Pre-Employment Testing Companies: 12 Vendors, 3 Different Markets

Three different industries answer to the phrase pre-employment testing company, and the search results do not separate them. In the top fifteen for this exact search sit a national drug-screening franchise, a New York occupational health clinic, a psychometric publisher, a leadership consultancy and two vendor directories. The first question Google reports people also asking is not about skills tests at all. It is “what companies do pre-employment drug testing?”

So this page starts by splitting the category, because picking a vendor from the wrong third of it wastes weeks.

We should also say what we are, because it bears on how you read this. SharpAssessment sells practical and job-knowledge tests to small hiring teams, priced by candidate volume. We are in the third market described below, and we have deliberately left ourselves off the list rather than rank ourselves first on our own page. That does not make us neutral, so here is the safeguard instead: every fact below was read from the vendor’s own live pages on 30 July 2026, and every price is one you can go and check yourself. Where a vendor’s own pages contradict each other, we say so rather than quietly picking the flattering number.

The three markets hiding in one search

If you are in the first two rows, stop reading. Nothing on this page can collect a urine sample or pull a county court record, and no amount of feature comparison will change that. The reason those vendors outrank assessment platforms on this keyword is that a drug screen is a recurring compliance purchase with a much higher lifetime value than a skills test, so they bid and publish accordingly.

Everything below concerns the third row.

Companies or software: the distinction the word “companies” hides

The search says companies, which implies somebody doing the testing for you. Most of this market has quietly become software you run yourself, and the two buying experiences barely resemble each other.

You want the service end of the market when nobody in your organisation can defend a scoring decision, when you need a validation study tied to your own performance data, or when hiring managers will need training to read a report without over-reading it. That is Wonderlic, Prevue at its Premium tier, eSkill’s assessment consulting tier, or one of the roughly 800 certified partners who resell and interpret Predictive Index. Expect a call, a quote based on your headcount, and an annual commitment.

You want self-serve software when you already know which skill you are testing and you need it delivered and scored the same way every time. That is TestDome, Evalart, EmployTest, HR Avatar and TestGorilla’s lower tiers. You can buy those with a card today.

This split predicts almost everything else, including whether you will ever see a price.

Vendors that sell instruments and interpretation

These four are psychometric publishers first. The product is the instrument and the report, not a library you browse. All four are sales-gated to some degree, and all four have the deepest validity documentation in this group.

Criteria

The most visible company in this category and the one to beat: it holds two of the top ten results for this search. It sells three packages, Criteria Assess, Criteria Interview and Criteria Hire, covering cognitive aptitude, personality, emotional intelligence, risk and skills, plus game-based assessments. Its cognitive test, the CCAT, derives from an instrument licensed exclusively from Harvard. It claims more than 20 years of validation work, an ISO 42001 certification for AI management, and 80 million assessments delivered.

Nothing on its site carries a dollar figure. We scanned the home, plans, request-pricing and free-trial pages for a currency symbol and found none. The 14-day free trial is real but form-gated behind ten fields including phone number, headcount and industry, and the page notes that non-business email addresses need to email support instead. AI proctoring and AI features are separately priced add-ons rather than included.

The honest downside comes from its users, not its site. The CCAT draws candidate refusals, and one recruiter describes the practical cost of that precisely: it “requires more recruiter overhead at scale, as you need to fill your pipelines with more candidates to account for the folks who refuse to take it” (r/humanresources). Recruiters comparing it to TestGorilla split the other way, though: “we use CRITERIA and find it to be superior. IE the tests actually have weight and are much less gamable” (r/recruiting).

Wonderlic

Deliberately the narrowest product here, and it says so. Wonderlic Select measures exactly three things, which it calls the top three predictors of job performance: cognitive ability, personality and motivation. There are no coding tests, no situational judgement tests, no typing tests. Its differentiator is combining those three constructs into one score with off-the-shelf profiles by job title, backed by a claimed 85 years of science.

Every buyer path ends at a demo request. We followed the “Get Started” and “Start Hiring Top Talent” buttons in the raw HTML and both resolve to the same get-a-demo page. Its own FAQ is candid about why there is no price: cost “depends on the package you choose, which is based on your organization’s needs and employee count.” The practice tests on the site are for candidates preparing to be tested, not for employers evaluating the product.

Worth knowing before you buy: scoring is band-based per role, and bands cut both ways. A former employee describes ranges like 12 to 16 for a warehouse line role against 24 to 29 for management, and confirms it is “absolutely possible to score too well for a given position and be disqualified that way” (r/recruitinghell). If that is not the behaviour you want, it is a configuration conversation to have before signing, not after.

The Predictive Index

The only vendor at the top of this market that publishes a real floor: the Talent plan starts at $10,000 a year, scaling with headcount, with unlimited users and unlimited assessments. It is not a test library. It is two instruments, a six-minute behavioural assessment and a cognitive assessment, plus a job assessment that defines the target profile first.

Its compliance writing is the most specific we found anywhere, naming EEOC guidelines and the four-fifths adverse impact standard directly. Two inconsistencies on its own science pages, which we report rather than resolve: the validity-study count appears as both 383 and more than 400 depending on which page you read. Trials exist but are not self-serve, and the wording is worth quoting because it is easy to miss: “PI can enable free trials of our different products. Please contact sales for further details.”

Its weakness is not the instrument, it is what organisations do with it. From an HR lead running it for a year: “3/4ths of the managers never look at the results and most of the rest didn’t understand how to use the results” (r/humanresources). A sharper warning from the same thread describes managers converging on their own demographic once PI was layered onto interviews. Budget for the training, or expect the tool to become a mirror.

Prevue Assessments

The clearest adverse-impact position in this group, and the only one that states it as an ongoing process rather than a certificate. Its science page says every assessment is monitored for adverse impact across gender, ethnicity and age, and that items disadvantaging a group without job-related justification do not ship. It cites SIOP, the APA, the EEOC and the Canadian Human Rights Act as the standards it builds to, alongside 35 years of research and more than 250,000 custom benchmarks. It measures aptitude, personality across 13 traits, motivation and work ethic, against a library of over 100 job benchmarks.

Essentials starts at $195 a month, priced by employee-count band, with unlimited candidate invites and a free trial. Standard and Premium show “Request Pricing” with no figure at all, and that is where the interesting things live: custom job benchmarking, access to in-house I/O psychologists, validation studies, and ATS, HRIS and API integrations. Cost tracks your headcount rather than your hiring volume, so it rewards constant hiring and punishes twice-a-year hiring.

Vendors that sell a test library you run yourself

Breadth and self-service are the product here. Most of these you can buy today without speaking to anyone.

TestGorilla

The default answer in this category and the most-discussed by a wide margin. A genuine free plan, not a trial: $0 a month, 10 credits every month, no card required, limited to five essential tests. Paid starts at $142 a month billed annually, which is $1,704 up front, for a library of over 350 tests. Plus starts at $400 a month, or $4,800 a year. A skills test costs one credit per candidate and an AI interview costs two.

Two things to know that the pricing page will not lead with. Both paid tiers are annual commitments despite the monthly headline. And scientific validation plus company-specific validity testing are Enterprise-only line items, marked “Talk to us” at every self-serve tier, which matters if your reason for testing is legal defensibility.

The candidate-experience complaint is consistent and specific. One withdrew over a “55 minute TestGorilla” assessment requiring camera-on; another recruiter’s advice is the practical version of the same point: “TestGorilla works for blue collar if you keep it under 15 min total. Whatever you pick, demo it on a phone first” (r/recruiting). We go deeper in our TestGorilla alternatives comparison.

eSkill

The deepest customisable library for role-specific hard skills: Microsoft Office and Excel, maths and bookkeeping, clerical and typing, mechanical aptitude. It states over 600 subjects against a 70,000-question bank, and note the unit, since it counts subjects and questions rather than tests.

It also has the most explicit regulatory positioning of any vendor here. Its compliance page title is literally “EEOC, OFCCP, ADA & GDPR Compliant”, and the page carries named sections on EEOC compliance and adverse impact risk management. If a procurement or legal reviewer is in your buying process, this is the easiest story to hand them.

The cost is access. All three plans, Growth, Scale and Custom, end at “Talk to sales”, and there is no free trial, no free plan and no sample test for buyers anywhere on the site. Nothing about eSkill can be evaluated without a sales conversation, which for a two-week evaluation window effectively rules it out.

TestDome

The most transparent pricing page in the category, and it is not close. Five prepaid packs, all priced, no subscription: $20 per candidate at five, $16 at 25, $10 at 100, $8 at 300 and $7 at 600. Packs never expire, an untaken invite returns to your balance after six days, and there is a self-serve 14-day trial. Unusually, every feature is on every plan, including ATS integrations, API access, SSO and candidate anonymisation, so tiers differ only by volume.

Its real product is anti-cheating, treated as the centrepiece rather than a feature row: proctoring that flags AI assistance, a locked-down exam browser, questions written to resist chatbots, duplicate-attempt detection. Coverage is 130-plus skills and 30-plus languages and frameworks, weighted heavily technical.

One caution for this specific keyword. TestDome uses the word integrity on its homepage, but it means the integrity of the test session, not an integrity or honesty questionnaire in the psychometric sense. And its compliance story is GDPR and payment security only. We found no EEOC, adverse-impact or validation-study language anywhere, which is a real gap if defensibility is why you are buying.

EmployTest

The unglamorous middle of the market, done well: office and clerical roles. Microsoft Office tests delivered as interactive simulations rather than multiple choice, typing and data entry, attention to detail, plus industry sets for legal, healthcare, accounting and warehouse work. It states that its tests follow EEOC and US Department of Labor selection guidelines, which is more than most of the self-serve group claims.

Credit packs, no contract: $199 for five, $299 for ten, $599 for 25, $1,999 for 100, valid a year. Watch the unit, because it is the trap here. One credit is one completed test, not one candidate, so a candidate taking three tests costs three credits and the $199 pack can cover fewer than five people. Its free offer is a single sample assessment, not a trial. Its own pages disagree on library size, saying 100-plus on the pricing page and 200-plus on the sample page. It also refuses individual buyers outright and verifies work email addresses.

Evalart

The cheapest published per-candidate rate we found: $76 a month for 20 candidates, which is $3.80 each, or $90 once for the same 20 valid twelve months, which is $4.50 each. Both include unlimited tests per candidate. Signup is genuinely self-serve, with an account-creation form attached directly to the buy buttons, and there is a free trial. Coverage spans programming, aptitude, knowledge and personality, including Big Five and DISC.

Two caveats worth stating plainly. Its own pages claim 500 tests on the homepage and 250-plus on the pricing page. And its www subdomain serves a TLS certificate issued for a different hostname, so https://www.evalart.com fails verification in a normal browser while the non-www address works. Neither is a reason to rule it out on price, but both tell you something about engineering attention.

Vendors that score the work itself

Vervoe

The strongest simulation-first positioning here: candidates do tasks resembling the job and you judge the output. Assessments are organised by role domain rather than by trait, and it claims independent AI bias auditing by Holistic AI with results openly reported, plus ISO 27001 and GDPR compliance.

It is also the hardest vendor here to evaluate. Its pricing page now shows a single Enterprise plan with a “Let’s Talk” button and no figure anywhere. We searched both the home and pricing pages for any trial language and found none: the only free thing on offer is a guided product tour, which is not account access. There is no self-serve path of any kind, which is a notable shift for a product that buyer guides still describe as small-team friendly.

HR Avatar

Whole-person screening on one credit. One candidate credit covers unlimited tests, a video interview and reference checks for that person within a 90-day window, which is good value when you want several signals on one hire rather than one signal on many. Tests are chosen by job title and bundle cognitive ability, personality, a scored essay, behavioural history and job knowledge.

Prices are published, though not where you would look: there is no pricing page, it 404s, and the table sits on the homepage. It is $50 for one candidate, $350 for ten, $785 for 25 and $1,430 for 50. The free trial requires a corporate email, and the signup modal states plainly that accounts using free email addresses will not receive trial credits. We found no EEOC, adverse-impact or bias-audit language on any page, and no published test-library count. At $50 for a single candidate it is the most expensive entry point here for one-off use.

Bryq

The flat-rate option, and the only vendor whose pricing table names the three regimes together in one row: EEOC and UGESP compliance alongside the NYC AI bias regulation, plus SOC 2, ISO 27001 and GDPR. It measures cognitive ability, behavioural traits on 16PF and OCEAN, and hard skills across a stated 140-plus test library, with a separate AI fluency assessment.

Pro is $69 a month, and read that carefully: the page shows a total of $828 a year on a one-year commitment, so it is an annual deal quoted monthly, not month-to-month. It is also hard-capped at companies of 1 to 15 employees, so it is genuinely a micro-business plan rather than a starter tier. Above that is a custom Enterprise quote. Self-serve ATS integration is limited to a named list including Workable, Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby and Zoho Recruit; anything else needs the Enterprise guided tier. Recruiting agencies are explicitly excluded from the unlimited-evaluation terms.

HackerRank, for engineering only

Included for completeness and scope-limited on purpose. If you are hiring software engineers, HackerRank is the most-cited option in this space and it publishes from $82 a month with a free trial. If you are hiring anyone else, it is the wrong tool and the rest of this list is more relevant. One recruiter’s summary is fair: good for coding, expensive, and rigid if you need non-technical tests in the same platform.

What the other lists for this search will not tell you

We read the eight highest-ranking pages for this keyword and its close siblings before writing. Four of them are owned by vendors that appear on their own list, and the page currently ranking fourth for this exact search names no competitor at all. Only two of the eight disclose how they picked anything, and neither publishes the scores behind the claim.

Two patterns are worth carrying with you as a reader.

Half this market will not show you a price. Five of the twelve vendors above publish nothing: Criteria, eSkill, Wonderlic, Vervoe and, above the micro tier, Bryq. Two more publish only the bottom rung. If you are a 40-person company evaluating five tools in two weeks, that half of the market is effectively closed to you, and vendors know a call converts better than a price tag.

Treat vendor-authored reviews as marketing. One assessment vendor’s founder posts promotional content across multiple recruiting threads under branded accounts, and in one case a community member called out a review on that vendor’s own subreddit as “a founder writing their own review” (r/Prehireassessments). At least two subreddits in this niche are single-vendor branded spaces. Check who owns the forum before you trust the consensus in it.

The number that decides this, and it is not the price

Drop-off. It is the most consistently reported problem with pre-employment testing and the one almost no vendor page quantifies.

What practitioners report publicly:

• 52 per cent completion on a three-stage funnel of personality questionnaire, one-way video and coding test, at a 50-engineer fintech.
• Over 80 per cent dropout on a roughly 30-minute assessment, described as reading like unpaid work.
• 30 to 50 per cent drop-off when a psychometric test is requested, from a commenter arguing cognitive tests do have predictive validity.
• 10 to 15 per cent drop-off, the only good number in the set, from a recruiter who sends the exercise only after a video screen.

The last one is the finding. The variable that moves completion is not which vendor you chose, it is where in the process the test sits and how long it takes. The single most-repeated specific length in the discussions we read was a 172-question personality questionnaire taking about an hour, and it was never mentioned approvingly.

Three things practitioners actually do about it: put the test after a human conversation rather than before, keep it under 15 minutes for high-volume and hourly roles, and open it on a phone yourself before sending it to anyone.

How to check a vendor’s science in one request

The best buying advice we found came from a self-identified I/O psychology PhD, and it is a single request that separates real instruments from repackaged quizzes: ask for the technical manual. Then look for a reliability table with Cronbach’s alpha per trait, validity studies linking traits to job performance, and an impression-management scale that flags candidates answering too favourably. Instruments built for selection have all three documented. Products that cannot produce the manual are telling you something.

The same practitioner is blunt about which frameworks to avoid in hiring specifically, singling out MBTI and DISC as lacking predictive validity for job performance. That view is not universal, but it is the mainstream position among people who build these tests, and DISC’s popularity is not evidence against it. The most-upvoted assessment of DISC we encountered in a recruiting discussion called it and Myers-Briggs “horoscopes for businessmen.”

Which points at the real failure mode. In the thread specifically about a candidate disqualified by an assessment, the top comment by a wide margin argues that some assessments are good and some are awful, but the bigger problem is misuse: “Assessment results should never be used as a ‘hire/don’t hire’ determinant” (r/recruiting). A test used as one input among several is defensible. The same test used as the only gate concentrates all of the legal exposure and discards everything else you know about the person.

Where the legal exposure actually sits

If a test produces adverse impact against a protected group, the EEOC Uniform Guidelines expect you to show it is job-related and consistent with business necessity, with the four-fifths rule as the usual first arithmetic. A test that operates as a medical examination is a bigger problem: in Karraker v. Rent-A-Center the MMPI was treated as one, which brings the ADA into play. If you hire for roles in New York City, Local Law 144 requires an annual bias audit by an independent auditor for automated employment decision tools, plus published results and ten business days’ notice to candidates. This is a summary of business risk and not legal advice; before you deploy a scored personality or cognitive instrument at scale, this is a question for an employment lawyer.

What is checkable is which vendors engage with any of it on their own sites, and the split is sharper than the marketing suggests.

Criteria and Wonderlic sit between the two: both make strong validity claims, and Wonderlic says it is aligned with US employment laws, but neither names the EEOC or adverse impact on the pages we fetched. Not one of the twelve mentions NYC Local Law 144 by name outside Bryq’s single pricing-table row. An absence on a marketing page is not proof a vendor fails to comply, but if you need the compliance story, ask for it in writing rather than assuming it.

What we would do with a short list

If you know the skill you are testing and you hire in bursts, start with the per-candidate vendors that publish prices and let you buy today: TestDome, Evalart, EmployTest or HR Avatar, depending on whether the role is technical, general, clerical or a whole-person hire. Work out two numbers first, candidates tested per year and tests per candidate, because without them no price on this page means anything.

If you need a defensible instrument and somebody to stand behind the scoring, you are in a sales process whether you like it or not: Prevue, Criteria, Wonderlic or Predictive Index, and expect a headcount-based quote. Ask each one for the technical manual before the second call.

If you are a genuinely small team, the honest answer is that you may not need a platform at all. A written work sample, scored against criteria you wrote down before you saw the first response, gets a lot of the same benefit. A platform starts earning its keep when consistency and record-keeping stop being things you can hold in your head, or when the same test has to be run identically by several interviewers.

For the same twelve-plus vendors ranked purely on cost and billing unit, see our talent assessment tools comparison. For what personality testing can and cannot support, see personality tests for hiring.