Wonderlic Select: Cognitive Ability 
Cognitive Ability
Cognitive ability tests reveal if your candidates can actually do the job.
One of the three signals measured by Wonderlic Select.
Cognitive ability tests reveal if your candidates can actually do the job.
One of the three signals measured by Wonderlic Select.
Put simply, cognitive ability describes a candidate’s ability to learn, adapt, solve problems, and understand relevant instructions. The single-best predictor of job performance, a cognitive ability test helps you understand if a candidate can do the job.
Cognitive ability is widely accepted as the single-best general predictor of job performance. This position has been confirmed in multiple scientific studies, most recently in a 2016 study performed by renowned I-O psychologists F. L. Schmidt, I. S. Oh, and J. A. Shaffer. More predictably reliable than resumes, cover letters, and interviews, this kind of objective candidate data can help your organization identify best-fit candidates early on in the vetting process, decide who to make an offer to once you have a shortlist of frontrunners, and tailor candidates’ onboarding and training experiences to best meet their needs.
Assessing someone’s general mental ability lets you know whether they have the capacity to:
Pick up new information and apply it on the job.
Work through unfamiliar situations and find a way forward.
Reason about concepts that are not concrete or spelled out.
Understand and act on detailed or layered instructions.
The very first test publisher to create a short-form cognitive ability test for the workplace, Wonderlic is the founder of cognitive ability testing for jobs. For over 80 years, Wonderlic has been leading the industry in efficient, predictive measurement of cognitive ability. The Wonderlic Select cognitive ability test consists of 50 questions that candidates have 12 minutes to answer. The questions feature challenges related to simple math, basic logic, language comprehension, spatial reasoning, pattern identification, and more that become increasingly difficult as the test progresses. Our scoring algorithm is based on a candidate’s overall response pattern, additionally weighting each question based on its level of difficulty and the impact of guessing. This produces a far more precise estimate of cognitive ability than a score based only on the total number of correct answers. Because different jobs require different knowledge, skills, and abilities, the weight the cognitive assessment is given relative to the motivation and personality assessments varies based on the specific requirements of the job. Our research scientists create these job profiles by analyzing both data from the US Department of Labor’s O*NET database and the applicant data across thousands of job profiles in our own database.
Wonderlic Select combines cognitive ability, personality, and motivation into a single, predictive picture of each candidate.