Wonderlic Select: Motivation 
Motivation
Motivation assessments let you know if your open position will keep candidates interested.
One of the three signals measured by Wonderlic Select.
Motivation assessments let you know if your open position will keep candidates interested.
One of the three signals measured by Wonderlic Select.
Motivation assessments provide valuable insight into a person’s work-related interests by measuring what motivates them and what they need in order to succeed. When measured in combination with cognitive ability, motivation tests help you discover who can do the job and who actually wants to do it.
Gathering data about the types of work your candidates inherently prefer to do, in addition to understanding their mental capacity to do a particular job through cognitive ability measures, increases the predictive power of pre-employment assessments. In industrial-organizational (I-O) science, this is called adding incremental validity: an outcome in which two or more uniquely predictive constructs are combined to produce greater predictive power than either construct on its own.
The Wonderlic Select motivation assessment is based on the RIASEC model, which measures how a candidate’s results across six characteristics match the ideal profile for a specific job:
Hands-on, physically demanding work.
Analytical, scientific, intellectual positions.
Imaginative, creative, expressive work.
Teaching, providing care, serving others.
Persuasion, balancing a bottom line, revenue generation.
Structured, repeatable, predictable work.
The Wonderlic Select motivation assessment is comprised of 58 forced-choice questions and takes about 20 minutes to complete. Candidates are presented with three descriptions of common work tasks and asked to choose which one they would most prefer to do. The options are not specific to the position they are applying for; instead, they represent a wide range of options meant to hone in on a candidate’s task-related preferences. Using this data, our motivation assessment then ranks the six RIASEC model characteristics a candidate does or does not exhibit according to how important they are to any particular job. For example, high Realistic, Conventional, and Investigative scores might be weighted more for a highly analytical Operations Manager role in a structured environment, whereas high Artistic, Enterprising, and Social scores might be more preferable for a more interactive and creative Music Teacher position.
Wonderlic Select combines cognitive ability, personality, and motivation into a single, predictive picture of each candidate.