For yacht crew · 107 questions
They were fine at interview. They left halfway through the season.
Junior crew leaving mid-season without notice is the expensive problem in yacht hiring, and it is rarely a competence problem. The Yacht Crew Assessment measures the traits that decide whether someone finishes what they signed up for.
- Questions
- 107
- Scored items
- 104
- Constructs
- 7
- Sub-constructs
- 26
- Formats
- 4
Every scored item in the instrument, one square each, grouped by construct. The hollow squares are the 52 written backwards. Agreeing with them counts against the score. Half the assessment disagrees with the other half on purpose.
Yacht crew · 104 items
52
Items written in the negative, half the assessment. Agreeing with everything produces a contradiction, not a strong score.
26
Sub-constructs beneath the seven headline scores, so a result points at specific behaviour instead of a broad label.
4
Question formats. A candidate who has worked out how to look good on one of them has not solved the other three.
The problem
The cost is not the recruitment fee.
It is a short-handed crew in the middle of a charter season, a rushed replacement hired on availability rather than fit, and the knock-on effect on everyone who stayed. By the time someone hands in notice in a foreign port, every option left is a bad one.
The traits that predict it do not show up in a CV or a twenty-minute call: how a person treats a commitment that has become inconvenient, how long they recover from a hard correction, how they handle a season away from home. They do show up under structured measurement.
What comes back
A profile across all seven constructs, with the sub-construct detail underneath, plus a response-validity read on whether the person actually engaged with the questions.
Reports arrive as a PDF profile and an Excel export carrying the risk profile and validity columns, so a fleet manager can compare across candidates rather than reading one report at a time.
Four formats
One format is one strategy to defeat.
The assessment runs four sections of 26 questions, each in a different format. A candidate who has worked out how to look good on one of them has not solved the other three.
Likert
26Agreement with a stated position. Fast, familiar, and half of it reverse-keyed.
Situational judgement
26A scenario from life aboard, and what they would actually do about it.
Ranking
26Order the options. Preference shows up where agreement can hide.
Comparative
26Forced choice between two defensible answers. Nowhere to be agreeable.
What it measures
Seven constructs, 104 scored items.
Fifty-two items are reverse-keyed, and 26 sub-constructs sit underneath the seven headline scores, so a result points at a specific behaviour rather than a broad label.
Conscientiousness & Dependability
Whether the checklist gets finished when nobody is watching.
20Commitment Orientation
How they treat a commitment that has stopped being convenient.
16Emotional Resilience
Recovery time after a bad charter or a hard correction.
16Interpersonal Adaptability
Living and working with the same eight people for months.
16Service Mindset
Whether guest service is performed or meant.
16Separation Tolerance
The pull of home when home is a season away.
12Grit & Perseverance
Finishing a season that turned out harder than the pitch.
8Honest limits
What this does not do.
It does not assess seamanship, service technique, or any other skill. It does not decide the hire. A low score is a reason to ask a better question at interview, not an automatic no.
Scoring uses absolute thresholds today. Norm-referenced percentiles, and validity thresholds calibrated by device and language group, need a larger completed sample than we have. We will publish them when they are real.
What crew managers ask us
How is this different from a standard personality test?
It is built for one decision: whether a person completes a season. It is not a general personality description. Separation Tolerance, for example, is not a construct you will find in an off-the-shelf inventory, and it is one of the more useful predictors when the job means months away from home.
Why four question formats instead of one?
Because a single format is a single strategy to defeat. Agreeing with everything works on a Likert battery. It does nothing where both options on offer are agreeable, and nothing where a candidate has to put one value above another.
Will crew with English as a second language be disadvantaged?
The items are written to a low reading level, with single-clause sentences, no phrasal verbs and no double negatives. That was a design constraint from the start rather than a later accommodation.
Can we assess crew already aboard?
Yes. Running it across an existing crew is usually how managers calibrate what a strong profile looks like on their own boat before using it on applicants.
How do you know someone answered carelessly?
Responses are checked for internal consistency as part of scoring. Someone clicking through without reading produces a pattern that does not hold together, and the report flags that separately rather than quietly averaging it into a score. We do not publish how the check works, for the same reason you would not publish the answer key.
Start with the crew you already have.
Run the assessment across a current crew to see what a strong profile looks like on your boat, then use it on applicants. We will walk you through the reports.