Our range of products & services
Recruitment tools to help businesses and consumers understand job fit and thinking tools to unleash creativity and innovation.
Big 5 Assessments
Pre hire tests and assessments for screening and selecting on 'Job Fit'
Learn moreWhat Job Fits Me
An online careers and personality assessment for students and jobseekers
Learn moreRecruitment Tools to understand job fit for businesses and consumers
Big 5 Assessments
As a UK-based worldwide supplier of Psychometric Tests we have over 15 years of assessment experience having developed our market leading "job-fit" technology. Our flagship "Big 5" range of pre-employment tests and assessments incorporates modern, validated behavioral assessments in an easy-to-use online platform specifically designed for the commercial business market.
Highly affordable and requiring little or no training or expert interpretation, Big 5 Assessments are used by thousands of companies around the globe to hire, train, and promote the right people for the right jobs. The ease of use, custom benchmarking, applicant ranking, and data mining capabilities make it the right choice for both large and small companies.
What Job Fits Me
What Job Fits Me is a leading career and personality assessment to help you understand your job fit!
Based on the "Big 5 Theory" of personality and with over 12 Million assessments completed worldwide, this free careers and personality assessment helps you to understand which jobs fit you the best.
It's free to try and you will get access to a range of free scores and reports so you can begin to understand your unique combination of strengths, which jobs are a good fit for you and even which careers will pay you the best so that you can begin to discover your full potential.
Thinking Tools
Helping you to unleash creativity & innovation
Today more than ever, businesses need a new way of thinking that creates fresh opportunities. A way of thinking that seeks new solutions to old intractable problems through unorthodox methods or elements that would normally be ignored by logical or analytical thinking.
Whether you just want to fix something that is broken, solve a problem or address a difficult issue, we can help you. However, before we can start we need to identify and understand what we're trying to do. We call this "Focus" - this means defining what we are trying to achieve, considering the constraints and developing a wide range of approaches.
There are many widely held misconceptions about creativity - some think it's just about freedom, some "brainstorming" and others the province of 'special' people who can do it.
In reality, the science is somewhat different, everyone can be creative...the question is, are they willing to learn and practice a few techniques and methods?
Our contention is that by using brain friendly techniques and methods, combined with thinking tools, we can achieve remarkable results from everyone. Everybody has a wealth of life experience that they can draw on so, given the right environment and techniques, they can very easily be creative.
We can help you:
- Develop & Release Creativity
- Become a more Innovative Organisation
- Generate New Ideas
- Solve Problems using creative approaches
- Implement Continuous Improvement
Our Approach
- Developing & Releasing Creativity
- Do you need to be more creative? Struggling for inspiration or finding it difficult to get out of a rut and unleash your creativity? Developing and releasing your creativity can be hard work when you don't know how.
- The Innovative Organisation
- Creativing an innovative organisation is quite a daunting task. It is more than just a motivational poster on the wall, it requires an understanding of human nature and a variety of tools and techniques.
- Generating New Ideas
- It can be difficult to generate new ideas! You could be in for a long wait if you sit under the tree waiting for the right idea to fall on to your head. Discover how to generate new ideas on demand.
- Creative Problem Solving
- There may be many more ways to solve a problem...but often we don't take time look for them. We just use our existing paradigms to create a solution. Discover how breakthrough thinking can help.
- Continuous Improvement
- The popular phrase "If it isn't broke, don't fix" often means that we overlook a wide range of opportunities and potential to create improvements in our products, services, systems and process.
Simple. Practical. Effective.
Just as man and higher apes are distinguished from the lower primates by their use of tools, so higher order thinkers are distinguished by their use of thinking tools.
- Six Thinking Hats
- The primary thinking management tool for creative and constructive thinking.
- Lateral Thinking
- The creative accelerator that generates a wealth of new ideas on demand.
- Direct Attention Thinking Tools
- These focus or mind on specific thinking tasks to increase productivity.
- Simplicity
- Purifies and simplifies your products, services, systems, process and thinking without comprising on value.
- CoRT
- Developed specifically for students, CoRT enables better thinking using a structured approach.
- Focus on Facilitation
- Incorparting a variety of tools, it enables innovation leaders to ensure constructive thinking.
- Keynote & Conference Speaking
- Our experienced conference and keynote speakers help you to provide an educational, informative, memorable, and often humorous experience at your next conference, away day, AGM or company meeting.
- One–to–One Coaching
- One-to-one coaching that helps individuals to develop their creative thinking skills in a highly tailored and personalised enviroment.
- Facilitation
- Experienced facilitators guide your people through a practical session using your 'live' topics without any previous training or creative thinking experience required for instant results.
- Workshops
- Experienced trainers deliver a one-off or series of workshops in the creative thinking techniques and tools for medium to large in-house teams.
- Formal Public Training
- Individuals and small groups can sign up to public courses for formal training in the creative thinking tools and techniques.
- Train–the–Trainer
- In-house L&D staff learn how to deliver and facilitate their own employees learning and development in the creative thinking tools and techniques.
- Company Wide Programme
- A highly tailored solution that takes large groups, project teams or departments through a company wide creativity and innovation initiative.
About Us
Based in Oxford in the UK, we are a worldwide provider of pre-employment assessments and creative thinking training & workshops.
It all starts with getting the right person! Our flagship Big 5 Assessments line of assessments incorporates modern, validated behavioural assessments in an easy-to-use online platform specifically designed for volume business use. Uniquely affordable and requiring little or no training or expert interpretation, Big 5 Assessments are used by thousands of companies around the globe to hire, train, and promote the right people for the right jobs. The ease of use, custom benchmarking, applicant ranking, and unlimited reporting capabilities make it the right choice for both large and small companies.
Creative thinking skills helps you to capitalise on the intellects of your staff. Once you have the right people in the right jobs...there is more that can be done. There is a growing realisation in organisations that the only true sustainable resource are their people. We believe that once clients get the right person onboard they can harness the intellectual capacity and experience in their minds. Using simple creative techniques we can help clients with creative problem solving, new idea generation and opportunity thinking.
Our Team
Proud to be a 'Family Run' business!
Nigel Newman
Co-Founder & Managing Director
Nigel is a highly experienced facilitator and a Global Master Practitioner in Dr. Edward de Bono's Thinking Methods. Nigel is a former military fast jet pilot and is a teaching graduate with a background in business management where he became experienced in the use of psychometric assessment in the recruitment and development of effective personnel. He is a regular conference speaker and has presented workshops to a wide variety of audiences. He has delivered major programmes for corporate clients including BT, Allianz, PWC, Bayer and HSBC helping them to hold more effective meetings and release creativity in their teams and organisations.
Paul Newman
Co-Founder & Director of Services
Paul is an HR Management & Business Management graduate with over 20 years experience of working in the Psychometric Testing industry. Paul is responsible for the day–to–day running of the business, but also for overseeing the technology side of the business. Paul has extensive experience in software development, product management, sales and marketing. In addition to this, Paul also has frontline recruitment and selection experience from sourcing and attracting candidates, assessing, screening, behavioural interviewing, offer management and resource planning as well as developing assessment centres and competency frameworks from scratch.
Janet Newman
Director of Financial Services
Janet is a teaching graduate with an exemplary and extensive background in the education and public sector. Janets experience in creativity and innovation includes an EU-funded project to introduce thinking skills in to schools and she is also an experienced conference speaker on the subject. Janet has also been responsible for multi-million pound budgets and acts as Director of Financial Services for PCSL HR. More importantly, Janet is also the glue in the business and her extra–ordinary leadership skills, coaching skills and financial acumen help to keep driving the year–on–year growth of the business and the success of the business.
Nikky Van Bommel
Director of Marketing
Nikky joined the 'family' 4 years ago. Nikky has worked in the Psychometric industry for almost 10 years and as a true ESFJ she is organised, realistic, personable and helpful. Nikky is Bi-Lingual (Dutch and English) and grew up in Belgium and The Netherlands, she moved to Oxford as a child and did the European Baccalaureate at the European School in Culham before studying Marketing and Sociology at Bristol UWE. She has since put her Marketing degree to good use. Nikky has worked for some of the leading Marketing Agencies in the UK and currently heads up the Marketing activities at Big 5 Assessments. As a mum of two young sons she works part time hours and loves having a warm cuppa tea at the office with the rest of the 'Big 5 Family'.
Mauro Caresimo
Senior Solutions Architect
Mauro studied Computer Studies at Cardiff Metropolitan university and leads the IT Team. Mauro is an all-round, multi skilled (Coldfusion, Python, Javascript, Java, Lucee, SQL, API's using XML & JSON) and adaptable IT professional, who also specialises in complex & core software design & engineering, "Big Data" and system and cloud infrastructure using Amazon Web Services. Committed, with a keen eye for design, an ability to rapidly learn new techniques and technologies, and the willingness to take on challenging problems and follow them through to a successful conclusion. Mauro's worked with Comtec Europe Ltd (now Insperitec) Sony, Unit4, The International Baccalaureate, Abcam & Highland Spring.
Amy Carter
International Account Manager
Amy is the most recent member to join the Big 5 family, having previously worked in the psychometrics industry for almost 10 years. Having graduated with a degree in Physics and Business Studies, her passions are problem solving, maths, supporting and helping other people. She thoroughly enjoys her role at pcslHR, as she is able to apply all of these skills when managing our new business and a selection of existing client accounts. She is extremely client focussed and likes to ensure she fully understands a client’s needs before working with them to select the best assessments for their recruitment process. Amy is finding it extremely useful getting to know our existing clients and how they work with us.
Rob Dominic
Occupational Psychologist
Rob is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist with over 20 years experience consulting on leadership assessment, executive coaching, culture change and psychometric design. He has extensive experience working for a variety of global organisations in many sectors, including financial services, energy, pharmaceuticals, engineering, information technology and professional services. As well as working as a consultant, Rob has also held senior management and leadership roles within a number of FTSE 100 companies. Rob typically works on leadership assessment and the design of psychometric tools. Rob has a BA (Hons) degree in Social Psychology from the University of Sussex, an MSc in Occupational Psychology from University of Nottingham and is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist and an accredited executive coach. He is also studying to complete a professional doctorate at the University of Birkbeck (London).
Daniel Bridson
Lead Software Engineer
Dan studied music composition at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire for five years before making the switch to software development. He has now worked in the IT industry for over 11 years, developing web applications for a diverse range of organisations ranging from online music retailers to the BBC and Sky TV. Dan specialises in Django and Python but has turned his hand to pretty much every modern day development environment out there. At pcslHR, he has worked on the construction of our recently-launched personality assessment consumer platform, which delivers careers advice to students, graduates, job seekers and professionals considering a change of direction. Dan's vital contribution to the site mainly comprised Django 2 and Python 3.6 coding, as well as building the database backend. Other technologies he worked with include VueJS, Xpath, Xquery, and Stripe Payments API, subscriptions and coupons.
Graham Stuart
Associate Consultant
Graham is an experienced Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), Personal Development, Leadership & Management and Business Development Coach. He is also a certified Clinical Hypnotherapist, Mindfulness Practitioner and Time Line Therapist. Graham also works with businesses to encourage employee engagement, improved communication skills, soft skills and "Big 5" psychometric profiling tools. In 2014 Graham worked with Andrzej Slawinski, the inventor of AudioStrobe technology and co-founder of VERIM (Virtual,- Energy,- Resources,- and Intelligence Management), producing over 100 AVS (audio-visual-stimulation) programs including productions for Deepak Chopra. Graham is focused on continuing to develop digital products to help in the field of personal wellbeing, growth and mental health through the creation of hypnosis/mindfulness MP3 recordings and personal development/wellbeing centric e-books.