Recruitment assessment tools test every candidate the same way, so you compare like with like. We read the pricing pages of 28 of them. Eleven publish a price. Here are the numbers, the billing unit that catches buyers out, and what each type of test predicts.
The finding
Every figure came from the vendor's own pricing page on 17 August 2026. The Bryq, HackerRank and Codility entries were re-read on 18 September 2026. Sorted by what a small employer pays to start. Our own product is the last row, set apart, in the same columns as everyone else.
| Tool | What it measures | How it bills you | Published price | Cheapest way in |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TestGorilla | Skills, plus some personality | Credits, used per candidate | Free tier · Core $1,704/yr · Plus from $4,800/yr | Free plan, 10 credits a month, no card |
| TestDome | Technical skills | Per candidate, packs never expire | $20 each for 5, falling to $7 each at 600 | $100 for five candidates |
| Prevue HR | Personality and ability | Flat monthly, banded by headcount | Essentials $195/mo for 1 to 25 staff | Free trial, terms not published |
| Bryq | Personality and cognitive | Flat monthly, banded by your headcount | Pro $69/mo billed yearly · Enterprise by quotethe "$168" on the page is a save badge, not a plan price | $828 a year, one-year commitment |
| Clevry | Personality, ability, situational judgement | Per test | Personality £135 · ability £40 · SJT £40 · £500 onboarding | Pay as you go, after the £500 onboarding fee |
| Xobin | Skills, psychometric, AI interview | Credit bundle. One credit runs 30 assessments | $1,000 per 100 credits | Free 5 credits for 14 days |
| McQuaig | Personality | 90-day term, not annual | From $1,500 per 90 days | $1,500, roughly $6,000 a year if you hire all year |
| HackerRank | Technical skills | Subscription plus per-attempt overage | Starter $1,990/yr · Pro $4,490/yr · $20 an attempt overnot on the pricing page, which renders blank without scripts; taken from HackerRank’s own comparison articles | Starter at $1,990 a year |
| Alva Labs | Personality and logic | Per open job per year, not per candidate | Extra positions €370, or €320 on the larger planbase subscription fee loads in the browser and never rendered | 30-day trial, one job, up to 50 candidates |
| Predictive Index | Personality and cognitive | Annual licence, priced by company headcount | From $10,000 a year | $10,000 floor, annual only |
| SeeMyPersonality Ours, listed last | Personality, worded for work | Monthly, by scored respondents | $99/mo, or $948 a year | Build and send without an account or a card |
Two names in older comparison posts are gone. Plum was bought by Phenom and no longer sells separately. Berke is now HighMatch, which says plainly that it does not offer fixed pricing. A list that still recommends either has not been checked recently.
The same year, nine bills
A small employer, fifty candidates, twelve months. This is arithmetic on the published figures above and nothing else. HackerRank and Alva Labs are left out because their base prices could not be read.
| Tool | A year, 50 candidates | How that is worked out |
|---|---|---|
| TestGorilla | $0 to $1,704 | The free plan covers it only if you test about four people a month, every month. Otherwise Core. |
| TestDome | $800 | Two packs of 25 at $400. Unused candidates carry over. |
| Bryq | $828 | The annual plan, whatever the number of candidates. |
| Xobin | $1,000 | The minimum bundle. You would use about two of its hundred credits. |
| Prevue HR | $2,340 | Twelve months of Essentials, for a company of up to 25 staff. |
| McQuaig | $1,500 to $6,000 | One 90-day term if you hire in a single burst, four if you hire all year. |
| Clevry | £7,250 | Fifty personality tests at £135, plus the £500 onboarding fee. |
| Predictive Index | $10,000 | The licence floor, whatever the number of candidates. |
| SeeMyPersonality (ours) | $948 | The annual Starter plan. Building and sending costs nothing until you want scored reports at volume. |
List prices only. Negotiated discounts are normal at the top of this market. For your own volume, divide the yearly price by the number of candidates you expect to assess in that year.
Why the bills differ tenfold
Headline prices are easy to compare and rarely what you pay. Three units catch small buyers out.
01
TestGorilla’s free plan gives ten credits a month and they do not bank. Paid bundles expire with the contract. If you hire in bursts, you buy capacity you lose.
02
Xobin has the best rate here: one credit runs thirty assessments. But the smallest purchase is a hundred credits at $1,000, so a small employer pays for a hundred and uses two.
03
Bryq, Prevue, Thomas and the Predictive Index price on how many people you employ, not how many you assess. A forty-person firm hiring five a year pays what one hiring two hundred pays.
The evidence, briefly
The number beside each type is its validity for predicting job performance in the 2022 re-analysis by Sackett and colleagues. Higher is better, and none is close to certainty.
Validity .33
Tells you whether someone can do the task today. The category most tools here sell, and the one whose validity fell furthest in 2022, from .54.
TestGorilla, TestDome, HackerRank, Codility, Xobin, Vervoe, iMocha
Validity .25 and .31
Personality worded for work predicts at .25 with almost no group gap. Cognitive ability predicts at .31 with the widest gap of any method (.79).
Bryq, Prevue, McQuaig, Clevry, Alva Labs, Predictive Index, Hogan, SHL, Talogy, Thomas, ours
Validity .42
A structured interview is the strongest single method. Software helps only if it makes your interview more structured. A question list and a rating scale do the same for nothing.
HireVue, Sapia.ai, and the interview kits inside most platforms
Our own row, read honestly
We sell a personality questionnaire worded for work. It predicts at .25, below a skills test and well below a structured interview. What the single number hides is consistency: it has the narrowest spread of any method in the 2023 follow-up, and essentially no group gap. We would not use it to rank your final three. We would use it to decide what to ask them. Most vendor pages still quote the older figures, where cognitive tests scored .51 and work samples .54. The full table is in our guide to the eight assessment types.
From table to shortlist
Buy per candidate. TestDome at $16 to $20 a head beats every subscription until you pass roughly a hundred candidates a year, and the packs do not expire.
A platform earns its keep. TestGorilla’s free tier is a genuine trial, and Xobin’s rate is the best in the table if you can use the volume.
That is the personality category. Word the items for work, keep the result out of the reject decision, and use it to write the interview. Bryq, Prevue and ours all publish a price.
Register with SHL or Talogy to see the real price list, or expect a demo cycle. The Predictive Index publishes a $10,000 floor, which mostly tells you who it is for.
Whatever you choose, the cheapest improvement is not on this page. Write your interview questions down, ask every candidate the same ones, and score as you go. That is worth more than any tool here.
United Kingdom
"Recruitment assessment" is the British phrase for what Americans call a hiring assessment, and "psychometric testing for recruitment" usually means the same tools. Three things differ.
A test that disadvantages people with a protected characteristic has to be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. Section 60 restricts questions about health before a job offer, so ask "do you need any adjustments to complete this assessment?" and nothing more. Reasonable adjustments, such as extra time, are a duty.
UK data protection law gives candidates rights where a decision is made solely by automated means. A score that a person reads and weighs is on safer ground than one that rejects people by itself.
Several UK publishers sell ability and personality tests only to people holding the British Psychological Society's test user qualifications. Of the tools that publish a price, Clevry is the one that lists it in sterling.
Questions buyers ask
They are software products that test candidates in a consistent way: skills tests, personality and ability questionnaires, situational judgement tests, and video or chat interviews that get scored. The point of all of them is the same. Everyone at a given stage answers the same thing, so you compare like with like instead of comparing your impressions.
Of 28 vendors we checked in August 2026, eleven publish a price, two of them with a caveat. Among those, a small employer testing 50 candidates a year pays anywhere from nothing to about $10,000. TestDome charges per candidate from $7 to $20. Bryq starts at $828 a year. Predictive Index starts at $10,000 a year regardless of how many people you assess. Most of the rest ask you to book a demo.
It depends on what you are testing and how you are billed, and those two questions matter more than any ranking. For technical roles at low volume, per-candidate pricing wins. For a whole team on a subscription, headcount-banded plans are usually cheaper. For anything where the result affects who gets rejected, pick the type with the evidence behind it and the smallest group gap, then put your real weight on a structured interview.
Yes. Vendors and buyers use the four phrases for the same software. "Recruitment" is the usual word in the UK, Ireland, Australia and India, "hiring" in the United States. "Talent assessment" sometimes also covers tools for developing existing staff, which is a different purchase. "Employee assessment tools" usually means performance-review software, which this page does not cover.
Accurate enough to help, and not accurate enough to decide alone. The best single method is a structured interview, at about .42. Skills tests come in near .33 and cognitive tests near .31, both lower than the figures most vendor pages still quote. A well-built questionnaire adds about .25 when its items are worded for work. Combine two methods that measure different things and you do well. Stack five and you mostly lose candidates.
Yes, with conditions. The test must not put people with protected characteristics at a disadvantage you cannot justify under the Equality Act 2010, and you must offer reasonable adjustments for disabled candidates. Ask "do you need any adjustments to complete this assessment?" rather than asking about health, which section 60 restricts before an offer. Keep a person in the decision rather than rejecting automatically. None of this is legal advice.
Yes, as one input among several, and not as the thing that produces the rejection on its own. Word the items for work rather than in general, because that difference alone is worth about a third more signal. Use it to shape what you probe in the interview. What it should not do is rank your final shortlist, because that is the part of the scale where candidates present themselves best.
Keep reading
How we checked this, and who wrote it
Michael Hodge, founder of SeeMyPersonality, BSc Psychology (University of Wollongong). Every price was read from the vendor's own live pricing page on 17 August 2026, not from another comparison post. Where a vendor publishes nothing, this page says so. How content is written and reviewed here.
HackerRank's figures are HackerRank's own but come from its comparison articles, because its pricing table renders in the browser and would not return numbers, on 17 August 2026 or on 18 September 2026. Alva Labs' base subscription fee does the same, so only its per-position rates are shown. Codility's pricing page returned a server error on every attempt on both dates, so no Codility price appears at all. Bryq's page shows a single priced plan, Pro at $69 a month billed annually; the "$168" beside it is a save badge that other comparison tables have mistaken for a price.
Validity figures come from the 2022 re-analysis of the selection literature and its 2023 follow-up, not from the 1998 table most vendor pages still use. They are averages across many jobs with real spread around them.
If you would rather try one than read about them
Ours builds in about a minute, with no account and no demo call.