Employers in Latin America screen for customer service and communication, not digital skills

When employers across Latin America screen job candidates through a standardized digital assessment platform, the competencies they choose to formalize are overwhelmingly interpersonal and attitudinal rather than technical. A new large-scale study analyzing 1,296,587 evaluations from 618,924 unique candidates across 38,075 selection processes in 17 Latin American countries finds that Customer Orientation tops the list, formalized in 36.38 percent of recruitment processes, followed by Effective Communication at 34.54 percent and Achievement Orientation at 31.60 percent. Teamwork (26.63 percent), Integrity (21.63 percent), and Flexibility and Adaptability (20.77 percent) complete the leading group. Strikingly, digital competencies were requested in only 5.64 percent of processes and leadership competencies in just 13.16 percent, a pattern the researchers describe as a pragmatic regional adaptation rather than evidence that technological skills no longer matter.

The study, published in Heliyon, draws on data from Evaluar.com, an assessment platform founded in Ecuador in 2012 that has served more than 5,000 client companies across over 17 Spanish-speaking countries. The researchers, Andrea Vinueza-Cabezas, César Parra-Gaete, Pablo A. Pinto-Delacadena, and Juan José Samaniego-Frixone, deliberately frame their object of study as “platform-observed employer assessment demand”: the set of competencies employers actively select to formalize and measure through standardized screening instruments at the early stage of hiring. This is a narrower and arguably more revealing measure than the job-vacancy analyses that dominate labor market research. Job advertisements capture only stated preferences, the competencies employers list as desirable. Platform assessment records, by contrast, show which competencies organizations have actually chosen to measure with standardized instruments, because employers on this platform selected competencies from a fixed catalog with no default templates or recommendation lists steering their choices.

The dataset covers assessments conducted between June and October 2024, a window chosen to avoid the seasonal recruitment peaks of November through February. The 17 countries included represent all markets where the platform had active recruitment processes during the period. The candidate pool was heavily concentrated: Peru accounted for 31.0 percent of unique candidates, Ecuador 25.2 percent, and Bolivia 14.2 percent, together making up 70.4 percent. Measured by recruitment processes, the unit of analysis for assessment intensity, the shares were 45.19, 15.69, and 10.05 percent respectively. Candidates had a mean age of 31.09 years, and men represented 52.5 percent of the pool. The platform’s catalog contains more than 118 competencies, of which 119 were observed at least once during the study window; 101 belong to the platform’s standard twelve-family taxonomy and 18 are client-defined custom competencies, which were excluded from the main analyses because each was requested in fewer than 0.4 percent of processes.

Grouping the observed competencies into the platform’s twelve families reveals the structure of early-stage demand. Attitudinal competencies were the most pervasive, requested in at least one form in 65.55 percent of processes, followed by cognitive (49.73 percent), commercial (46.31 percent), relational (43.99 percent), and communicational (40.35 percent) families. Educational (19.76 percent), risk (19.44 percent), leadership (13.16 percent), and digital (5.64 percent) families trailed far behind. The authors interpret the low digital figure carefully. Specialized digital or technical competencies, they argue, are likely not absent from employer priorities but reserved for later, more in-depth stages of the hiring funnel, where high-fidelity methods such as work sample tests or structured interviews are required for accurate measurement. They also note that local companies in labor markets historically characterized by high informality and segmentation may prioritize establishing whether candidates possess the attitudes needed to interact effectively and pursue goals before evaluating technological proficiency.

Country-level profiles showed a broadly consistent regional core with substantial national deviations. Customer Orientation or Effective Communication led in every market. Customer Orientation was the top competency in Ecuador (33.73 percent), Mexico (52.38 percent), the Central America group (36.32 percent), and the South America group (32.01 percent), while Effective Communication led in Peru (38.39 percent) and Bolivia (46.21 percent). Mexico displayed the highest concentration on a single competency, suggesting a markedly customer-driven screening profile. The Central America and South America figures come from analytical groupings of countries that individually fell below a 5 percent process-share threshold, aggregated solely to ensure adequate sample sizes; the authors stress these are not homogeneous markets.

To quantify cross-country effects, the researchers fitted separate logistic regressions for the twenty competencies with the highest candidate-level evaluation volumes, modeling the probability that each was requested in a given process. Country was entered as a fixed effect with Ecuador as the reference, alongside the percentage of female candidates, mean candidate age, and modal marital status. Because the sample size of 38,075 processes would render even trivial differences statistically significant, inference relied on country-stratified bootstrap procedures with 2,000 replications, and magnitudes were converted into adjusted predicted-probability differences in percentage points. Across the twenty country contrasts for the four core competencies, adjusted differences relative to Ecuador ranged from −16.2 to +19.9 percentage points, with a median absolute difference of 5.6 points. Mexico showed the strongest positive associations for Customer Orientation (odds ratio 2.29, equivalent to +19.9 percentage points) and Achievement Orientation (odds ratio 2.01, +16.4 points), while Bolivia stood out for Effective Communication (odds ratio 2.22, +18.1 points). The Central America grouping showed consistently lower odds of requesting Achievement Orientation (odds ratio 0.45, −14.4 points) and Teamwork (odds ratio 0.36, −16.2 points). Fifteen of the twenty contrasts had confidence intervals excluding zero; the five that did not were all smaller than two percentage points.

The models, however, explained only a small share of the variation in whether a competency was requested, with McFadden’s pseudo-R-squared values of 0.019, 0.020, 0.027, and 0.019 for the four core competencies. The authors interpret this low explanatory power not as evidence of regional homogeneity but as indicating that most variation arises from unobserved characteristics of individual processes, such as the role, sector, or employer. The dataset contains no client-level metadata on industry, firm size, job type, or hierarchical level, a limitation the authors acknowledge as directly affecting interpretation. Sensitivity analyses nonetheless supported the robustness of the headline findings: excluding Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia left the four core competencies unchanged in the top four positions, and weighting each of the 17 countries equally preserved the same leaders, though Achievement Orientation declined from 31.60 to 23.78 percent, indicating that part of its high frequency reflects its prevalence in Peru.

A third analysis examined whether competencies are formalized in bundles. Pairwise correlations of co-request across processes were uniformly low, ranging from −0.10 to 0.28, with the strongest association between Customer Orientation and Achievement Orientation (r = 0.28), followed by Teamwork and Effective Communication (r = 0.19). Although most correlations reached statistical significance given the sample size, the authors judge their practical significance negligible. The pattern suggests that employers do not rely on fixed blocks of skills at the screening stage but assemble requirements flexibly around each specific role, consistent with the modular configuration that platform-based recruitment allows. This finding contrasts with research suggesting competencies cluster into cognitive, social, and emotional groups that are assessed together.

Gender-related patterns emerged as statistically significant but small. After adjusting for country, no competency reached a partial eta squared of 0.025, meaning gender accounted for less than 2.3 percent of the variance in any score. Men scored higher on Mental Agility/General Intelligence (5.24 versus 4.62), Analytical Thinking (4.76 versus 4.32), and Innovation (5.52 versus 5.14), while women scored higher on Customer Orientation (5.46 versus 5.02) and Collaboration (5.17 versus 4.72). The higher female mean in Customer Orientation is notable because it is the most frequently requested competency overall. Both men and women shared Customer Orientation as their most frequently requested competency. The authors caution that because the platform provides no occupational metadata, these patterns cannot be separated from occupational sorting: men and women may be channeled into roles with systematically different screening profiles. The differences should be read as patterns in employer assessment requests, not as evidence of intrinsic ability differences.

The authors are explicit that the findings describe demand observed on a single platform, not the entire Latin American labor market. The cross-sectional design cannot capture change over time or establish causal relationships, the sample’s concentration in three countries limits macro-regional representativeness, and the absence of employer identifiers means confidence intervals may be somewhat narrow if multiple processes came from the same employer. No data on hiring outcomes were available, so predictive validity remains untested. Still, the study offers one of the first large-scale, cross-country mappings of formalized competency assessment in the region, and its central message is measured: early screening across Latin America prioritizes a consistent core of customer orientation, communication, and achievement, while digital and leadership competencies wait for later stages, and their low early-stage frequency should not be mistaken for low importance.

Subject of Research: A large-scale analysis of which competencies employers formalize in early-stage digital recruitment screening across 17 Latin American countries.

Article Title: What employers assess: A large-scale mapping of competencies formalized in early-stage screening across Latin America

Article References: Vinueza-Cabezas, A., Parra-Gaete, C., Pinto-Delacadena, P. A., & Samaniego-Frixone, J. J. (2026). What employers assess: A large-scale mapping of competencies formalized in early-stage screening across Latin America. Heliyon, 12(16), Article e45638. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45638

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45638

Keywords: recruitment, competency assessment, Latin America, hiring, soft skills, digital skills, labor market, personnel selection, gender differences, screening, employability, assessment platforms