Building a leading organization isn’t easy, to say the least – which makes effective and efficient hiring practices irreplaceable. Talent assessment tools offer a data-driven approach to evaluating candidates, helping recruiters, hiring managers, and people managers make the best talent decisions possible. However, when choosing between different solutions in the market, it’s important to choose the talent assessment that’s right for your team. See how Wonderlic stacks up to Predictive Index in the comparison below.
What is Wonderlic and how does it work?
Wonderlic is a talent assessment platform that evaluates cognitive ability, personality, and motivation to give recruiters, hiring managers, and employees highly predictive insights. Our multi-measure pre-hire assessment uses leading industrial-organizational (I/O) psychology to evaluate whether workers are a good match for the job. Or, in other words, can they do the job, do they want to do the job, and how will they do the job? These assessments, combined, provide highly predictive insights into on-the-job performance, team fit, satisfaction, and retention.
When it comes to developing employees, workers can use Wonderlic to quickly understand which aspects of their role come naturally — and which require more effort. With guided, self-paced learning, employees can easily incorporate these results into their day-to-day work to learn and grow at their own pace.
What is Predictive Index and how does it work?
Predictive Index is an assessment tool that uses high-level job families to score candidates. Their multiple assessments measure “behavioral drives” — including dominance, extraversion, patience, and formality — and cognitive ability, giving hiring managers multiple scores that they can then use to make hiring decisions.
Managers can also use Predictive Index’s assessment to create employee development plans. However, these assessments, and resulting programs, require manager oversight.
Side-by-Side Comparison
Predictive Accuracy
| Predictive Index | Wonderlic | |
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| Why is this important? | Assessments with high levels of predictive accuracy provide better long-term outcomes — including employee performance, satisfaction, and retention — than those with low predictive accuracy and little to no job specificity. | |
| How Predictive Index Scores | Predictive Index uses high-level job families to score candidates on broad categories of jobs (e.g., sales, service, management, etc.), providing insights within job families. However, because of its broad nature, it can oversimplify results, leading to diminished predictive accuracy and job relevance. | |
| How is Wonderlic different? | Science has shown that multi-measure assessments are the most predictive of on-the-job performance. Wonderlic’s multi-measure assessments evaluate cognitive ability, personality, and motivation to provide a single score for easier and faster hiring decisions.The Wonderlic Jobs Engine is the only database on the market that provides off-the-shelf scoring profiles covering all existing and emerging jobs in the market. This means you and your team get the most accurate information specific to the role you’re hiring for — without spending weeks or months building customized job profiles or guessing which features are most important. Wonderlic gives employees job-specific insights into their strengths and weaknesses, providing tips and tools they can easily incorporate into their day-to-day work to improve performance and grow in their careers. | |
Ease of Use
| Predictive Index | Wonderlic | |
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| Why is this important? | An overly complicated assessment may frustrate candidates, leading to unfinished applications. If the results of an employee assessment are challenging to interpret or inconsistent, recruiters are more likely to make biased, inequitable, and unreliable decisions — leading to poor hires and, in some cases, legal consequences. If there’s a lot of complexity required to interpret results, organizations may need to pay for additional training or certifications. For employee selection and development, reports must be clear and relevant to specific jobs. Otherwise, employees won’t know where to begin, what to focus on, or where they’re going, resulting in low levels of product utilization and performance. | |
| How Predictive Index Scores | The results from Predictive Index’s assessments are scored separately, creating fragmented scores that don’t relate to each other. In other words, recruiters aren’t given context for how to weigh each of the scores against the role. Hiring managers must attempt to interpret and weigh scores themselves, adding unnecessary complexity to the hiring process. This also creates an environment with little standardization across recruiters and reviewers. Predictive Index relies on managers to drive employee development, leading to employee growth competing with managers’ bandwidth and ability to develop talent. | |
| How is Wonderlic different? | Wonderlic provides a single score for reviewers and employees that weighs cognitive ability, personality, and motivation against job-specific requirements. When deciding between candidates, recruiters can view an applicant’s overall score or dive into the specific scores of any single component of our multi-measure assessment, easily seeing how a candidate scored and why. When it comes to employee development, Wonderlic provides insights specific to an employee’s job. It also requires little to no manager oversight, giving employees the agency and ability to improve at their own pace. | |
Scientific Quality
| Predictive Index | Wonderlic | |
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| Why is this important? | The most effective talent assessments are backed by leading industrial organizational psychology and science. Multi-measure assessments that include cognitive ability, personality, and motivation have been shown to be the most predictive of on-the-job performance. | |
| How Predictive Index Scores | Predictive Index does not measure motivation. Instead, it focuses on measuring cognitive ability and uses a simplified Big Five Personality Test, which they call their behavioral test. This behavioral test categorizes a person’s personality into one of 17 buckets, or typologies. These typologies can diminish the value of a candidate’s unique personality.Since the Predictive Index assessment does not include a motivation test, overall results are less likely to lead to employee retention or reduced turnover — which can result in more hiring costs. Predictive Index’s behavioral test does not include any reporting on the “Openness” scale, a key factor of the Big Five Personality Test which can uncover an individual’s tendency to solve complex problems, invent new solutions and ideas, and consider multiple perspectives before making a decision. | |
| How is Wonderlic different? | Wonderlic relies on the combined predictive power of cognitive ability, motivation, and personality to understand if a candidate can do the job and if they want to do the job. Our cognitive ability test is widely recognized as the industry standard for aptitude testing. | |
Test-Taker Experience
| Predictive Index | Wonderlic | |
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| Why is this important? | Providing feedback to candidates offers them value post-application process and helps them gain strategic self-awareness.Allowing employees to own their development empowers them and gives them the buy-in to own their development, reducing the managerial overhead of providing day-to-day coaching. | |
| How Predictive Index Scores | Predictive Index offers candidate feedback reports; however, candidates must request them. Employee development results are designed for managers, not individuals. The overall test-taker experience takes less time than average, but this is because there is no motivation test and an oversimplified personality test. | |
| How is Wonderlic different? | After completing the Wonderlic Select assessment, candidates receive a detailed feedback report that provides valuable insights into their essential traits, natural tendencies, and personal drivers.Wonderlic’s self-led development approach gives employees a user-friendly way to grow and improve while taking the burden off HR teams and managers. | |
Experience the Most Predictive Talent Assessment on the Market
Help your team find top candidates faster using clear and unbiased insights from our multi-measure pre-hire assessment, Wonderlic Select. Select uses leading I/O science to provide results that are easy for you and your team to understand without any expensive certifications.
Wonderlic Develop also gives your employees a personalized, role-specific roadmap for development tailored to their unique roles. These insights can help them make immediate improvements in their daily tasks, making professional development an organic part of the daily routine — minimizing disruptions while maximizing growth.
