Hiring the right candidate can be the difference between gaining a high performer who becomes a valuable part of your team and recruiting a low performer who quits after several months — forcing you to restart your search. Talent assessments give recruiters a data-driven edge in choosing the best candidates possible, but there are several pre-hire assessment tools on the market, and choosing the right one is essential if you want highly predictive, unbiased results that provide both a great recruiter and candidate experience. Below, we explore the difference between two assessments, Wonderlic and Criteria Corp.
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 Criteria Corp and how does it work?
Criteria Corp is a catalog assessment provider that offers many different 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 solely focuses on hiring and does not provide assessments to guide employee growth post-hire.
Side-by-Side Comparison
Predictive Accuracy
| Score Breakdown |  Wonderlic Criteria Corp |
|---|---|
| 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. – Assessment providers often emphasize the number of tests they offer, but adding more tests may assess irrelevant skills that have minimal impact on job performance. – Organizations often unknowingly choose assessments that overlap in validity. For example, using a typing test and an MS Excel test, along with a cognitive ability assessment, provides no additional predictive value beyond what the cognitive ability test offers alone. |
| How Criteria Corp Scores | – Criteria Corp uses high-level job families to score candidates on broad categories of jobs (e.g., sales, service, management, etc.), providing insights within generalized roles. However, because of its broad nature, it can oversimplify results, leading to diminished predictive accuracy and job relevance. – Criteria Corp has over two dozen assessments to choose from, which means it’s up to the organization to decide which tests would provide the most accurate performance prediction while considering the trade-off in candidate experience. |
| 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. – 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. |
Ease of Use
| Score Breakdown | Wonderlic Criteria Corp |
|---|---|
| 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 Criteria Corp Scores | – The results from Criteria Corp’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 candidate’s scores against the role they’re hiring for. – Criteria Corp offers over two dozen assessments so hiring managers must attempt to interpret and weigh scores themselves, adding unnecessary complexity — and room for error — to the hiring process. This also creates an environment with little standardization across recruiters and reviewers. |
| 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
| Score Breakdown | Wonderlic Criteria Corp |
|---|---|
| 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. – Maintaining scientific integrity for each assessment is crucial for reducing bias and maximizing effectiveness, but it requires constant updating. Providers with many assessments are at a much higher risk of falling behind on the latest science, technical advancements, and job relevance. |
| How Criteria Corp Scores | – Criteria Corp does not offer motivation or vocational interests, which are a valuable predictor of job performance and retention. – Criteria Corp offers over two dozen assessments, which can lead to inefficient or irrelevant usage and overlapping and redundant tests (i.e., a poor candidate experience) – Criteria Corp also offers skills assessments that measure narrow technical abilities and are generally not predictive across other jobs. As jobs evolve rapidly, skill testing needs to be updated regularly. – Criteria Corp does not have an employee development solution to help your new hires succeed post-hire. |
| 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
| Score Breakdown | Wonderlic Criteria Corp |
|---|---|
| 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 after onboarding empowers them to take ownership of their careers. This also helps them to their development, reducing the managerial overhead of providing day-to-day coaching while improving employee performance and productivity. |
| How Criteria Corp Scores | – Criteria Corp offers assessment feedback to candidates so candidates understand how they scored and why. – Criteria Corp offers a game-based app and video interviews. While these can be engaging tests, it’s important to make sure they’re relevant to the job and that each one is adding incremental validity so the candidate does not get fatigued by a lengthy and redundant test-taking process. |
| How is Wonderlic different? | – After completing the Wonderlic Select assessment, candidates automatically receive a detailed feedback report that provides valuable insights into their essential traits, natural tendencies, and personal drivers. – Whether candidates get the role or not, they will walk away with deeper insights into themselves that will help them in the future. – Wonderlic’s employee assessments and self-led development give 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.
