Introduction
What to expect
You’ve taken the first step. You’ve come to the decision that you want to start using a pre-employment assessment tool to help you find better hires. However, when you search online, you find a dozen different companies that offers various hiring tools. How should you pick?
To save you some time, our team at Prevue has prepared a series of side-by-side comparisons to help you find the best hiring assessment tool for your company. We are very proud of our product, but our goal is to give you an unbiased and honest full picture of the products. We hope this will help!
Introduction
Compare the following:
- What does our assessments measure? How are they conducted?
- What standard of measure is used behind the assessments? How are benchmarks created?
- What is included in the reports? How are they presented?
- What kind of customer support do you provide? Is there training available?
What does our assessments measure? How are they conducted?
Prevue: As with most sciences, the method and models behind pre-employment assessments are standardized to ensure reliability, validity, and fairness. Prevue’s Assessment Suite doesn’t miss a beat – it uses relevant science to measure a candidate’s cognitive aptitude, personality, and motivations. To get the full picture of job preference and fit, you’ll want to test for all three.
In a sea of assessment providers who basically offer the very same type of hiring solutions, at Prevue, we distinguish ourselves by being simple and straightforward. Through years of research, we managed to create a multi-use assessment without missing any of the scientific elements that go into predicting job-fit. This means every candidate completes the same 35-minute assessment and will be evaluated fairly, and equally, across any position.
While we encourage our customers to utilize the full assessment for hiring the best, we also recommend combinations of assessment sections for different purposes. For example, you can test a candidate on their learning and reasoning by giving them only the Aptitude part of the assessment. Or, when hiring for positions that primarily deal with numbers on the fly, we have a Numerical Reasoning assessment that covers just numbers, motivations, and personality. This option saves you time and gives candidates an experience that speaks precisely to their skills.
Criteria: Criteria offers similar types of assessments too: aptitude and personality – but in a much different approach. Instead of an all-in-one assessment suite, customers get to choose what tests to use based on the industry or role that they’re hiring for. For example, companies seeking to hire electricians can use its mechanical aptitude test to measure not only general cognitive abilities, but specifically the ability to learn how to operate, maintain, install, and repair equipment and machinery.
In terms of personality, while Prevue has all it needs to measure work behavior and work preference, Criteria takes this step further by introducing personality tests that are designed for customer service and sales. This may sound attractive to businesses that deal with niche roles on the regular. But at the same time, if you work at a company where cross-functional collaboration is common, having tests that are too specific may make it difficult to gauge a candidate’s performance in a different role.
Comparison: Prevue’s strength lies in making complex data simple; our goal was to create a solution that is easy to understand and use for both employers and candidates. Meanwhile, Criteria gives its customers more control over the time it takes to complete the assessments by giving them the option to select what tests to use – a slight win if you’re hiring for niche positions.
The key differentiator, though, is our Motivations/Interests assessment. At Prevue, we dedicate a separate section to a candidate’s job interests. How likely are they going to be motivated and satisfied to stay in the job long term? What makes them tick? We stand by the belief that a job should be more than “just a paycheck”. By considering the candidate’s motivations, we ensure that the job-candidate match is a true reflection of what we call “job-fit”. This gives Prevue a greater edge here.
Results: A tie. Criteria’s ability to choose what to assess allows for time savings for the candidate, while Prevue’s Assessment method allows for one candidate’s results to be compared to any other specific job role, even after the fact.
What standard of measure is used behind the assessments? How are benchmarks created?
Prevue: We’ve invested a lot of time developing our assessments in a way that is simple and scientifically rooted. This includes working with renowned occupational psychologists – some of whom you may recognize such as Dr. David Bartram and Dr. Pat Lindley. Over the years, our team of in-house psychometricians continue to research and review our hiring tools to ensure that they reflect our current work climate.
At Prevue, we stand out by offering customizable job profiles – we call them “benchmarks” – that directly echo your company’s hiring needs. Whether you’re looking for a salesperson who is confident in speech and abundantly ambitious, or an accountant who needs to be well-organized and detailed, we have the science to help map out the ideal qualities needed for the role.
We build our benchmarks in several ways: A Job Description Survey, Top-Performer Study, or a combination that will give you all the data needed to put together the best employee profile; we also have a general Benchmark Library for those who want to save time and get started as soon as possible. Because Prevue is all about making hiring science easy and accessible for everyone, we make sure the process in building a benchmark is thorough yet simple. So expect to complete a short 10-minute survey or invite your star players to complete an assessment, and our team will do the rest of the heavy lifting.
Criteria: Criteria ensures its products’ reliability and validity by working with its Research and Development partners. They also have an in-house Scientific Advisory Board to further their test development and validations. Criteria’s efforts in creating a fair and unbiased assessment can also be reflected in their blind hiring feature. This feature allows you to reduce the effect of subconscious bias by hiding the names and emails of your candidates.
On the other hand, Criteria has quite a different benchmarking approach – they use a standardization sample made up of a mixture of individuals to build their library of benchmarks. These job-specific profiles are based on the “norms” of a sampled working population in the respective industry as well as validity studies conducted by Criteria themselves. While Criteria does not offer customizable benchmarks like we do at Prevue, some of its industry-specific aptitude and personality tests allow for a quick and accurate evaluation without the need of a custom-made benchmark. This works best, however, only if you hire niche positions on the regular.
Comparison: There is very little difference in the science behind Prevue and Criteria’s assessments – both of us put in great effort to make sure that the hiring tools we offer are fair, reliable, and valid. The most distinct contrast between the two would definitely be our benchmarking methods. At Prevue, we place emphasis on finding the best fit specifically for your business, which is why we primarily offer customizable benchmarks that draw insights directly from your company’s needs and culture. Meanwhile, Criteria relies on sampled data and national norms to generate its industry-specific benchmarks.
Results: Prevue wins. Industry-based benchmarks are good enough when you are hiring roles with generic job descriptions. But if you want them to speak deeper to your company’s unique tasks and work culture, you’re going to want to be as specific as possible so you can hire someone who is actually compatible with your team. Prevue wins in this case.
What is included in the reports? How are they presented?
Prevue: Aiming for the fine balance between being straightforward and having a comprehensive result, our Prevue Job-Fit report has one standardized format. Along with the customizable benchmarks and the shared core assessment, using the same report format, you’ll be able to compare your candidates to different job positions that may be a better fit or use in succession planning for future job growth.
Our report is divided into several parts. You’ll find a Prevue Results Graph comparing the candidate’s assessment results to the job-fit profile you have customized for the role. The suitability score in the report comes from a formula that analyzes the areas where the candidate has landed (or not landed) on the benchmark – meaning the higher the score, the better match they are with the job. We complement these findings by providing you an interview guide that targets areas off the benchmark. These suggested questions are designed to probe at how this may affect the candidate’s performance in the role, whether they are aware of their challenges, and provide an opportunity to describe how they may work to overcome it.
Criteria: Because Criteria offers individual tests for aptitude and personality, their reports also come separated – each containing its own scores and analysis. Results for both reports are expressed as percentile rankings. What that means is that they reflect how a person scored on a test or a trait relative to other test takers (i.e., a percentile rank of 70 implies that the candidate scored better than 70% of the people who have taken the same test, putting them in the top 30%).
Criteria similarly shares the idea of having an interview guide. It picks out personality traits which the candidate fell above or below the range and generates behavioral questions targeting those areas. One unique feature they do have in their reports is a section comparing the person’s scores to various other positions. For example, the candidate may have applied for the role of an Administrative Assistant, but perhaps you want to see how they may be a better fit in a managerial or receptionist role.
Comparison: Prevue and Criteria’s reports share a similar format in how we display our candidate data – starting with a benchmark comparison graph, a final score, and a follow-up interview guide. The slight difference lies in the way our scores are presented. Criteria uses a 1-to-99 percentile ranking system, whereas we use a ten-point system called sten (standard ten) scores at Prevue. Both are commonly used in psychometric settings and are rooted from the same science. Based on these similarities, sten scores can also be thought of as percentile scores but rescaled to a number between 1 and 10, instead of 1 and 99.
Oftentimes, it is recommended that larger test scores are re-scaled in order to make for easier comparisons, while reducing the likelihood of over-interpretation. For example, while the difference between a 7 and an 8 (out of 10) is the same as 70 and 80 (out of 100), the difference in scale between the one instead of the ten helps prevent users from putting too much thought into small differences between various raw scores.
Results: Prevue wins. If we were to simply dissect and compare the components of both ours and Criteria’s reports, there would be no significant difference that put either ahead. While individual sections very much near a fair tie, by comparing the sum of its parts – the simplicity of Prevue’s all-in-one report versus Criteria’s varied approach of having multiple outputs – we have the edge here in bringing you a consistent format of information in one place. This may particularly come in handy when there is a large influx of applicants at a time or when you are considering multiple different job roles round-the-clock.
What kind of customer support do you provide? Is there training available?
Prevue: Once you’re onboard at Prevue, you’ll be paired with a representative from our Success team who will act as your designated point of contact throughout your journey with us. We want to make sure that you make the most of what we have to offer. That is why through our different training and refresher sessions, we will cover everything you need to know at zero additional cost to get you going as soon as possible. Your Customer Success Manager will guide you through specific training on system setups, benchmark finalizations, and understanding our reports. Of course, as part of our ongoing support, your Success rep will continue to assist you with any concerns that you may come across. We are never more than a phone call or an email away, and we make this absolutely free for all our customers!
Criteria: Just like us, Criteria takes pride in offering unlimited training and support to all of their customers for free. You will be assigned a dedicated Customer Success Manager as well, who is there to guide you throughout the entire duration of your subscription, from training and implementation to administering and interpreting results.
Comparison: Prevue and Criteria both take the ‘service’ in Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) very seriously. We share the same objective in providing a seamless post-purchase experience to our customers, and we achieve this by offering free training and effective support so our customer’s goals can also be met.
Results: A tie. This is an obvious win for the both of us!
