Pre-employment testing is the key to streamlining your recruitment process and finding the best person for the job.
By removing unconscious bias from the hiring process, you can gain objective insights into your candidates beyond their resumes. This knowledge improves the quality and longevity of your employees, reducing turnover.
But with a range of pre-employment platforms available, it can be hard to know where to start when choosing one. To help you out, this article takes a closer look at two providers, TestGorilla and HackerEarth.
TestGorilla is a comprehensive and easy-to-use pre-employment testing platform.
With over 300 scientifically validated tests that assess candidates’ cognitive abilities, personalities, and job-specific skills for almost any role, TestGorilla helps you make bias-free, data-driven hiring decisions.
With TestGorilla, it’s easy to create your assessment, add custom questions, and send it to multiple candidates in minutes. Plus, enhanced features like one-way video interviews deliver deeper insights while improving the candidate experience.
TestGorilla’s reporting features present candidates’ results in an easy-to-understand format so you can easily use them to inform your recruitment process.
Our robust anti-cheating measures and rigorous quality-control process mean you can rely on the results to help you find the best person for the role.
HackerEarth is a platform specifically designed for screening, interviewing, hiring, and upskilling developers.
The platform offers a suite of tools, including:
Assessments: Coding tests that assess over 900 developer-related skills in various programming languages and frameworks, based on job descriptions and related skills. Users can customize these tests with their own questions to identify top technical talent.
FaceCode: A live coding interview platform with a collaborative code editor and diagram board
Learning and Development: A skills assessment for insights to develop employees’ tech skills
Hackathons: Conduct global or internal coding challenges to identify top talent and increase collaboration
The platform provides detailed reports of candidates’ results and rankings, as well as a code replay feature.
The more tests a platform offers, the better you can tailor your pre-employment assessment to the role you’re recruiting for.
Look for a platform that offers a wide range of tests, including aptitude, personality, motivation, cultural fit, and job-specific skills.
TestGorilla’s extensive test library contains over 300 tests, with lots more on the way. You can use these to assess candidates’:
Situational judgment
Coding, programming, and other role-related skills
You can add custom questions and choose the response format from options including multiple-choice, free text, or file upload.
Plus, TestGorilla supports international recruitment processes by offering localized websites in 11 different languages.
HackerEarth can generate coding tests automatically based on a job description and role-specific skills. Users can also manually create tests by choosing from a library of over 17,000 questions or adding their own.
There are 15 types of question formats available, including multiple-choice and project-style questions that test candidates on real challenges they’d face in the role.
HackerEarth supports six languages. As a specialized technical assessment platform, it doesn’t appear to offer other test types like personality, cultural fit, or motivation.
TestGorilla | HackerEarth | |
Cognitive ability tests | Yes | No |
Situational judgment tests | Yes | No |
Job-specific tests | Yes | Yes (programming and developer roles only) |
Software tests | Yes | No |
Programming tests (inc. coding challenges) | Yes | Yes |
Language tests | Yes | No |
Personality tests | Yes | No |
Culture-add test | Yes | No |
Your own custom tests | Yes | Yes |
Custom questions per assessment | Yes | Yes |
Test recommendations for each job role | Yes | Yes |
Multiple tests per assessment | Yes | N/A |
When hiring developers, you need to assess a candidate’s full range of technical skills to see if they align with your team and workload.
Look for a platform that offers a range of these tests, including coding and algorithmic-thinking challenges. You’ll also want to evaluate candidates’ ability to work with different frameworks and coding languages.
TestGorilla offers a suite of tests that specifically assess developer-related skills, including:
Web- and mobile-development frameworks including Django and ReactNative
Over 15 coding languages like PHP, Javascript, Python, and Typescript
Custom coding challenges to see how candidates solve real-life problems they’d face in your role
We record candidates’ coding challenges so you can review them at any time to follow their problem-solving approach.
HackerEarth’s assessments are specifically designed to assess candidates’ technical skills and familiarity with coding concepts.
Users create tests with programming problems, as well as full stack, DevOps, machine learning, Java Project, Diagram, and Selenium-specific questions.
You can also test candidates’ familiarity with over 40 coding languages.
HackerEarth offers a code player to record candidates’ responses to programming questions for you to review later. It also automatically scores technical tests and assesses code quality.
HackerEarth’s external Hackathons are another way recruiters can find qualified developers. The platform generates a coding challenge based on your job description and sends it out to a pool of qualified developers for users to shortlist candidates from.
TestGorilla | HackerEarth | |
Coding languages | JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP, C, C#, C++, SQL, Kotlin, Ruby, TypeScript, Go, R, Scala, and Swift | 40+ |
Web-development frameworks | Yes | Yes |
Mobile-development frameworks | Yes | Yes |
Algorithmic-thinking challenges | Yes | Yes |
Debugging challenges | Yes | Yes |
Language-specific concept challenges | Yes | Yes |
Your own custom coding challenges | Yes | Yes |
Code playback function | Yes | Yes |
Automated scoring | Yes | Yes |
Video interviews offer further insights into your candidates’ communication styles while providing them the freedom to express themselves. They also add variety, improving candidates’ testing experience.
Features like one-way video interviews and custom video questions are ideal for remote hiring.
TestGorilla enables you to add one-way video interview questions to your assessments, which help you pre-screen candidates for an in-person interview.
Like so many of our features, video interview questions are customizable. You can set the maximum length for candidates’ responses and limit the number of attempts they have to answer the question.
TestGorilla records candidates’ responses for you to review at any time. You can even add notes and your own ratings to candidates’ video responses to share with your team.
Hiring managers can conduct live coding interviews on HackerEarth’s FaceCode platform to assess applicants’ abilities with a real-time code editor and diagram board.
Up to five interviewers can participate in an interview, using the built-in chat to manage the process. HackerEarth records and saves interviews and their transcripts, compiling them into reports along with the interviewers’ notes.
While FaceCode supports blind interviews (where the candidates’ identifying information is hidden) it doesn’t appear to support asynchronous interviews.
TestGorilla | HackerEarth | |
One-way video interviews | Yes | No |
Custom video questions | Yes | Yes |
Recording of candidates’ attempts | Yes | N/A |
Restrict maximum answer length | Yes | N/A |
Recording and playback on any device | Yes | Yes |
Rate and comment on video answers | Yes | Yes |
The best way to engage your candidates is by providing a positive testing experience. Features like appropriate test length and good candidate support help ensure candidates complete your assessment.
Some testing platforms also offer branding options. This means candidates will associate their positive experiences with your company, boosting your brand awareness.
TestGorilla delivers an accessible and enjoyable pre-employment testing experience for candidates.
Our mobile-friendly platform makes it easy to complete an assessment from anywhere. With the average assessment taking less than 30 minutes and no login required, there are no barriers to discourage candidates from completing the assessment.
Candidates also receive dedicated support via our online help center.
Plus, with TestGorilla you can add your logo, brand colors, and custom intro and outro videos to your assessment. This helps candidates link their experience with your brand.
With HackerEarth, users can create auto-reminder emails to ensure candidates complete their tests on time.
Practice tests are also available on HackerEarth’s website, as well as detailed candidate instructions and troubleshooting articles.
HackerEarth’s premium subscription lets users send invitation links to candidates without requiring them to create an account. White labeling options are also available with HackerEarth’s higher-tier subscriptions.
While there isn’t currently a mobile-friendly version of the software, one is in development.
TestGorilla | HackerEarth | |
Your company’s intro and outro videos | Yes | N/A |
Assessments branded with your company logo and color | Yes | Yes |
Customizable invitation and rejection emails | Yes | Yes |
No login required for candidates | Yes | Yes |
Mobile-friendly | Yes | No |
Help and support for your candidates | Yes | Yes |
Typical assessment length | 10-50 minutes | 30-60 minutes |
Qualifying questions prior to assessment | Yes | No |
The best pre-employment testing platforms support all business sizes, from startups through to enterprise-level firms.
Features like GDPR compliance are necessary for all businesses, especially those that recruit internationally. For larger hiring needs, bulk actions, role-based rights management, and ATS integrations are essential.
TestGorilla proudly caters to businesses of all sizes. In addition to our affordable pricing plans, our customizable features offer flexibility to smaller and scaling businesses.
With full GDPR compliance, we ensure candidates’ data is handled ethically. TestGorilla also provides public links for each candidate source, so you can track where your candidates saw the job ad.
For large recruitment drives, we offer a range of ATS integrations as well as bulk candidate invites and role-based rights management. These help streamline both the testing and hiring processes.
HackerEarth is GDPR compliant and follows all Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidelines.
Candidates can test via invite-only or public links. HackerEarth also enables users to create teams and assign different admin levels to manage the testing process.
HackerEarth offers integrations with a range of ATS including Zoho Recruit, Greenhouse, and JazzHR, as well as API access.
HackerEarth doesn’t appear to include other useful features for large recruitment drives, such as bulk candidate invites or public links for candidate sources.
TestGorilla | HackerEarth | |
ATS integrations | Yes | Yes |
Multiple users and role-based rights management | Yes | Yes |
GDPR compliant | Yes | Yes |
Multiple candidate invitation options | Yes | Yes |
Public link to invite candidates | Yes | Yes |
Public links for each candidate source | Yes | N/A |
Bulk invite candidates (CSV/XLSX upload) | Yes | N/A |
Track candidate states from invited to hired | Yes | N/A |
API access | Yes | Yes |
For candidates’ test results to be valid and reliable, you need a pre-employment testing platform that only publishes the highest-quality tests. This requires rigorous pre-launch quality checks, as well as ongoing review and improvement.
TestGorilla applies the strictest quality control measures to ensure our tests accurately measure candidates’ skills, personalities, and motivations.
Before a test becomes available, it goes through a 28-step quality control process involving subject-matter experts and psychometricians.
But our commitment to quality control doesn’t stop there. TestGorilla is also dedicated to continuous test improvement. In addition to our proprietary algorithm, we review both customer and candidate feedback to identify areas for improvement.
HackerEarth’s coding tests are accurate, reliable, and valid, and prevalidates all the questions in its library.
When users create a test, HackerEarth measures its reliability and difficulty level. The platform also provides users with a guide to building reliable tests and creating quality questions.
There is also a candidate survey at the end of each assessment and interview to help users improve their testing process.
However, it’s not clear whether HackerEarth regularly replaces questions or has a proprietary algorithm to improve the quality of its tests.
TestGorilla | HackerEarth | |
Proprietary algorithms that continuously improve quality of each test | Yes | N/A |
Extensive quality check before tests go live | Yes | Yes |
Questions replaced after reaching exposure limit | Yes | N/A |
Customer feedback used to improve tests | Yes | N/A |
Test-taker feedback used to improve tests | Yes | Yes |
Cheating in pre-employment testing can give some candidates an unfair advantage and undermine the reliability of their results.
Strong anti-cheating measures like IP-address monitoring and webcam snapshots ensure tests are fair and the results accurately reflect candidates’ abilities.
TestGorilla prevents plagiarism and other forms of cheating using a range of measures. These include:
IP-address monitoring and webcam snapshots (with the candidate’s permission) to confirm the intended candidate completes the test
Regularly replacing questions and disabling copy-paste to prevent candidates from sharing questions or answers online
Full-screen monitor tracking to detect if a candidate exits the assessment
These features protect the integrity of candidates’ results so you can rely on them to make effective hiring decisions.
HackerEarth uses AI-powered proctoring to prevent plagiarism and cheating. This includes facial recognition technology to confirm candidates’ identities using random webcam snapshots.
The platform also has an advanced proctoring function that stops candidates from taking screenshots or videos of the test window and using certain keystrokes during a test.
Other anti-cheating measures include disabling copy-paste functionality and notifying users if a candidate exits full-screen mode.
Users can also restrict IP addresses to ensure candidates are testing from a certain location.
TestGorilla | HackerEarth | |
IP-address logging (to avoid multiple attempts by the same candidate) | Yes | N/A |
Logging of candidate location | Yes | Yes |
Webcam snapshots (with option to turn on/off) | Yes | Yes |
Full-screen mode detection (to avoid research during test) | Yes | Yes |
Randomized questions per test | Yes | Yes |
Large question pool for each test | Yes (100+) | Yes |
Questions and answer not visible to employers to protect test integrity | Yes | No |
Time limit on tests | Yes (typically 10 minutes) | Yes |
Copy-paste disabled | Yes | Yes |
Accurate reporting and analytics are crucial for you to comprehensively understand candidates’ results and apply them to your hiring process.
Look for a platform that offers downloadable reports in a range of formats that you can easily share with your hiring team.
TestGorilla offers detailed, clear reports to help you understand candidates’ overall benchmark rankings as well as their individual test results.
These reports present the results in an easy-to-understand format, using graphics and text to make the information clear.
You can download reports in PDF, CSV, and Excel formats, making them easy to send to your hiring team. Add comments and ratings to candidate reports to aid team discussions during the process.
HackerEarth generates an overall assessment report for each candidate, and users can view detailed reports for the programming question results.
These detailed reports include information on candidates’ scores, the time it took to complete the test, and the number of attempts they made.
HackerEarth also offers a benchmarking feature to compare candidates and identify top performers.
Users can send reports to their hiring team via a shareable link or downloadable file, although it’s not clear what formats they can choose for this.
TestGorilla | HackerEarth | |
PDF reports of assessments and individual candidates | Yes | N/A |
Excel and CSV reports of assessments and individual candidates | Yes | N/A |
Comprehensive overview of all current and past candidates | Yes | Yes |
Scoring benchmarks for candidates (including percentile rank scoring) | Yes | Yes |
Add ratings and comments for candidates | Yes | Yes |
A pre-employment testing platform should provide extensive customer support both during the onboarding phase as well as continuously thereafter.
Most pre-employment testing platforms offer support via chat or email, as well as an online help center with FAQs and help articles. Some platforms also offer a dedicated customer support manager.
TestGorilla supports customers to ensure they get the most out of the platform. We offer support via live chat and email, as well as an extensive online help center with extensive how-to guides for both customers and candidates.
And when you sign up for any of our plans, you receive a free, detailed onboarding tour to help you get started with pre-employment testing.
Subscribers to HackerEarth’s enterprise-level custom plans get a dedicated customer success manager, as well as phone and email support.
HackerEarth also offers an online help center with a range of troubleshooting articles for both users and candidates, as well as answers to FAQs.
However, unfortunately, live chat isn’t a support option.
TestGorilla | HackerEarth | |
Live chat | Yes | No |
Help center | Yes | Yes |
Email support | Yes | Yes |
Training & onboarding tour | Yes | Yes |
Most pre-employment testing platforms offer monthly or annual plans for various quantities of candidates or assessments. Higher-tier plans also usually offer users increasing access to premium features.
Some platforms also offer free trials or even completely free plans for you to get started with.
TestGorilla’s Free forever plan gives you access to 10 tests and includes essay and multiple-choice question types.
For larger testing needs, we offer two paid plans (billed annually or monthly) with no hidden costs:
Free forever at $0: Full access to 10 free tests, including all personality tests.
Depending on the size of your company, paid plans begin with:
Starter from $75 USD per month ($900 per year paid upfront) - start with skills-based hiring for all roles. There is also the option to pay monthly, starting from $85 USD per month.
Pro from $115 USD per month ($1,380 per year paid upfront) - maximize your hiring with advanced features. There is also the option to pay monthly, starting from $130 USD per month.
HackerEarth offers annual bundle subscriptions that give users access to assessments and FaceCode (billed annually):
Hire for $360 per month with up to five coding interviews and 40 assessment invites
Grow for $949 per month with up to five coding interviews and 100 assessment invites
Users can also subscribe to HackerEarth’s assessment as a standalone product and add on extra features like FaceCode and Hackathons for an additional cost. These plans are (billed annually):
For startups, $169 per month for up to 20 assessment invites
For enterprises, $369 per month for up to 50 assessment invites, plus an API, white labeling, ATS integration, and more
HackerEarth can provide custom quotes for both types of subscriptions for users with larger testing needs. There’s also a 14-day free trial.
TestGorilla | HackerEarth | ||
Plan | Price (billed annually) | Plan | Price (billed annually) |
Free | $0 | Bundles | |
Starter | From $75 USD per month ($900 per year paid upfront) The pay monthly plan starts from $85 USD per month | Hire | $360 monthly |
Pro | From $115 USD per month ($1,380 per year paid upfront) The pay monthly plan starts from $130 USD per month | Grow | $949 monthly |
Assessment only | |||
Startups | $169 monthly (for 20 invites) | ||
Enterprises | $369 monthly (for 50 invites) |
To encourage both your hiring team and candidates to use your pre-employment testing platform, it must be user-friendly.
Look for features that will make it straightforward to use, including a well-designed UI and intuitive navigation.
Features like pre-built tests and automated candidate invitations make it quick and easy to use TestGorilla to create custom tests and send them to candidates. Even users trying pre-employment testing for the first time will find it a breeze!
Our user-friendly interface means it’s straightforward to track candidates, find their results, and share them with your hiring team.
TestGorilla is equally simple for candidates to use. We provide clear test instructions and keep most tests below 15 minutes.
HackerEarth aims to make test creation effortless for its users through automatic test creation and customizable questions and coding interviews.
Online reviews describe HackerEarth’s interface as user-friendly and easy to navigate when creating tests, scheduling live coding interviews, and finding candidates’ results.
With a range of online support articles available, HackerEarth helps both users and test takers become familiar with the platform and address any issues.
TestGorilla and HackerEarth both offer a range of technical tests designed to assess candidates’ skills when hiring for developer roles.
Both also offer video interview features to enhance the testing experience, plus extensive anti-cheating measures to protect the integrity of test results.
However, TestGorilla pulls ahead in several areas – most notably when it comes to the range of tests in its library. Users can not only assess candidates’ developer skills but also their general cognitive abilities, personalities, and motivation.
TestGorilla also offers asynchronous video interviews, which makes the recruitment process much more flexible and supports international hiring. If you need more information to decide, check out the other HackerEarth alternatives that are currently available on the market.
Plus, TestGorilla’s free plan is ideal for smaller businesses looking to introduce pre-employment testing to their hiring processes.
Many employers are turning to pre-employment testing to enhance their recruitment processes – and it’s easy to see why.
Pre-employment testing improves the quality of your hires by delivering in-depth insights into your candidates while removing unconscious bias from your decision-making.
TestGorilla is the ideal platform to use when hiring for a range of roles, including developers. To try it out for yourself, sign up for our free-for-life plan and see how we can help you find your next hire.
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