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.
Wonderlic: Wonderlic is an assessments provider that measure similar areas to what Prevue offers: cognitive, motivations, and personality. To test for all three takes approximately an hour to complete.
While at Prevue, we weigh each scale equally to provide a more well-rounded picture of the candidate’s interests and personality traits, Wonderlic gives the option to rank each characteristic according to how important they are to the job. For example, high “realistic” and “investigative” scores might be valued and weighted more for a highly analytical position as opposed to a creative role where “artistic” traits are more preferable. This can be helpful for hiring niche or senior roles that favor a specific set of characteristics over another.
Comparison: Cognitive and personality assessments help reveal information about a candidate’s learning speed and approach to work, but they don’t provide enough insight into a person’s motivations to succeed on the job. Everyone likely has unique goals that only they find desirable. Beyond the intrinsic qualities of an individual, knowing more about the environment, or activities, that drive each person will help to improve career fit and guidance.
Results: A tie. People often search for environments resembling their vocational interests. Prevue and Wonderlic both take the no.1 spot for including measurements of motivations in their assessments to truly reflect what we call “job-fit”. Collecting data about the types of work your candidates prefer to do can increase the predictive power of pre-employment assessments.
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.
Wonderlic: We have no doubts when it comes to how reliable Wonderlic’s assessments are. With 80 years of history and experience, its precise results have made it far enough to be used by the U.S. military and even tying into the National Football League’s player drafts.
As great as the assessments are to begin with, the level of skills required to be successful at each job is vastly different – making it hard to determine job match based on test results alone. This is where benchmarking comes in. Named “cut scores” instead, Wonderlic recommends benchmarks they’ve drawn from the same O*Net library (a list of occupations curated by the U.S. Department of Labor/Employment and Training Administration), allowing clients with standard positions to get up and running as quick as possible.
Comparison: The HR landscape has transformed so much in the past decade that we now consider company and culture fit as some of the most important aspects of hiring. That’s why at Prevue, we always recommend our clients to create a customized role-specific benchmark rather than just using a cookie cutter benchmark which doesn’t match quite right.
Wonderlic, on the other hand, values having a broader talent pool, as well as time-savings. In their defense, by setting the bar too high based solely on top performers, you may screen out many qualified candidates who could be good enough for what is needed. Benchmarking based on small sample sizes can also open the door to potentially misleading conclusions, according to their experts.
Results: Prevue wins. While there’s advantage in having a bigger candidate pool to start your hiring with, we find that customized job profiles are key to achieving job and culture fit. Prevue’s Combined Study hits the nail on the head better in this case. Should you want the flexibility of getting started right away and using an O*Net library benchmark, both companies can fit the bill.
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, by 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 it 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.
Wonderlic: Wonderlic similarly shares the idea of having an all-in-one job-fit report, which includes a candidate’s assessment results, description of each scale, and an overall compatibility score. In their case, the interview guide comes as a separate document.
Unlike Prevue, Wonderlic doesn’t have a results graph comparing the candidate’s assessment results to the benchmark. Instead, their approach identifies and displays job-fit by generating a separate percentile score for the three tested areas – cognitive, motivations, and personality. Each of these areas can be weighted differently depending on its perceived importance to the job as well. In other words, if the role requires higher levels of cognitive skills, by giving it more weight, it will have a greater impact on the candidate’s overall job compatibility.
Comparison: Solely looking at the components of Prevue’s and Wonderlic’s reports, we both share similarities in providing a final job-fit score, a description of work behavior, and an interview guide. What Wonderlic offers in their hiring tool that we don’t at Prevue is the ability to compare multiple candidates at once. In a typical hiring scenario, we’re often left with less than a handful of short listed candidates near the end. Rather than having multiple tabs open at the same time that can take up space, Wonderlic allows you to evaluate the results of two to four candidates, side by side, so you can identify the differences (or similarities) in one glance.
At Prevue, we weigh every scale equally and we deduct marks from the final score only when the individual falls off the benchmark. Wonderlic, on the other hand, gives you the option to weigh each assessment based on its importance to the job. This is a valuable solution if you’re hiring niche roles with extreme qualities. For example, a senior-level engineer whose problem-solving skills are valued to a much greater extent than traits such as sociability. However, in a more common work scenario where job functions may overlap, Prevue’s all-around approach allows you to evaluate candidates in a bigger picture, while reducing the likelihood of over-interpretation. Unless you’re a psychometrician, it’s probably best that users don’t over-analyze at such a granular level.
Results: A tie. Prevue stands out by bringing you convenient yet thorough candidate data in one place. Our benchmark comparison graph is considered the most attractive item on our reports by our existing clients as it gives you an overall idea of job-fit in one single view. Wonderlic is the star by giving you flexibility to compare multiple candidates and adjust the fit score weight – a win if you’re hiring for senior positions or unique roles.
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!
Wonderlic: Wonderlic’s assessment platform is meant to be training-free, meaning it is easy to use and should not require much coaching support from the team. Online user guides and a self-service content library are also made accessible to all their clients, so users can get learned up at their own pace and time. Optional paid services like customized training and I/O consulting do require an extra cost.
Comparison: Prevue takes the ‘service’ in Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) very seriously. We have the objective of 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. While customized training comes with additional cost at Wonderlic, its online resources are sufficient for a user-friendly platform to begin with.
Results: Prevue wins. Free and tailored support for teams of any size gives us more edge here.