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 TestGorilla.
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 TestGorilla. 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 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 TestGorilla and how does it work?
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 making hiring decisions. However, these assessments are only applicable for assessing technical abilities and might not be useful in hiring decisions. TestGorilla solely focuses on hiring and does not provide assessments to guide employee growth post-hire.
Side-by-Side Comparison
Predictive Accuracy
| Score Breakdown |  Wonderlic TestGorilla |
|---|---|
| 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 TestGorilla Scores | – TestGorilla is a skills assessment provider with over 400 different assessments. With such a large scale of assessments, it’s common for tests to overlap with one another, creating redundancy and a lengthy testing experience for candidates. – Most TestGorilla assessments are for technical skills, which generally do not translate across jobs and only measure a narrow aspect of the candidate’s ability (a snapshot in time rather than learnability, job fit, and motivation). – Since there is a wide range of tests available to choose from, it’s up to hiring managers and recruiters to decide which set of tests might provide the most accurate performance prediction. |
| 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. |
Ease of Use
| Score Breakdown | Wonderlic TestGorilla |
|---|---|
| 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 TestGorilla Scores | – The results from TestGorilla’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. – Since TestGorilla offers over 400+ assessments, there’s a higher likelihood that candidates for the same job go through different testing experiences, increasing legal risk for the organization. – 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. |
| 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 TestGorilla |
|---|---|
| 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 TestGorilla Scores | – TestGorilla does not have an employee development solution to help your new hires succeed post-hire. – TestGorilla does not offer motivation (in the sense of vocational interests) which is an important predictor of job performance and ongoing retention (which leads to less turnover and lower hiring costs). – TestGorilla offers many different personality assessments that are proven not to be useful in making hiring decisions, such as DiSC, Enneagram, and 16pf. |
| 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. – Wonderlic uses the Big Five personality test, one of the most trusted pre-employment 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. |
Test-Taker Experience
| Score Breakdown | Wonderlic TestGorilla |
|---|---|
| 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 TestGorilla Scores | – TestGorilla offers candidate feedback reports; however, organizations must manually share them with candidates. – TestGorilla provides skills assessments. However, one skills test can last for 10 minutes, meaning a combination of skills tests can take longer and negatively impact both the candidate experience and the validity of the test. |
| 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.
