The 5 Best Pre-Employment Testing Software Solutions

Realizing your newly hired salesperson knows nothing about sales 10 minutes into their first day? Even the best interviews give employers only a partial picture of the candidate. However, in conjunction with traditional interviews and other employment screening services, pre-employment testing software can provide companies with a sense of a candidate’s knowledge base and ability to do the job.

The variety of pre-employment testing software available is just as wide and unique as each company. Below is a shortlist of the top five applicant testing software to meet individual business needs.

Top Pre-Employment Testing Solutions for Talent Assessment

Businesses have distinct needs when searching for the best new hire and little time to do so. Our top five candidate testing software picks offer unique assessment and screening tools to help companies quickly narrow down the best candidates.

TestGorilla: Best for versatility

TestGorilla is a pre-employment assessment platform for businesses looking for versatility—whether in implementation, skills library, or candidate experience. With multiple pricing tiers (including a free plan), growing businesses can take advantage of TestGorilla’s additional features as the needs of the company evolve.

TestGorilla also offers user-friendly experiences for both employers and candidates. Candidates can take their assessments from any mobile device without the need for login credentials or a user profile. This makes it easier for employees in industries like construction or retail that do not necessarily need a computer.

TestGorilla pros and cons

Key features

Accessibility: Candidates can access TestGorilla’s skill assessments from any mobile device and do not need login credentials or a user profile. This is useful for employers hiring for roles that do not require a computer. Likewise, TestGorilla integrates natively with several of the best applicant tracking systems, including Workable, Greenhouse, BreezyHR, and JazzHR. Therefore, employers do not need to sacrifice time or money to switch between platforms or manually input data into their talent management platform.

Anti-Cheating Capabilities: TestGorilla employs anti-cheating measures, such as randomized question cycling, disabled copy-paste function, test time limits, candidate location logging, and webcam snapshots, to ensure test integrity. Employers searching for talent in specialized roles, like engineering or nursing, may appreciate these monitoring capabilities to ensure their prospective candidates can perform in the role. However, companies should be cautious about some of these features with regard to employee data privacy.

iMocha: Best for its skills library

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iMocha (AKA Interview Mocha) boasts the most extensive skills test library of any pre-employment testing software available. With over 2,500 tests, including aptitude, business intelligence, coding, language, and personality tests, iMocha targets enterprises hiring individuals in varying, specialized roles.

iMocha also takes advantage of its massive skill library to foster continuing education in the company. For example, employers interested in developing an employee’s skill set can assign or suggest skill tests to advance their knowledge base. In addition, employees can follow their assessment paths on their own time, giving them control over the skills they feel are lacking. Meanwhile, businesses can utilize this data to analyze skill deficits in their organizations and ensure they remain competitive with a talent force well-versed in all the latest trends in their fields.

iMocha pros and cons

Key features

Custom Subject Matter Expert Assessments: If employers cannot find a suitable test in iMocha’s assessment library, they can request a custom assessment from global subject matter experts (SMEs). With a turnaround time of fewer than 48 hours, this can return time to both human resources (HR) and managers who would otherwise have to collaborate to develop the test themselves. Moreover, this improves assessment accuracy as SMEs guarantee the most pertinent information is collected for HR teams to make hiring decisions.

Upskilling Platform: iMocha’s upskilling platform allows employers to engage with university students or recent graduates through self-assessments and badge-earning to encourage the learning of new skills. This provides employers with an opportunity to understand the capabilities of an incoming workforce in order to plan and develop training modules appropriately. Similarly, entry-level employees can gain insight into the real-world expectations of their field.

Wonderlic Select: Best AI capabilities

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Wonderlic started back in 1937 when its founder, E. F. Wonderlic, was tasked with streamlining the recruitment process for his employer. After over 80 years of research into industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology and artificial intelligence, Wonderlic has become one of the most used assessment platforms on the market.

Wonderlic Select (formerly WonScore) combines Wonderlic’s cognitive ability, personality, and motivation tests into one score. Employers can consult with Wonderlic Select’s team to determine the parameters of the tests based on their job descriptions. With this information, Wonderlic’s AI develops, issues, and grades assessment tests automatically. This makes it easy for HR teams to implement across the organization, as they do not need to create custom assessments for each role.

Wonderlic Select pros and cons

Key features

AI Job Description Search: Wonderlic uses AI to provide employers with a shortlist of role-appropriate testing profiles and hiring criteria based on an employer’s job description. Wonderlic’s AI parses job descriptions; determines the role’s main knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs); and suggests the testing profiles to best measure that role’s competencies.

Automatic Grading: Wonderlic Select’s AI automatically grades and stacks completed candidate assessments based on their score. Scores are also color-coded from red to green, so HR teams can quickly identify qualified candidates. These visual organizational elements reduce the time HR teams take to screen candidates, so they can focus instead on individuals with the greatest potential of succeeding in the role.

Vervoe: Best for customization

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Like TestGorilla and iMocha, Vervoe has an extensive library of over 300 skills assessments. However, Vervoe differs in its ability to view and customize its own existing tests.

For example, to maintain test integrity, TestGorilla prevents employers from viewing the questions and answers of their skill assessments and only provides employers with up to 20 custom questions per assessment at their highest-priced tier. Vervoe, on the other hand, encourages employers to customize their assessments—even generate their own tests from scratch.

Vervoe allows businesses to create tests for roles where a common assessment may not exist. Employers who have been unsuccessful in assessing applicants’ capabilities for highly technical positions, such as engineering or coding, may find the control hiring managers have in test creation beneficial.

Vervoe pros and cons

Key features

Assessment Builder Tool: Vervoe allows companies to utilize its prebuilt skill tests as templates. From there, companies can customize their assessments using different question types outside of multiple-choice and essay questions, such as video, audio, spreadsheet, presentation, and code. With these, companies can gain valuable insight into how a candidate performs on specific tasks or projects unique to the position.

Personalized AI Grading: Vervoe gives companies the ability to train their AI on how to grade their assessments. Companies can “rank” responses to questions on a scale from 1–10, so their AI learns which aspects are most valuable when grading. However, the drawback is that this can occasionally result in inaccurate grading as the AI learns. Nevertheless, employers may find this feature appealing, as they can control how the AI weighs each assessment to their liking.

The Predictive Index: Best for global talent

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Like Wonderlic Select, The Predictive Index (PI) is excellent for HR administrators and hiring managers interested in pre-employment assessment tools that require little effort to implement. However, PI stands out by accommodating test takers speaking multiple languages.

PI assists employers hiring outside of the U.S. or employing a remote workforce by creating a unified experience for prospective employees through their cognitive abilities and behavioral traits assessments. Because candidates receive versions of the same test, companies can make data-driven decisions in determining what behavioral styles work best for each role in different locations and hire talent accordingly.

The Predictive Index pros and cons

Key features

Global Talent Optimization: Because PI’s tests come in over 70 languages, international employers can utilize the same tests in all locations without having to spend the time or resources to create and translate custom tests.

Moreover, PI boasts that their tests are culturally neutral. Its cognitive ability assessment focuses on how fast someone can learn, while their behavioral traits assessment measures how someone thinks and works. Such impartial tests are critical to organizations with diverse workforces where political, cultural, or socioeconomic factors could potentially hinder applicants’ chances in traditional, skills-focused assessments.

Four-Framework Solution: PI offers four solutions: Hire, Inspire, Design, and Diagnose. Each offers ways to assess prospective talent and align them with appropriate roles, develop meaningful relationships between managers and employees, create career paths for teams, and analyze employee engagement. In addition, each solution integrates with ATS platforms like UKG, so companies can add these analytic tools without sacrificing existing frameworks.

Choosing the Best Pre-Employment Testing Software

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Each pre-employment testing solution comes with its own pros and cons, and some cater to industries with distinctive needs. Therefore, employers should consider the aspects most important to them when selecting the best solution.

For businesses looking for a range of industry-specific questions for use on all device platforms, TestGorilla and iMocha’s vast skill set libraries allow employers to save time on test creation for specialized roles. In particular, iMocha’s customized expert-created tests save employers valuable time searching for assessments in niche industries.

In contrast, for companies looking for customization at every stage of the assessment process, Vervoe’s assessment builder and personalized AI grading give control to hiring departments in deciding what to value most in candidate assessments. Meanwhile, TestGorilla’s question randomization and test-taker snapshots help reduce the likelihood of cheating and suspicious behavior for employers concerned about test integrity.

Wonderlic Select and The Predictive Index require the least amount of work from HR departments needing to quickly implement pre-employment assessments into their hiring process. The Predictive Index, with its breadth of language options, can provide companies with international workforces, in particular, a unified assessment measure across its diverse marketplaces.

Many of the software above integrate with applicant tracking systems to boost efficiency at every stage of the hiring process—from application to new hire onboarding. Check out our ATS Software or Recruiting Software guides for solutions to meet your particular needs.