Assessment of people in the workplace is never neutral. Every evaluation, rating, and feedback session carries the potential to shape careers, influence opportunities, and impact organisational culture. That's why ISO 10667 exists: to establish a framework that ensures people assessments are valid, reliable, fair, and ethically sound.
Traditional approaches to talent assessment, including annual performance reviews, subjective manager ratings, and gut feel decision-making, often fall short of these standards. They're vulnerable to bias, inconsistent, and disconnected from actual performance signals. Solas OS, an AI-driven talent operating system, offers a fundamentally different approach. By analysing everyday workplace signals, it helps organisations build assessment practices that align with ISO 10667 best practice and deliver genuinely fair, evidence-based insights.
Here are seven ways Solas OS supports organisations in meeting ISO 10667 requirements.
1. Validity: Ensuring Assessments Actually Predict What They Claim To
ISO 10667 requirement: Assessments must demonstrate validity, meaning they accurately measure what they're intended to measure and predict relevant outcomes.
The Solas OS approach: Rather than relying on single-moment snapshots of performance (like an annual review), Solas OS continuously monitors workplace signals: communication patterns, collaboration networks, project participation, and how work actually gets done. This multifaceted data provides a richer, more valid picture of performance that correlates directly with business outcomes. The system learns which observable behaviours genuinely predict success in specific roles, teams, and contexts.
Why it's better than traditional methods: A manager's annual rating is subjective and often influenced by recency bias. What someone did last month overshadows what they accomplished across the full year. Solas OS observes hundreds of daily signals over months, creating a composite view of actual performance capability. This longitudinal evidence base is far more valid for predicting future success than a single subjective conversation.
2. Reliability and Consistency: Moving Beyond Recency Bias
ISO 10667 requirement: Assessment results must be reliable and consistent, producing stable measures that aren't distorted by temporary factors or the assessor's mood on the day.
The Solas OS approach: Behavioural analytics removes the human inconsistency from assessment. Two managers rating the same employee in the same role can reach wildly different conclusions; algorithms are consistent. Solas OS analyses the same workplace signals the same way every time, eliminating rater bias. The system's assessments remain stable across time unless actual behaviour genuinely changes, preventing the false fluctuations that plague subjective reviews.
Why it's better than traditional methods: A 360-degree feedback round often produces contradictory findings: the manager thinks you're collaborative, peers think you're dominating, and direct reports view you as defensive. These conflicts usually reflect differing perspectives rather than genuine performance variation. Solas OS cuts through this by anchoring assessment in observable, measurable behaviour that doesn't change based on who's doing the observing. You get reliability that actually means something.
3. Fairness and Absence of Adverse Impact: Eliminating Demographic Bias
ISO 10667 requirement: Assessments must be fair and must not adversely impact individuals or groups based on protected characteristics (age, gender, ethnicity, disability, and so on).
The Solas OS approach: Solas OS measures what people actually do: their communication frequency, collaboration patterns, and project contributions. Not subjective judgements about whether they "seem engaged" or "feel like a cultural fit." Because the system is metrics-based, it's inherently more objective and far less susceptible to unconscious bias. The platform can be monitored and audited to ensure assessments don't systematically disadvantage any demographic group. This transparency enables organisations to identify and correct bias, rather than embedding it (as traditional assessments often do).
Why it's better than traditional methods: Managers carry unconscious biases. We all do. Research consistently shows that identical performance is rated differently depending on the employee's demographic characteristics. A woman who challenges decisions is "difficult"; a man is "assertive." Behavioural data doesn't make subjective judgements. It counts contributions, measures interaction patterns, and records participation in the same way for everyone. This eliminates the unspoken double standards that poison fairness in traditional reviews.
4. Transparency and Explainability: People Understand How They're Assessed
ISO 10667 requirement: ISO 10667 emphasises that people being assessed should understand what's being measured, why, and how the findings will be used.
The Solas OS approach: Solas OS provides clear, explainable insights. When the system identifies someone as a high performer, it can point to specific behaviours: "You've been central to 8 high-impact projects this quarter, with strong cross-team collaboration." The metrics are visible and understandable. Employees can see the data driving decisions about them and understand which behaviours the organisation values.
Why it's better than traditional methods: An annual review often delivers vague, judgement-laden feedback: "You need to be a better team player" or "You lack strategic thinking." What does this mean? How can you change? Traditional assessments are often opaque, leaving people confused about what they're being evaluated on. Solas OS provides concrete, measurable feedback rooted in observable behaviour. People understand not just the assessment result, but exactly why.
5. Ethical Use of Results: Assessments Inform, They Don't Replace Human Judgement
ISO 10667 requirement: Assessment results must be used ethically and responsibly. They should inform decisions, but organisations retain responsibility for how results are interpreted and applied.
The Solas OS approach: Solas OS is deliberately designed as a decision-support tool, not a decision-replacement mechanism. The system surfaces insights and patterns, but humans retain full authority over how to interpret and act on them. A manager might learn that an employee is highly collaborative and project-focused, but deciding whether that person is ready for promotion remains a human decision, informed by, but not dictated by, the data. This preserves human agency and accountability.
Why it's better than traditional methods: Traditional assessments create the illusion of objectivity while hiding subjective judgement. A "performance rating of 3 out of 5" sounds objective, but it's actually compressed human opinion, wrapped in a number. Once you have a number, organisations often treat it as truth: "She got a 3, so she's not promotion material." Solas OS is transparent about what it does: it surfaces behavioural signals and patterns. It's explicitly not claiming that an algorithm has rendered a final verdict on human capability. This transparency forces organisations to think more carefully about how they use assessment data.
6. Continuous Assessment vs Snapshot Reviews: Ongoing Data Beats Annual Snapshots
ISO 10667 requirement: Good assessment practice recognises that single-point-in-time measures have limitations; multiple data points and observations over time strengthen validity and reliability.
The Solas OS approach: Rather than relying on the annual review cycle (where people are expected to remember what they did in Q1), Solas OS continuously captures workplace signals. An employee's contribution pattern, collaboration quality, and project involvement are measured every day. This creates a rich longitudinal dataset that reveals trends, patterns, and genuine capability far more clearly than any retrospective recounting.
Why it's better than traditional methods: The annual review is a relic of industrial-era management. Asking a manager to recall and fairly assess someone's year-long performance in a single conversation is unrealistic. Memory is selective, recent events loom large, and the whole exercise becomes more about completing a form than genuine insight. Continuous behavioural measurement means you're never relying on what people remember. You're working with actual data about how work happened, captured in real time.
7. Evidence-Based Decision Making: Data Beats Gut Feel
ISO 10667 requirement: Assessment decisions should be grounded in evidence, not impression or intuition.
The Solas OS approach: Solas OS powers genuinely evidence-based workforce decisions. Need to identify high performers for a special project? The system doesn't guess based on instinct. It shows you who's been most effective across relevant dimensions. Need to spot emerging risks like disengagement, knowledge loss, or flight risk? The system's algorithms identify patterns invisible to casual observation. Promotion decisions, succession planning, team composition, capability development: all become grounded in observable data rather than hunches.
Why it's better than traditional methods: How many times have organisations promoted someone because they "seemed like the right fit" only to find they struggled in the new role? How many talented people have been overlooked because they're less visible to senior leaders? How much institutional knowledge walks out the door because no one saw it leaving? Traditional assessment, built on gut feel, informal networks, and management opinion, is riddled with blind spots. Solas OS doesn't rely on who impressed the CEO in a meeting. It shows you actual contribution, actual impact, actual capability. This shifts decision-making from the dangerous territory of intuition to solid ground: evidence.
Moving Beyond Compliance to Genuine Fairness
ISO 10667 isn't just a compliance checklist. It represents a commitment to fairness, validity, and ethical practice in how organisations assess their people. Many organisations see it as a box to tick; Solas OS treats it as a genuine direction for change.
By analysing everyday workplace signals rather than relying on subjective judgment, Solas OS helps organisations build assessment practices that are more valid, more reliable, and more fair. Employees understand how they're evaluated. Bias has nowhere to hide. Decision-makers work from evidence, not instinct. And organisations make genuinely better decisions about their most valuable asset: their people.
The move from annual reviews and gut feel to continuous behavioural analytics isn't just more compliant with ISO 10667. It's fundamentally more respectful of people and more effective for organisations. That's a combination worth pursuing.