices about where to focus.
The Gray-Collar Skills Assessment Gap Nobody’s Talking About
The assessment market has become increasingly polarized. On one end, you have behavioral testing specialists creating sophisticated personality profiles for white-collar professionals. On the other hand, basic skills tests for frontline workers haven’t evolved much since the 1990s. But there’s a gap in the middle that Marks calls “gray-collar” roles, which require both hands-on technical skills and digital literacy.
Consider a modern manufacturing technician who operates a CNC machine while also analyzing production data in Excel. Or a healthcare worker managing both patient care and electronic health records. These roles represent the fastest-growing segment of the workforce.
Mapping the Competitive Terrain
In the assessment market, eSkill competitors have picked a side, leaving the gray-collar middle underserved.
- TestGorilla has positioned itself squarely in the professional and remote employee testing space, with particular strength in the tech industry. Their strategy involves building a job board model where test results are shared with candidates who can then apply to other positions. They have limited customization capabilities. An employee count-based pricing model makes them challenging for organizations needing role-specific assessments or divisional implementations.
- Criteria Corp targets white-collar professional roles almost exclusively, with minimal gray-collar or hands-on technical testing capabilities. They excel at cognitive and personality assessments for knowledge workers but offer less flexibility for organizations needing to test equipment operation or trade skills.
- CandidTech focuses on professional jobs with limited technical skills coverage, using a per-candidate pricing model based on annual hiring estimates. While this pricing approach can work well for companies with predictable hiring patterns, their limited simulation capabilities for hands-on skills and focus on standardized roles make them less suitable for organizations with unique position requirements or those hiring for roles that blend manual and digital work.
- Testlify represents a newer entrant emphasizing white-collar and professional job assessment. They’ve adopted per-assessment pricing. Their relative newness means a less-proven track record in complex implementations or highly customized assessment needs, particularly for organizations outside the professional services sector.
The Customization Imperative Driving Real-World Adoption
Here’s a statistic that should make every HR tech vendor pause: 72% of all deployed eSkill tests are customized in some way. The platform’s approach to customization reveals three critical capabilities:
- Content flexibility allows organizations to mix and match from 70,000+ questions across 600 subject areas, create tests from scratch using proprietary questions, or digitize existing paper-based assessments. The latter is particularly valuable for government clients who’ve used the same validated tests for decades.
- Simulation innovation enables testing of job-specific tasks ranging from forklift operation to fingerprint analysis, digitally recreating hands-on tasks previously thought impossible to test remotely.
- Their anti-cheat evolution moves beyond basic proctoring to AI-assisted integrity scoring, with baseline anti-cheat features being built into most packages at no extra cost to address the ChatGPT problem undermining traditional assessment methods.
The ideal eSkill customer profile emerged clearly from our discussion, though I’ll respect their request not to detail specific verticals. The sweet spot encompasses mid-market organizations with 500-5,000 employees experiencing high turnover in critical operational roles, where bad hires have immediate operational impact and verifying skills in an AI-enhanced resume world has become nearly impossible.
The Scaleworks Effect: Strategic Discipline Through Deliberate Narrowing
The acquisition by Scaleworks represents a fundamental reset of the company’s strategic direction. All customer-facing roles have been brought in-house after years of outsourcing. Companies that wish to purchase ad-hoc blocks of assessments for one-time use, once a significant source of revenue, are now actively avoided. eSkill is focused on its mission to help companies hire better and retain longer with programmatic skills-based hiring.
This narrowing has freed eSkill to develop deeper expertise in its target segments. When recent executive orders created new requirements for commercial driver English proficiency, eSkill had comprehensive assessments ready within a month. The digitization push in government testing finds them leading with innovations like digital fingerprint analysis.
Package Architecture That Reflects Implementation Reality
Perhaps the most telling strategic shift is eSkill’s move from “everything for everyone” to a clear good-better-best packaging strategy that acknowledges different organizational readiness levels.
- The Foundation package offers self-guided implementation for simple use cases, basic customization through mixing and matching existing content, and email support only. It’s designed for single departments or organizations with straightforward needs and internal expertise to manage assessment programs.
- The Growth package, the most popular option, includes 30-day guided onboarding with implementation experts, standard ATS integrations, video questions and custom branding capabilities, plus chat and phone support. This recognizes that most organizations need assistance through initial setup, but can self-manage once established.
- The Scale package provides 60-day full implementation with a dedicated manager, complete test authoring from scratch capabilities, team grading and assessment consulting, and dedicated account management post-implementation. This serves organizations with complex, unique requirements or those making assessment a strategic differentiator.
eSkill developed its new packaging strategy recognizing that more complex deployments require proper support and that unsupported, these types of implementations often fail to deliver value.
Pragmatic AI Integration Over Buzzword Chasing
When pressed about AI integration, Marks provided refreshingly honest answers that distinguish eSkill from competitors chasing every AI trend. Rather than building AI coding tests or LLM architecture assessments, they’re focusing on practical applications that solve real customer problems.
AI-assisted content search, launching Q4 2025, will help users navigate their massive 70,000+ question library more effectively. AI-powered assessment creation from job descriptions will reduce the time to build custom tests from hours to minutes. They’re using AI primarily to identify and prevent cheating rather than to create fancier tests.
Most interestingly, they’re focusing on testing AI literacy for gray-collar roles, helping organizations assess whether a warehouse supervisor can use AI tools to optimize routing or if a medical billing clerk can leverage AI for coding assistance rather than deep technical AI knowledge that few roles actually require.
The Integration Infrastructure Nobody Talks About (But Everyone Needs)
One technical detail deserves special attention: eSkill is building an integration core with common API endpoints adopted by major ATS platforms. While this might sound like plumbing, it addresses a critical pain point that often kills assessment implementations.
Today, every integration is either custom-built or runs through third-party middleware, creating maintenance nightmares and limiting flexibility. The new approach will enable rapid integration and deployment at scale, which is essential for a company targeting mid-market organizations using diverse HR tech stacks. The platform currently integrates with 30+ ATS providers, but the integration core strategy could exponentially expand this reach while reducing implementation timeframes from weeks to days.
Strategic Implications for HR Technology Buyers
eSkill’s transformation under Scaleworks offers important lessons for HR leaders evaluating assessment platforms. The willingness to say no to revenue streams that don’t align with the core mission demonstrates strategic discipline and recognition that customization isn’t a nice-to-have but essential for real-world application.
For organizations evaluating assessment platforms, the key question is whether your current solution acknowledges the fundamental changes in work. As the lines between technical and knowledge work continue to blur, assessment strategies built on outdated job categorizations will increasingly fail to identify the talent you need.
The discipline to narrow focus while deepening capability represents a mature strategy. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, eSkill is betting that being exceptional for specific use cases creates more value than being adequate across the board. The next 18 months will reveal whether this focused approach can capture the gray-collar assessment opportunity.
