Pre-employment screening is a great way to quickly evaluate multiple candidates for your open roles. It’s an objective, scientifically backed way to compare applicants without bias, helping you hire the right person.
But you need the right platform in order to use the tests to streamline your hiring and identify the candidates whose skills most closely match your requirements – and there are so many out there that choosing can be tricky.
This article compares two popular pre-employment screening platforms, TestGorilla and Wonderlic, and reveals the features that put TestGorilla ahead as the better choice.
TestGorilla is a leading pre-employment screening platform that can enhance your hiring process and help you select qualified, skilled, long-term employees.
Customize your perfect assessment for each role by choosing up to five tests from our library of more than 300, and you can customize individual test questions too.
The expansive library includes tests covering many types of skills and traits, including cognitive ability, culture-add, and job-specific abilities.
TestGorilla makes it easy to create and send a test to your applicants in minutes, no matter what your level of experience with pre-employment testing is.
You can choose how candidates reply depending on the question: there are options for multiple-choice, open-text, and video responses, and coding challenges for developers.
TestGorilla generates easy-to-understand reports for each candidate, so you can forget about tedious resume reviews and start making impartial and accurate hiring decisions with ease.
Wonderlic’s pre-employment assessment measures a candidate’s motivation, cognitive ability, and personality. Wonderlic uses a combination of Industrial-Organizational psychology research, machine learning, and AI to create its tests.
Employers indicate the job they’re hiring for, then Wonderlic generates questions suited to the role using its AI Job Description Profile.
Once candidates complete the test, Wonderlic ranks them. Companies can then see candidates with the highest scores and those whose interests match the relevant job tasks, so they can choose a team member most likely to engage fully in the work.
TestGorilla’s extensive library enables you to customize your assessments to almost any specific role. Wonderlic, on the other hand, offers just three tests to evaluate a candidate’s personality, cognitive ability, and motivation.
TestGorilla’s fully searchable test library includes more than 300 pre-employment tests that cover:
Cognitive ability
Reading comprehension
Administrative software skills, e.g. PostgreSQL
Customer service skills
Language skills
Personality
Culture-add
Motivation
You can choose from answer formats including multiple-choice, file upload, video response, open-text, and coding challenges.
With localized websites in 11+ languages, TestGorilla’s a great choice for employers hiring around the world.
With more than 400 scientifically-backed skills tests, TestGorilla helps you spot and shortlist your best-fit candidates. Sign up for a free live demo to find out how.
Wonderlic has defined three key areas for its assessments:
Personality: This test measures cooperation, dependability, stress tolerance, sociability, and open-mindedness
Motivation: This test asks applicants to rank their enthusiasm for certain tasks
Cognitive ability: This test measures a candidate’s ability to problem-solve, learn from experience, think in abstractions, and understand complex concepts
No skill-specific tests are available.
TestGorilla | Wonderlic | |
Cognitive ability tests | Yes | Yes |
Situational judgment tests | Yes | N/A (though the motivation test does evaluate responses to tasks) |
Job-specific tests | Yes | No |
Software tests | Yes | No |
Programming tests (including coding challenges) | Yes | No |
Language tests | Yes | No |
Personality tests | Yes | Yes |
Culture-add test | Yes | No |
Your own custom tests | Yes | N/A |
Custom questions (with various question types) | Yes | N/A |
Test recommendations for each role | Yes | Yes |
Multiple tests per assessment | Yes | Yes |
Assessment templates | Yes | N/A |
To hire skilled developers, you need to evaluate their full scope of technical skills. Pre-employment programming assessments are the most accurate way to determine your candidates’ success in your developer team.
Look for a platform with features to test candidates’ knowledge of common and custom job-related tasks, including coding languages and platforms, debugging, and development frameworks.
TestGorilla offers specific skills-based tests to help you hire developers, including:
Mobile- and web-development framework tests including Flutter, React Native, and Django
Debugging challenges
Coding language tests, including Ruby, Python, PHP, JavaScript, Java, C++, and many more
You can even create your own custom coding challenges, giving applicants real-life coding problems to solve. Then, you can play back each candidate’s attempt to see exactly how they work.
Wonderlic doesn’t have specific tests for developers, and the platform doesn’t let you test debugging or coding ability. However, you can assess an applicant’s cognitive ability, which includes problem-solving skills.
TestGorilla | Wonderlic | |
Coding languages | JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP, C, C#, C++, SQL, Kotlin, Ruby, Typescript, Go, R, Scala, and Swift | No |
Web-development frameworks | Yes | No |
Mobile-development frameworks | Yes | No |
Algorithmic-thinking challenges | Yes | N/A (though the cognitive ability test does evaluate problem-solving) |
Debugging challenges | Yes | No |
Language-specific concept challenges | Yes | No |
Your own custom coding challenges | Yes | No |
Code-playback function | Yes | No |
Code originality check | Coming in 2023 | No |
Live peer coding | No | No |
Automated scoring | Yes | Yes |
Video interviews are a great way for you to get a better sense of candidates’ personality and communication skills.
Some platforms offer one-way video interviews, live interviews, and custom video questions. These enable you to tailor your assessment to evaluate candidates’ on-the-spot thinking or pre-recorded responses.
TestGorilla offers a range of video interview features, including one-way video interviews and recorded video responses to test questions.
With these, applicants can take their time rerecording their replies – and you can even see how many tries they took to come up with a final response.
To keep videos on point, you can limit replies to 30, 60, or 120 seconds.
After applicants submit their video interview, you can review and rank the responses and leave comments for your team. TestGorilla also ranks candidates’ test scores automatically, so you get two sets of data for evaluating talent.
Unfortunately, Wonderlic doesn’t have any video interview features. Instead, the platform focuses on preparing candidates and recruiters for in-person interviews.
The platform offers structured interview guides to help recruiters ask the right questions for the specific position the applicant is interviewing for. These include questions about how a candidate would respond to a specific job challenge.
TestGorilla | Wonderlic | |
One-way video interviews | Yes | No |
Custom video questions | Yes (20) | No |
Candidate’s recording attempts per question | 3 | No |
Restrict maximum answer length | Yes (to 30, 60, or 120 seconds) | No |
Recording and playback on any device | Yes | No |
Rate and comment on video answers | Yes | No |
Live video interviews | No | No |
A pre-employment testing platform should be easy to use for both employers and applicants.
For candidates, mobile-friendliness, customer support, and reasonable test lengths create a positive experience that promotes high levels of assessment completion.
For companies, the ability to brand pre-employment tests with company logos and record intro and outro videos can help with brand recognition and assure candidates they’re dealing with a reputable firm.
TestGorilla places the candidate experience at the heart of the platform.
Firstly, applicants have the convenience of completing their assessments on any device and most tests are under 15 minutes, preventing test fatigue. There’s also no need to create a separate TestGorilla login, saving further precious time.
And if candidates ever need help, TestGorilla is there, with support tickets and an accessible online help center containing how-to guides and technical support.
You can also incorporate your company’s branding throughout the assessment experience, with custom intro and outro videos, company colors, and a logo.
Candidates can complete the Wonderlic pre-employment on any device. They simply click on the test link and begin.
The cognitive ability test is 12 minutes and has 50 questions. The motivation assessment has 58 questions and a 20-minute time limit. Wonderlic doesn’t disclose the time limit or number of questions in the personality test.
Reviews from candidates indicate it can be challenging to complete these tests within the time limits.
TestGorilla | Wonderlic | |
Your company’s intro or outro video | Yes | N/A |
Assessments branded with your company logo and colors | Yes | N/A |
Customizable invitation and rejection emails | Yes | N/A |
No login required for candidates | Yes | Yes |
Mobile-friendly | Yes | Yes |
Help and support for your candidates | Yes | Yes |
Typical assessment length | 10-50 minutes | 12-20 minutes |
Knockout questions prior to assessment | Yes | No |
As your organization grows and your hiring needs change, you’ll need pre-employment assessments that can meet your needs at each stage.
Look for a platform with features like GDPR compliance, which lets you hire globally, and ATS integration and API access so your assessments work with your company tech.
TestGorilla works with businesses of all sizes and is completely scalable. Our Pay as you go plan adapts to fluctuating hiring needs, perfect if you’re a growing company. We even have a free plan for startups to get going with.
For large organizations, TestGorilla meets complex hiring needs with ease. For example, ATS integrations and API access make TestGorilla work with your existing programs.
TestGorilla is fully GDPR-compliant, meaning you can hire applicants in other countries if your company operates globally.
Wonderlic works with large enterprises and small startups. The platform is GDPR compliant but doesn’t have API access or any ATS integrations.
TestGorilla | Wonderlic | |
ATS integration | Yes | No |
Multiple users and role-based rights management | Yes | N/A |
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 stages from invited to hired | Yes | N/A |
Enable anonymous candidate data for bias-free recruiting | Coming in 2023 | N/A |
Chrome Extension to invite candidates directly from LinkedIn | Coming in 2024 | N/A |
White labeling | Coming in 2024 | N/A |
API access | Yes | No |
Strict quality control measures give you confidence that the results you gather from your pre-employment assessments are accurate and bias-free. This means you can rely on them to make informed hiring decisions.
These measures might include replacing questions often, developing test questions with subject-matter experts, and running regular quality checks to protect the integrity of your hiring process.
TestGorilla develops every test in collaboration with subject-matter experts. Then, it undergoes a rigorous 28-step quality-control process before going live. This includes reviews by copywriters, psychometricians, and other professionals.
Even once a test is live, TestGorilla continues to work to improve it. After 10,000 uses, we replace questions so they can’t be shared.
TestGorilla also seeks out and acts on candidate and employer feedback to improve the overall assessment experience.
Wonderlic uses research in Industrial-Organizational psychology as well as AI and machine learning to develop its tests. However, it doesn’t share details about its quality-control processes on its website.
Once a company indicates what position they’re hiring for, the platform uses AI to choose the most relevant questions to test candidates’ cognitive ability, motivation, and personality.
TestGorilla | Wonderlic | |
Proprietary algorithms that continuously improve the quality of each test | Yes | N/A |
Extensive quality check before tests go live | Yes | N/A |
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 | N/A |
It’s important for pre-employment testing platforms to implement rigorous anti-cheating measures. This creates a fair assessment for all applicants and ensures you can make accurate decisions based on the results.
Features such as time limits, screen monitoring, and blocking copy-paste functionality all prevent anyone from gaining an unfair advantage.
TestGorilla is proud of its robust suite of anti-cheating features, which include:
Full-screen detection that alerts you if a candidate opens another window
Disabling copy-paste functionality
Time limits for tests
IP-address logging
Webcam screenshots (with applicants’ permission)
These measures ensure the integrity of every TestGorilla pre-employment test.
Wonderlic limits the time candidates have to answer questions and monitors the cognitive ability test scores for unusual patterns that could indicate cheating.
The assessments also use Item Response Theory (IRT), which uses scoring algorithms to weight the questions by difficulty, so that random guessing won’t give test-takers an advantage.
However, companies should be aware that there are YouTube videos and test prep companies promising candidates ways to “beat” Wonderlic tests.
TestGorilla | Wonderlic | |
IP-address logging (to avoid multiple attempts by the same candidate) | Yes | N/A |
Logging of candidate location | Yes | N/A |
Webcam snapshots (with the option to turn on/off) | Yes | N/A |
Full-screen mode detection (to avoid research during the test) | Yes | N/A |
AI proctoring: voice detection, face recognition, object recognition | Coming in 2024 | No |
Randomized questions per test | Yes | Yes |
Large question pool for each test | Yes (100+) | N/A |
Questions and answers not visible to employers to protect test integrity | Yes | N/A |
Time limit on tests | Yes (typically 10 minutes) | Yes (12-20 minutes) |
Mouse tracking | Yes | N/A |
Copy-paste disabled | Yes | No |
After the assessments are over, reporting and analytics are crucial to enable you to make sense of the results.
Look for a platform that creates succinct reports to summarize and rank applicant responses, and that enables you to share results and your comments about each job seeker with your team.
With TestGorilla, you can access assessment results in real-time. Check which applicants have started or completed their assessments and where everyone ranks at any point.
For more in-depth insights, you can review detailed reports for each applicant, including their video responses. Add comments to the videos and reports and share these with your hiring team for a collaborative hiring approach.
Wonderlic shows recruiters candidates’ scores on each of the three tests.
Users can see top candidates based on their ranking, or look more closely at the specific results for each candidate, like the specific score for problem-solving within the cognitive ability test, for example.
Recruiters can also print and share reports of the results or export them as PDFs.
TestGorilla | Wonderlic | |
PDF reports of assessments and individual candidates | Yes | Yes |
Excel and CSV reports of assessments and individual candidates | Yes | N/A |
Comprehensive overview of all current and past candidates | Yes | N/A (although an overview of current candidates is possible) |
Scoring benchmarks for candidates (including percentile rank scoring) | Yes | N/A (benchmarks and ranking of candidates are available, though) |
Add your ratings and personal notes for candidates | Yes | N/A |
Reporting by candidate source | Yes | No |
Candidate anonymization | No | No |
Detailed funnel and candidate analytics | Coming in 2023 | No |
Accessible, dependable pre-employment testing customer support – usually by live chat, phone, or email – is important for test-takers and employers.
Good customer support enables employers to use all the features of the testing platform so they can create the best tests and get accurate results. For candidates, support is necessary for them to complete tests quickly and perform at their best.
For employers, TestGorilla offers email and chat support. Candidates have access to a step-by-step guide and can contact tech support through an online form.
There’s also a detailed help and inspiration center to explore tutorials and FAQs in more detail, useful for employers and candidates alike.
Applicants can also submit an online request for help if they run into problems during their assessment.
We even offer new customers a detailed onboarding tour of all our features to help them hit the ground running with our software.
Companies can receive training sessions when they sign up with Wonderlic. They also have access to additional user and admin training and a dedicated Customer Success Manager.
Wonderlic also has a Knowledge Base with product information and training resources, and a customer community where employers can gain access to training webinars.
TestGorilla | Wonderlic | |
Live chat | Yes | N/A |
Help and inspiration center | Yes | Yes |
Email support | Yes | N/A |
Phone assistance | No | Yes |
Training and onboarding tour | Yes | Yes |
You’ll typically pay a monthly subscription cost for pre-employment testing platforms, based on the number of users and the features you need.
Some platforms offer free trials or versions that let you try out their features before you commit.
TestGorilla serves businesses of different sizes with three pricing plans, billed annually or monthly:
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.
Wonderlic doesn’t provide pricing information. There doesn’t appear to be a free trial or free plan and you need to contact the company for a quote.
TestGorilla | Wonderlic | |
Plan | Price (billed annually) | Contact company for a quote |
Free | $0 | |
Starter | From $75 USD per month ($900 per year paid upfront) The pay monthly plan starts from $85 USD per month | |
Pro | From $115 USD per month ($1,380 per year paid upfront) The pay monthly plan starts from $130 USD per month |
An easy-to-use pre-employment assessment platform is key for employers to create and send tests quickly, and for applicants to complete tests efficiently.
Look for platforms with smooth navigation, clear instructions, accessible technical support, and intuitive design.
TestGorilla is intuitive to use, so even if you’re new to pre-employment assessments you’ll find it easy to create and send your first tests in minutes.
The helpful reports help you interpret candidate data clearly and use it to make the right hiring decisions.
TestGorilla supports candidates throughout the process and makes it easy for them to complete their assessments. They enjoy clear instructions and can start their test with just one click. There’s also robust support if they get stuck.
Wonderlic uses AI to populate its personality, motivation, and cognitive ability tests.
Wonderlic presents test questions simply, with a forced-reply approach, meaning applicants answer one question at a time before seeing the next. Applicants can complete their assessment on any device.
Pre-employment testing improves hiring success. Sign up for your free TestGorilla plan today.
TestGorilla and Wonderlic are leading pre-employment screening services that help customers improve their hiring practices.
But while both measure cognitive ability, personality, and motivation, TestGorilla’s host of additional features make it the top choice for many companies.
TestGorilla’s extensive library and customization options mean you can tailor your assessments to any role you can think of. By comparison, Wonderlic focuses on three tests and doesn’t measure job-specific skills.
TestGorilla also implements strong quality-control and anti-cheating measures. In addition, the platform is transparent about pricing and its tests, in a way Wonderlic isn’t.
Using pre-employment assessments means you can quickly and accurately evaluate many candidates efficiently. It helps you find the best talent out there while reducing bias in your hiring process.
TestGorilla stands out for its features and flexibility. Curious to see more? Sign up for a free demo to see TestGorilla in action or get started today with our free plan.
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