TestGorilla vs. Kolbe

Pre-employment testing helps employers identify candidates with the right skills and personality traits to succeed in a role. These tests drive skills-based hiring and provide bias-free insights into job applicants. They also minimize the risk of mis-hiring. 

There are many pre-employment testing platforms available today, and picking the right one for your organization’s needs is essential. To help you make this decision, this article compares two top solutions: TestGorilla and Kolbe.

How does TestGorilla work?

TestGorilla is a pre-employment testing platform that streamlines hiring decisions for companies of all sizes.

The platform provides more than 300 tests, customizable assessments, and detailed reports that help you evaluate candidates quickly and accurately.

You can build custom assessments for every job role by picking tests from TestGorilla’s comprehensive test library, which includes tests for job-specific skills, situational judgment, cognitive ability, personality, and more.

TestGorilla’s pre-employment tests are developed with a strong focus on fairness and bias reduction.

You can view assessment results at a glance through our intuitive dashboard. Plus, detailed reports provide insights into each candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, making it easy to identify and compare top talent.

TestGorilla can help your organization reduce the time and money spent on traditional hiring methods, all while improving the quality of your hiring decisions.

How does Kolbe work?

Kolbe offers assessments to identify a person’s instinctual strengths and natural abilities. Individuals and businesses can use the Kolbe Index to measure conation, the innate ability to take action.

Rather than specific skills or personality traits, the Kolbe Index assesses an individual’s instincts and provides insights into how they’re likely to behave, problem-solve, and make decisions.

Kolbe has three assessments: the Kolbe A Index, Kolbe B Index, and Kolbe C Index. These can be used to hire new talent, assess current employees, or improve team performance.

The platform’s hiring solution, Kolbe RightFit, uses a unique process to help companies choose candidates.

When there’s a job opening, the direct supervisor of the role completes the Kolbe A Index and the Kolbe C Index to identify their natural strengths and the ones required for the position. Other employees involved in evaluating candidates are called “Cooperatives” and must also complete the Kolbe C Index.

Using these results, they create a job profile and a Kolbe Range of Success Report to measure the capabilities of candidates. Job applicants then complete the Kolbe A Index, and their results are compared to the Range of Success Report to find the best candidates.

Kolbe also provides consulting services and personal assessments.

TestGorilla vs. Kolbe: Test libraries

A test library must include a wide range of tests to accurately assess applicants’ skills and qualities. TestGorilla and Kolbe have different tests for pre-screening, but they use widely different methodologies.

TestGorilla’s test library 

TestGorilla offers an extensive test library with more than 300 tests. These tests are divided into eight broad categories:

• Role-specific skills

• Situational judgment

• Programming skills

• Language

• Cognitive ability

• Personality and culture

• Software skills

• Typing speed

You can add your own questions to TestGorilla’s tests as well. There are also different question formats to choose from, including text, multiple-choice, video, and file upload.

To help you efficiently hire international candidates, TestGorilla has localized websites in 11 languages.

Kolbe’s test library

There are three main assessments on Kolbe: 

• Kolbe A Index (Instinct Test): A 36-question assessment to identify an individual’s conative strengths.

• Kolbe B Index: To understand an employee’s perception of their job responsibilities.

• Kolbe C Index: To measure the functional expectations of a specific role.

Kolbe has a supplemental report to the Kolbe A Index, Financial MO+, to help users make better financial decisions. In addition, there’s the Kolbe R Index test, used to identify the instinctive strengths in personal relationships.

There’s also a Student Aptitude quiz and a free team collaboration survey.

Test libraries: Comparison chart at a glance

TestGorilla vs. Kolbe: Functionalities for hiring developers 

Hiring software developers requires testing candidates’ skills in various programming languages and frameworks. This ensures you choose talented developers that add value to your organization.

Hiring developers with TestGorilla 

TestGorilla has many tests to assess developer-related skills. You can choose from:

• 16 coding language tests, including Python, PHP, Rust, C, C#, C++, and Javascript

• Framework tests, including React Native, Flutter, Flask, and Django

• Android development tests using Java

• Coding tasks

• Debugging tasks

There’s an option to add custom coding questions to developer tests to see how candidates would perform in a situation related to the role. You can also see how long candidates took to complete each test in an assessment and use recorded replays to see which methodology they used.

Plus, TestGorilla automates the hiring process for developers by grading programming tests, so hiring managers can easily see who the top candidates are.

Hiring developers with Kolbe

Kolbe is an instinctive abilities assessment tool. It doesn’t offer any specific tests for hiring developers.

Functionalities for hiring developers: Comparison chart at a glance

TestGorilla vs. Kolbe: Video interviews

Using video interviews, employers can better understand job applicants’ communication skills, personality, and real-time responses. To assess candidates, you can use live or one-way video interviews with pre-recorded questions.

TestGorilla’s video interviews 

TestGorilla enables recruiters to create one-way video interviews with up to 20 custom questions per assessment. Candidates have three attempts to record video responses, and you’re able to set a time limit of 30 seconds, 60 seconds, or two minutes.

You and your hiring team can view video responses on any device. Ratings and comments on candidate answers make it easy to collaborate while picking the best applicants.

Kolbe’s video interviews 

Kolbe doesn’t offer any video interview features.

Video interviews: Comparison chart at a glance

TestGorilla vs. Kolbe: Candidate experience and company branding

By prioritizing the candidate experience, companies can attract top talent, build a positive reputation, and create long-lasting relationships with skilled job seekers (even if they’re not hired for the position).

To attract the best candidates, you should create a dynamic experience that includes branded assessments, mobile-friendly tests, and video questions. 

The candidate experience with TestGorilla 

TestGorilla is focused on providing an exceptional candidate experience. Users can take tests anytime, anywhere, and using any device.

TestGorilla removes candidate hurdles by providing mobile-friendly assessments that can be completed without creating an account or logging in. 

Candidates can use the online help center, which has detailed instructions to solve common issues during assessments. They can also raise a support request for further assistance.

For added transparency, TestGorilla helps you keep applicants updated throughout the hiring process by sending them customizable invitation, results, and rejection emails.

In addition, you can add your company logo and use brand colors in every TestGorilla assessment. You can also include intro and outro videos and a custom redirect URL at the end of each assessment.

The candidate experience with Kolbe

Candidates can complete the Kolbe A Index on the Kolbe website using their desktops, laptops, or mobile devices. 

However, there’s a lack of transparency in communication during the hiring progress since there’s no easy way to keep candidates updated.

Additionally, you can’t add company branding, intro, or outro videos to Kolbe assessments.

Candidate experience and company branding: Comparison chart at a glance

TestGorilla vs. Kolbe: Enterprise and startup friendliness

Many organizations need a pre-employment testing platform that can grow as its hiring needs do. 

Exceptional platforms will have dynamic features to support startups, growing businesses, and enterprises alike. These include bulk actions, role-based rights management, public links, GDPR compliance, and API access.

TestGorilla’s enterprise and startup friendliness

TestGorilla has extensive features for small businesses, enterprises, and every kind of organization in between.

Our GDPR-compliant platform integrates with applicant tracking system (ATS) solutions. This helps recruiters track candidates through the hiring process without delays or errors.

Enterprises can use the TestGorilla API to integrate with all the tools they use for hiring and recruitment.

TestGorilla also has multiple candidate invite options to conveniently invite applicants to assessments. It also enables public links for each candidate source, so recruiters can identify their best sources for high-quality hires.

Hiring teams at all types of organizations can use branding options to personalize assessments. They can also share candidate reports in multiple formats, including PDF and Excel, to collaboratively decide who to hire.

TestGorilla’s intuitive candidate tracking dashboard and role-based permissions create a cohesive recruitment environment, while bulk invitations and actions help streamline large-scale hiring processes.

Kolbe’s enterprise and startup friendliness

Kolbe’s assessments are most effective for individuals but can help improve the performance of an organization’s existing teams.

Recruiters can use Kolbe’s hiring solution, RightFit, as part of its larger software called Kolbe WAREwithal. This tool also includes KolbeCore Pro and Team Tactix.

Enterprises get access to job analysis and Range of Success job profiles to easily create accurate job descriptions. The platform also provides purchasing discounts for the Kolbe Index and automatically grades candidates based on their results.

While these tools might be enough to create job posts and track candidate progress, Kolbe lacks the advanced features required to attract high-quality applicants and accurately assess a large number of candidates.

There are also no ATS integrations, user permissions, or public API access.

Enterprise and startup friendliness: Comparison chart at a glance

TestGorilla vs. Kolbe: Quality control

To be effective, pre-employment screening tests must be reliable, bias-free, and expertly crafted. Extensive quality control measures are necessary to achieve this.

TestGorilla’s quality-control processes

TestGorilla’s tests are created by subject-matter experts and pass through a 28-step quality-control process before going live. This process includes peer reviews, sample testing, and more to build scientifically backed, bias-free assessments.

Our platform also uses a proprietary algorithm to continually improve each test’s quality, ensuring all tests are up-to-date and accurate.

Every question is automatically replaced once it’s been used 10,000 times. So, every test has content relevant to current industry practices and trends.

Additionally, feedback from clients, candidates, recruiters, and hiring teams is used to consistently improve tests and the test-taking experience.

Kolbe’s quality-control processes

Theorist Kathy Kolbe, who founded Kolbe, created the Kolbe Indexes. Kolbe is led by a team of experts, including entrepreneurs, leaders, and consultants.

The accuracy and reliability of the Kolbe Indexes is based on Kolbe’s own research and consulting work since the 1980s. Additionally, various organizations have successfully implemented the Kolbe Indexes. 

Beyond this, there’s no further information about Kolbe’s quality-control processes on its website. 

Quality control: Comparison chart at a glance

TestGorilla vs. Kolbe: Anti-cheating measures

Anti-cheating measures are crucial for gauging candidates’ true abilities.

Without these measures, dishonest applicants can manipulate test results to get ahead of more qualified competitors in the hiring process. This disrupts the process and can even lead to mis-hires.

TestGorilla’s anti-cheating measures 

TestGorilla has a range of anti-cheating measures to prevent candidates from unfairly manipulating test results. 

TestGorilla uses IP address and candidate location logging, webcam snapshots, randomized questions for each test, and full-screen mode detection to prevent cheating.

Every candidate gets a unique assessment, and you’re able to choose from 100+ questions for each test. 

Test Gorilla also enables you to disable copy-paste, so questions and answers aren’t leaked online.

Kolbe’s anti-cheating measures

Since the Kolbe Indexes aren’t skills-based assessments with “right” and “wrong” answers, users can’t copy answers or rely on outside research to complete them. However, they can still choose different answers to get a more desired result. 

To prevent this, Kolbe’s algorithm detects inconsistencies in answers and notes them in the candidate’s report to warn prospective employers that the applicant should retake the test.

Anti-cheating measures: Comparison chart at a glance

TestGorilla vs. Kolbe: Reporting and analytics

Reporting and analytics help HR teams make data-backed hiring decisions. Reports that are easy to share in multiple formats also make for a more collaborative hiring process.

TestGorilla’s reporting and analytics features

TestGorilla enables you to set a scoring benchmark and will automatically rank candidates based on their results.

Our platform provides easy-to-read reports following assessments. These show candidate results and summarize their suitability for the role. TestGorilla also provides the option to generate reports that give an overview of all current and past applicants. 

Reports can be exported in PDF, CSV, and Excel formats. You can easily share reports with your hiring team and add notes and ratings for each candidate. This streamlines collaboration and helps you hire top talent.

Kolbe’s reporting and analytics features

Kolbe’s RightFit tool sends an email to the direct supervisor containing an individual’s candidate report. This report assigns a letter grade (from A to F) to indicate their suitability for the role.

If there are multiple candidates, Kolbe’s RightFit sends a Candidate Summary report containing each candidate’s letter grade. 

For job roles where there are Cooperatives involved in the evaluation process, the summary report will also indicate the candidate’s impact on team synergy.

While sharing reports using email is easy, hiring teams must go back and forth to make decisions and give feedback on candidates.

Reporting and analytics: Comparison chart at a glance

TestGorilla vs. Kolbe: Customer support

Standout pre-employment testing platforms offer quick, helpful customer support. This helps employers address issues and assists candidates facing problems while completing assessments.

TestGorilla’s customer support

TestGorilla offers top-notch customer support to help companies make the most of our features. 

All customers can access support through live chat and email. Those on the Business plan can contact our support team by phone. Everyone can visit our online help center, which includes detailed guides to solve any issues.

Candidates who need help completing their assessments can use the help center or contact support via chat. 

Customers get a free onboarding tour when they first start using TestGorilla, so they know all the ins and outs from the start. We also keep customers informed through our blog, featuring the latest information on recruitment, hiring, and more.

Kolbe’s customer support

Kolbe provides customer service through phone and email during business hours. Users who opt to work with a Kolbe consultant can contact them for support.

The platform also has a blog to help customers use the Kolbe Indexes more efficiently.

Customer support: Comparison chart at a glance

TestGorilla vs. Kolbe: Pricing

Pre-employment testing companies offer a range of payment plan options, but some are complicated and may come with hidden costs. The best solution is to research pricing for the size of plan that you need, and ensure there are no hidden fees.

TestGorilla’s pricing 

TestGorilla offers three pricing plans (billed annually or monthly) that are transparent and easy to understand: 

• 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.

Kolbe’s pricing 

Kolbe doesn’t use a subscription payment model. Instead, individuals can purchase the Kolbe A Index for $55, Kolbe B Index for $45, and other resources at additional cost.

Businesses must purchase the Kolbe WAREwithal software to use RightFit. 

Kolbe also offers custom pricing for each customer. Additional purchases of Index Credits (needed to complete the assessments) may be required.

Pricing: Comparison chart at a glance

TestGorilla vs. Kolbe: Ease of use

An intuitive interface and easy-to-use features make candidate selection easier and keep candidates engaged throughout the assessment process.

TestGorilla’s ease of use 

TestGorilla is effortless to use. Once you enter the role you’re hiring for, our platform will automatically suggest tests to add to your assessment. You can also easily add more tests and custom questions to create a comprehensive assessment.

You can use public links to source candidates. Hiring teams can keep track of all candidates and their results at a glance using an intuitive dashboard. They can perform bulk actions for better candidate management and integrate with other ATS software to create a cohesive environment.

The user experience for candidates is equally smooth. They can complete assessments on any device without logging in and use various support options while taking tests.

You can also send automated emails to keep candidates updated every step of the way.

Kolbe’s ease of use

Kolbe is straightforward to use. Companies can use the WAREwithal software to monitor hiring efforts and buy Index Credits so candidates can complete the Kolbe A Index. 

Candidates must log in to complete the assessment, which usually takes 10-15 minutes. 

Candidate reports are sent via email. However, there are no bulk operations, integrations with ATS applications, or public links to paste on job boards. Every candidate must be sent an individual invitation to take the A Index.

Conclusion: TestGorilla vs. Kolbe 

TestGorilla and Kolbe offer bias-free tests designed to hire employees based on their abilities. While TestGorilla focuses on skills tests to assess capabilities, Kolbe uses a questionnaire to measure instinctive strengths.

Both platforms offer reports containing insights about candidates’ strengths and weaknesses, along with their fit for the role.

Kolbe’s assessments are best used as one part of many tests, including skills tests, to rate candidates. TestGorilla, on the other hand, offers hundreds of customizable skills and personality tests, along with extensive features for candidate management. Its customer support options and anti-cheating tools are also exceptional.

TestGorilla is the ideal pre-employment testing solution for businesses of all sizes. The dynamic platform can easily cater to your hiring needs with flexible pricing options and a long list of features.

Streamline your hiring process with pre-employment testing

Pre-employment screening tests provide valuable insights into a candidate’s skills and traits that a resume alone can’t provide.

These assessments remove bias from the hiring process, save time, and help ensure the most qualified candidates get the job. Consequently, this boosts employee retention.

TestGorilla is the leading pre-employment testing platform for all organizations. Sign up for a free live demo to see how TestGorilla can transform your hiring decisions.