As an HR professional, you probably aren’t surprised that 75% of employers say it’s difficult to fill roles today. Persistent talent shortages, shrinking budgets, and fierce competition are ratcheting up the pressure on talent acquisition teams to find top talent quickly and effectively. Add AI into the mix and recruiters find themselves in a whirlwind of disruption — and distraction. Pre-hire assessment tools offer a way for recruiters, hiring managers, and HR leaders to find quality candidates faster. In this blog, we explore different pre-hire assessment tools and best practices for using them in your hiring process.
Table of contents
What is a pre-hire assessment tool?
A pre-hire assessment tool is any recruiting tool that helps HR professionals evaluate candidates — such as a skills test, personality test, or cognitive ability test — and make data-driven hiring decisions. The best pre-hire assessment tools use leading industrial-organizational (IO) science to give recruiters an unbiased, objective view of candidates, accessing insights that far surpass those gleaned from resumes or interviews alone.
Types of pre-employment assessment tools
While there are many pre-employment assessment tools available today, from gamified personality tests to emotional intelligence tests, the most predictive pre-hire tools are multi-measure tests, which evaluate cognitive abilities, personality, and motivation. These fundamental categories, together, provide a comprehensive view that reveals if candidates can do the job, how they’ll do the job, and if they want the job.
Why do cognitive assessments, personality tests, and motivation assessments stand out among other pre-hire assessment tests? Let’s dig into each.
“When you can find something that gives you better hires and saves money at the same time in this economy, it’s a big win.”
Jeff McDonald, Director of HR at Sweetwater Sound
Cognitive ability tests
In the mid-1930s, E.F. Wonderlic pioneered the short-form cognitive ability test, helping companies assess candidate suitability for specific job roles. Cognitive assessments gauge a candidate’s ability to learn, adapt, solve problems, and process complex ideas. Typically, these tests feature challenges related to simple math, logic, language comprehension, memory, and spatial reasoning. They assist recruiters and hiring managers in selecting better candidates, predicting job success, and fostering a more agile workforce.
Personality tests
These assessments give candidates a chance to showcase their unique skills and strengths. Essentially, they provide a platform for candidates to demonstrate what they bring to the table, well beyond what’s on their resume or what they might share in an interview. They also provide insights into interpersonal preferences, general temperament, and behavioral tendencies. Moreover, pre-employment personality testing sheds light on a candidate’s preferred ways of collaborating with others, which can enhance employee management post-hiring.
The Five Factor Model, or Big Five Personality Test — which Wonderlic is built upon — stands as one of the most trusted pre-hire personality test frameworks. This model measures an individual’s Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Openness to Experience, and Emotional Stability — the dimensions of personality deemed most comprehensive by I/O research.
Motivation tests
Motivation assessments remain an under-utilized tool in pre-hire assessment comparison tools. A relatively small percentage of pre-employment testing companies offer motivation assessments, with many exclusively focused on cognitive ability and/or personality assessments. Yet, when incorporated, these assessments are the top predictor of staying power, preventing voluntary turnover by understanding if a role inspires candidates and offers what they’re looking for.
Combining data from a motivation test with cognitive ability and personality data has demonstrated highly predictive insights, surpassing even the combination of the latter two alone, as evidenced by research from Cambridge University.
While there are additional types of pre-employment assessments on the market today, they aren’t as predictive of candidate and employee success for a number of reasons.
Emotional intelligence tests
For instance, pre-employment assessments measuring emotional intelligence might seem crucial due to the emphasis on self-awareness and empathy. However, personality and cognitive tests tend to cover this ground already, so they fail to add additional value.
Integrity tests
Similarly, integrity tests focusing on traits like honesty and dependability don’t offer unique insights beyond what personality tests already cover. Moreover, they can harbor biases through poorly disguised questions probing for wrongdoing. When this happens, candidates can easily see through the intentions of these pre-hire assessments and get turned off to the company or position.
Skills tests
While skills tests are beneficial in evaluating proficiencies for specific job roles, they come with limitations. Although they effectively measure immediate capabilities — such as coding proficiency or financial reporting — they fall short in acknowledging the rapid depreciation of learned skills and the value of soft skills or power skills. Currently, the half-life of acquired skills is estimated at two to three years, meaning skills will be worth half as much in a few years.
Essentially, skills assessments are a snapshot of the candidate’s skills at one particular time. Other traits, like motivation and personality, are stable and unwavering, offering a more helpful and accurate picture of employee fit.
The five elements of effective pre-employment assessments
To be effective, pre-hire assessment tools, including multi-measure assessments, must meet five employee evaluation criteria: They must be reliable, resistant to self-representation, fair, use the latest science, and be easy to interpret. Let’s explore these best practices in detail.
Reliability
Reliability in pre-hire assessments measures how consistent the results are when the same person takes the test multiple times. If someone can get significantly different results on the same test, it’s unreliable. Sometimes, companies try to make their tests more appealing to HR or test-takers by simplifying or shortening the assessment, but fewer questions can make the test less reliable. Here is a rule of thumb to check for reliability: If there are differences of 30% or more in results when people take the test at different times, the test is not reliable.
Resistance to bias
When selecting a pre-hire assessment tool, it’s essential to provide equal opportunities and processes for all candidates, avoiding biases toward any person or group. Countering bias requires pre-employment assessment providers to carefully develop their assessments based on leading science and unbiased data.
Resistance to self-representation
Naturally, individuals want to highlight their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. Resistance to self-representation, or candidate impression management, refers to how difficult it is for test-takers to manipulate outcomes or “game the test” to align with their desired results. High-quality pre-hire assessments aim to provide an objective perspective on individuals. However, if an assessment is easily manipulated, test-takers may adjust their responses to match what they believe the assessment provider wants, compromising accuracy.
To counteract potential test manipulation, make sure the assessment you’re using understands response patterns and can detect unusual ones, ensuring its integrity. While the best assessments can detect dishonesty, many on the market cannot.
Uses the latest science
Many pre-hire assessment tools are based on pseudoscience or employ popular psychology that may not have relevance to workplace performance. Proven and vetted tests, like the Big 5 Model for personality tests, will almost always yield better results than tests not backed by years of scientific rigor and research and tests not specifically built to predict workplace performance.
Easy-to-interpret results
Pre-employment assessments are powerful tools — but the actual decision-making lies with recruiters and hiring managers. That’s why it’s so important for recruiters and hiring managers to understand what the test results mean about a candidate’s or an employee’s abilities, potential, and overall. If results are too complex or difficult to understand, recruiters may misinterpret the results, or they may need expensive training and licensing before they can appropriately interpret the results. Low levels of usability mean low levels of usage, which results in diminished ROI.
To succeed with a pre-hire assessment tool, HR professionals need digestible and informative reports. These reports should immediately highlight what matters most in decision-making so that managers don’t get stuck building narratives around certain scores or falling into the trap of only hiring people with certain traits. These assessments must scale decision-making — increasing ROI and hiring efficacy — not derail it.
Reviewed: The five most popular pre-hire assessment tools
Looking for a quality pre-hire assessment tool? Below, we explore five of the most common pre-employment assessments, including their strengths and limitations and why you may want to think twice before making a purchase.
Criteria Corp
What is it? Criteria Corp is a catalog assessment provider that offers many types of assessments, from cognitive ability to skills and video interviews, giving hiring managers multiple scores that they can then use to make hiring decisions. Criteria Corp also uses high-level job families to score candidates on broad categories of jobs (e.g., sales, service, management, etc.).
What is it good at? Criteria Corp offers over two dozen assessments to give recruiters many options when assessing candidates.
Areas of limitation: While it’s nice to have options, with so many tests available, the hiring team must decide which tests or combination of tests will provide the most accurate prediction of performance. And because of the broad job families it use, Criteria Corp can oversimplify results, leading to diminished predictive accuracy and job relevance. Additionally, the results from Criteria Corp’s assessments are scored separately, creating fragmented scores that don’t relate to each other.
See how Wonderlic compares to Criteria Corp
TestGorilla
What is it? TestGorilla is a skills assessment provider that provides over 400 different assessments.
What is it good at? TestGorilla provides skill testing services to assess the technical abilities of candidates. This enables hiring managers to obtain multiple scores that they can use in their hiring process.
Areas of limitation: Since TestGorilla offers over 400+ assessments, it’s common for tests to overlap with one another, creating redundancy and a lengthy testing experience for candidates. In addition, maintaining scientific integrity for assessments is crucial for reducing bias and maximizing effectiveness, but it requires constant updating. Providers with many assessments, like TestGorilla, are at a much higher risk of falling behind on the latest science, technical advancements, and job relevance. It’s almost important to remember that skills are only a snapshot in time. With the rapid evolution of technology, it’s imperative that candidates have high degrees of learnability and motivation to pick up new, emerging skills.
See how Wonderlic compares to TestGorilla
MBTI
What is it? The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) measures personality preferences, exploring how individuals perceive the world and make decisions. MBTI places individuals into one of 16 personality types based on four categories — for example, extraversion versus introversion or sensing versus intuition. The four classifications create a combination of letters that designate someone’s unique personality type, e.g., ENFP.
What is it good at? MBTI can give individuals greater self-awareness about how they perceive the world, work with others, and make decisions.
Areas of limitation: MBTI self-reports that their tool is not validated for hiring purposes. The MBTI assessment is not designed to predict job performance. Instead, MBTI is intended to report traits about individuals — not individuals relative to a job.
In addition, the MBTI tool can be susceptible to reliability challenges due to the self-reporting nature of the test. Individuals’ responses may vary due to self-perception, mood, or external circumstances, potentially leading to different MBTI profiles on subsequent assessments.
See how Wonderlic compares to MBTI
DISC
What is it? The DISC assessment evaluates workplace personality traits, focusing on how people interact, communicate, and work as a team.
What is it good at? DiSC helps test takers understand their personality and behavior styles, promoting teamwork, communication, and leadership skills by identifying work styles.
Areas of limitation: A benefit of using DiSC is that it can simplify team building because it gives somebody a label or “type.” However, using “types” to categorize behavior can lead to hurtful labels and biases. Additionally, DiSC self-reports that its tool is not validated for hiring use because it “does not measure specific skills, aptitudes, or other factors critical for a position.”
The DiSC tool can also be susceptible to reliability challenges due to the self-reporting nature of the test. Individuals’ responses may vary due to self-perception, mood, or external circumstances, potentially leading to different DiSC profiles on subsequent assessments.
See how Wonderlic compares to DiSC
Wonderlic
What is it? Wonderlic is a talent assessment platform that evaluates cognitive ability, personality, and motivation. 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 insights into on-the-job performance, team fit, satisfaction, and retention.
What is it good at? Wonderlic is validated for both hiring and employee development.
Science has shown that multi-measure assessments are the most predictive of on-the-job performance. Wonderlic’s multi-measure assessment evaluates cognitive ability, personality, and motivation to provide a single score for easier, faster, and more effective hiring decisions. Wonderlic uses the same test for all candidates, and scores are weighted against detailed job and role requirements.
In addition, the Wonderlic Jobs Engine is the only database on the market that provides off-the-shelf scoring profiles covering all existing and emerging jobs. This means you and your team get the most accurate information about the role you’re hiring for — without spending weeks or months building customized job profiles or guessing which features are most important.
Areas of limitation: Wonderlic does not offer integrity tests, emotional intelligence tests, or technical assessments, as the research has not borne the validity and effectiveness of these assessments.
Which pre-hire assessment tool is best for recruiting?
Sometimes, the best way to choose the right candidate is to avoid choosing the wrong candidates due to bias or lack of insights. No matter which combination of screening tools you use — whether a resume parser, mult-measure assessment, interview, etc. — the most important factor to ensure is your hiring process is standardized. A documented and repeatable process helps ensure your hiring decisions are resistant to human bias.
As part of your structured interview process, we recommend using a multi-measure assessment like Wonderlic along with a structured interview. Our multi-measure assessment helps you quickly identify top candidates for further evaluation. Then, you can use your structured interview questions to explore the insights revealed through Wonderlic’s pre-employment assessment further and make a final hiring decision.
Hire top talent in a fraction of the time
Wonderlic Select isn’t just another pre-employment assessment tool. With decades of experience, we’ve honed our craft to help you make smarter, faster hiring decisions every time.
Want to learn more about how Wonderlic works? Sign up for a demo today.
