TestGorilla vs. Topgrading

Pre-employment screening makes it simple to hire the best person for any open role in your organization. 

You can use test results to rank candidates quickly and understand the skills and qualities they will bring to your business. Quantitative screening also helps you remove human bias from the hiring process.

To get the most out of pre-employment testing, it’s important to have the right software for the job. This guide compares TestGorilla and Topgrading so you can decide which candidate screening platform is best for your business.

• ✅Learn more about pre-employment screening and sign up for your free TestGorilla account

How does TestGorilla work?

TestGorilla is a pre-employment screening software that enables you to test candidates on a huge variety of skills and qualities. Our platform offers more than 280 tests that you can combine to create the perfect assessment.

TestGorilla’s library includes tests for programming skills, cognitive ability, personality, communication skills, and much more. All of our tests go through rigorous quality-control measures to ensure there’s no bias in your hiring process.

TestGorilla caters to companies of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises. You can add custom questions to any assessment, communicate with candidates throughout the hiring process, and share test results with your entire hiring team.

How does Topgrading work?

Topgrading is a hiring platform that provides a visual report about an applicant’s last two jobs. The platform doesn’t test for specific skills or qualities but instead supplements the information on a candidate’s resume.

Topgrading focuses on how long a candidate was in their previous roles and why they left. It also evaluates how their managers felt about them and whether their salaries increased over time. Topgrading works as a stand-alone tool or in combination with your applicant tracking system (ATS). 

Topgrading also offers workshops and consulting services for companies that need professional help hiring for critical positions, such as leadership roles.

TestGorilla vs. Topgrading: Test libraries

Having a wide range of pre-employment screening tests available enables your hiring team to evaluate the skills and qualities that are most important for any open role. In general, a larger test library offers more flexibility.

TestGorilla’s test library

TestGorilla’s test library includes more than 280 tests. Test categories include:

• Cognitive ability
• Personality and culture
• Programming skills
• Software skills
• Language skills
• Job-specific skills
• Situational judgment

TestGorilla enables you to mix and match an unlimited number of tests to create a custom assessment for each open position. Our platform automatically recommends tests to use based on the job title for which your company is hiring.

You can also add custom questions to any assessment. TestGorilla offers custom questions with several answer formats, including multiple-choice, text, audio, video, and file upload.

TestGorilla also has localized websites in 11 languages, including Spanish and Chinese, making it simple to hire top talent from abroad or to fill roles at offices around the globe.

Topgrading’s test library

Topgrading offers a single questionnaire for candidates which asks about their two previous jobs.

The information Topgrading collects includes the start and end dates of an applicant’s previous two roles, their salary at each role, their reason for leaving, and how their managers at each role would rate them on a scale from one to five.

Topgrading doesn’t assess cognitive ability or job-specific skills, and you can’t add custom questions to the candidate questionnaire, which is only available in English.

Test libraries: Comparison chart at a glance

	TestGorilla	Topgrading
Cognitive ability tests	Yes	No
Situational judgment tests	Yes	No
Job-specific tests	Yes	No
Software tests	Yes	No
Programming tests (including coding challenges)	Yes	No
Language tests	Yes	No
Personality tests	Yes	No
Culture-add test	Yes	No
Motivation test	Yes	No
Your own custom tests	Yes	No
Custom questions per assessment	Yes	No
Test recommendations for each job role	Yes	No
Multiple tests per assessment	Yes	No

TestGorilla vs. Topgrading: Functionalities for hiring developers

Developers are essential for any company that builds software or needs to maintain internal systems. Programming skills tests enable you to determine whether a candidate is proficient in the coding languages and frameworks they list on their resume.

Hiring developers with TestGorilla

TestGorilla enables you to test applicants’ skills across 16 popular programming languages, including Python, C++, PHP, Node.js, and more. Our platform also has skills tests for the React Native framework and smart contracts built with Solidity.

You can add custom coding problems and debugging challenges to any programming skills test. TestGorilla can grade programming tests automatically to save hiring managers time and reduce bias in evaluations. 

TestGorilla also enables you to record each candidate’s screen while they take an assessment. This enables you to see how the candidate works through coding problems, not just the end result of their work. 

Hiring developers with Topgrading

Topgrading doesn’t offer any programming skills tests, and there are no questions in Topgrading’s questionnaire specific to coding.

Functionalities for hiring developers: Comparison chart at a glance

	TestGorilla	Topgrading
Coding languages	JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP, C, C#, C++, SQL, Kotlin, Ruby, TypeScript, Go, R, Scala, React, and Swift	None
Web-development frameworks	Yes	No
Mobile-development frameworks	Yes	No
Algorithmic-thinking challenges	Yes	No
Debugging challenges	Yes	No
Language-specific concept challenges	Yes	No
Your own custom coding challenges	Yes	No
Code-playback function	Yes	No
Automated scoring	Yes	No
Live peer coding	No	No

TestGorilla vs. Topgrading: Video interviews

Video interviews give hiring managers and recruiters deeper insight into how candidates approach problems and express their personalities. They can play an important role in deciding who to invite for an in-person interview with your team.

TestGorilla’s video interviews

TestGorilla makes it simple to add one-way video questions to any assessment. Candidates must record a video response to answer the question. TestGorilla enables you to limit the length of video responses or the number of times that an applicant can re-record their response. 

You can watch video responses on any device and leave ratings and comments. This makes it easy to share your thoughts on a candidate’s response with your entire hiring team.

Topgrading’s video interviews

Topgrading doesn’t support video interviews or video responses from candidates.

Video interviews: Comparison chart at a glance

	TestGorilla	Topgrading
One-way video interview	Yes	No
Custom video questions	Yes	No
Record the number of candidates’ attempts	Yes	No
Restrict maximum answer length	Yes	No
Record and playback on any device	Yes	No
Rate and comment video answers	Yes	No

TestGorilla vs. Topgrading: Candidate experience and company branding

It’s important to provide a good hiring experience for your candidates, particularly during the prescreening stage. Hiring highly qualified applicants is competitive, and they could drop out of your hiring process if they find it overly burdensome or difficult to navigate.

It’s also essential to put your brand front and center during the hiring process. This strengthens your company’s image in the eyes of candidates and makes the hiring experience more memorable.

The candidate experience with TestGorilla

TestGorilla provides an outstanding candidate experience from start to finish. 

Applicants can access tests and assessments on any device and start them whenever it’s most convenient. Plus, they don’t need to create an account to log in. 

TestGorilla’s customer support team and help center give unlimited access to test-takers to answer any questions.

Each test takes 10-15 minutes to complete, and assessments typically take 30-60 minutes. This is a very reasonable time commitment for most candidates, especially compared to the time it takes to write a cover letter.

You can add a custom welcome video as well as your company’s logo and colors to every assessment to emphasize your brand. You can also redirect candidates to your organization’s website at the end of each assessment.

In addition, TestGorilla offers tools for communicating with applicants as your hiring process moves forward. You can invite candidates to take an assessment and notify them if they are rejected. All emails to candidates are fully customizable.

The candidate experience with Topgrading

Topgrading’s questionnaire takes 5-10 minutes to complete. Candidates can complete the questionnaire on any device with no login required.

The questionnaire isn’t customizable with your company’s logo or colors, and you can’t add a welcome video or custom note at the start of the questionnaire. 

Topgrading also doesn’t redirect candidates to your company’s website or provide tools for communicating with applicants.

Candidate experience and company branding: Comparison chart at a glance

	TestGorilla	Topgrading
Your company’s intro and/or outro video	Yes	No
Assessments branded with your company logo and colors	Yes	No
Customizable invitation and rejection emails	Yes	No
No login required for candidates	Yes	Yes
Mobile friendly	Yes	Yes
Help and support for your candidates	Yes	Yes
Typical assessment length	30-60 minutes	5-10 minutes
Qualifying questions prior to assessment	Yes	No
Redirect candidates to a URL of your choice after finishing an assessment	Yes	No

TestGorilla vs. Topgrading: Enterprise and startup friendliness

Pre-employment testing platforms will ideally cater to a wide range of businesses, from startups to large enterprises. They will also have the capacity to grow with your company as your hiring needs scale up.

TestGorilla’s enterprise and startup friendliness

TestGorilla offers several plans for businesses of varying sizes. There’s a Free plan for businesses that only need to hire a few people each year and tiered subscriptions for medium-sized businesses. Enterprises can take advantage of a fully customizable plan.

Our platform integrates with popular ATS platforms, including SmartRecruiters, Greenhouse, JazzHR, and more. TestGorilla also offers an API for enterprise-scale companies that have their own internal ATS.

TestGorilla makes it easy to hire for multiple positions at once thanks to features like bulk candidate invites. You can also track how candidates are finding your open roles by setting up unique public links for each job board you use.

Businesses with offices around the world can easily use TestGorilla to hire local talent. We have localized websites in 11 languages, and candidates can take assessments in any of these languages.

Topgrading’s enterprise and startup friendliness

Topgrading offers the same applicant questionnaire no matter how many employees your business is hiring. It integrates with several popular ATS platforms or displays data in a web portal for small businesses that don’t have an ATS. There’s no API to integrate with custom ATS platforms.

Topgrading doesn’t offer public invitation links. Instead, candidates who apply for an open role automatically receive an invitation to fill out the questionnaire, which is only available in English.

Enterprise and startup friendliness: Comparison chart at a glance

	TestGorilla	Topgrading
ATS integration	Yes	Yes
Multiple users and role-based rights management	Yes	No
GDPR compliant	Yes	N/A
Multiple candidate invitation options	Yes	No
Public links to invite candidates	Yes	No
Public links for each candidate source	Yes	No
Bulk invite candidates (CSV/XLSX upload)	Yes	No
Track candidate stages from invited to hired	Yes	No
API access	Yes	No
Bulk actions to manage candidates	Yes	No

TestGorilla vs. Topgrading: Quality control

Quality-control measures are critical to ensure that your candidate pre-employment tests are bias-free and accurately evaluate the skills and traits that matter to your business.

TestGorilla’s quality-control processes

TestGorilla uses data-backed tests that are quality-controlled by subject-matter experts, peer reviewers, and sample testers. In addition, our proprietary algorithms use feedback from applicants and companies to continuously improve the quality of each test.

Each test includes a minimum of 100 questions, but only 12–20 questions are used each time the test is given. After a question is used repeatedly, it’s replaced in the question bank to prevent overexposure.

Topgrading’s quality-control processes

Topgrading doesn’t specify whether its questionnaire is based on data or employment statistics. The questions don’t change over time, and every candidate sees the same questions.

Quality control: Comparison chart at a glance

	TestGorilla	Topgrading
Proprietary algorithms that continuously improve the quality of each test	Yes	No
Extensive quality checks before tests go live	Yes	No
Questions replaced after reaching exposure limit	Yes	No
Customer feedback used to improve tests	Yes	No
Test-taker feedback used to improve tests	Yes	No

TestGorilla vs. Topgrading: Anti-cheating measures

Anti-cheating measures are important to ensure that no candidate gets an unfair leg up in your pre-employment screening process. With strong anti-cheating features in place, your hiring team can be confident in assessment results.

TestGorilla’s anti-cheating measures

TestGorilla offers several features to prevent cheating during assessments:

• Replace questions before they’re overused
• Disable copy and paste to make it harder for candidates to leak questions
• Cycle questions within the question bank so that candidates see different questions on every attempt
• Place time limits on tests so that candidates can’t research answers and still finish on time
• Log candidates’ IP addresses to prevent them from attempting a test more than once
• Alert hiring managers if a candidate opens another window during a test
• Record a candidate’s screen or take snapshots using their webcam during an assessment (with permission)

Topgrading’s anti-cheating measures

Topgrading’s questionnaire is not a skills assessment, so cheating is largely not a concern. As a result, Topgrading doesn’t have any anti-cheating measures.

Topgrading doesn’t cross-reference information entered in the questionnaire against an applicant’s resume. So, it’s up to hiring managers to ensure that the information applicants provide is accurate.

Anti-cheating measures: Comparison chart at a glance

	TestGorilla	Topgrading
IP address logging (to avoid multiple attempts by the same candidate)	Yes	No
Logging of a candidate’s location	Yes	No
Webcam snapshots (with the option to turn on/off)	Yes	No
Full-screen mode detection (to avoid research during the test)	Yes	No
Randomized questions per test	Yes	No
Large question pool for each test	Yes (100+)	No
Questions and answers not visible to employers to protect test integrity	Yes	No
Time limit on tests	Yes (typically 10 minutes)	No
Copy-paste disabled	Yes	No

TestGorilla vs. Topgrading: Reporting and analytics

Reporting tools enable hiring managers and recruiters to turn the data gathered from pre-employment screening into actionable hiring decisions. 

TestGorilla’s reporting and analytics features

TestGorilla displays candidates’ assessment results in easy-to-read reports. You can quickly see applicants’ responses and scores for each test component. You can also rank applicants by their scores to decide who should progress to the next round of your hiring process.

You can share TestGorilla reports as PDF, XLSX, or CSV files or export data to your ATS. You can also add notes to each candidate or annotate their responses. This makes it easy for hiring teams to collaborate and discuss specific candidates.

Topgrading’s reporting and analytics features

Topgrading offers a basic report that breaks down an applicant’s last two jobs. This includes a chart showing their salary over time and how long they remained in each position. Details like why the employee left their previous role and how their manager would rate them are color-coded.

Topgrading can export report data to your ATS. There’s no way to rank candidates or add notes.

Reporting and analytics: Comparison chart at a glance

	TestGorilla	Topgrading
PDF reports of assessments and individual candidates	Yes	Yes
Excel and CSV reports of assessments and individual candidates	Yes	No
Comprehensive overview for all current and past candidates	Yes	No
Scoring benchmarks for candidates (including percentile rank scoring)	Yes	No
Add your ratings and personal notes for candidates	Yes	No

TestGorilla vs. Topgrading: Customer support

When you have a question about your pre-employment screening platform, it’s important to get answers quickly. So, the platform you choose should offer responsive support and multiple ways to get in touch.

TestGorilla’s customer support

TestGorilla offers customer support by live chat and email. Business plan users also receive phone support.

All plans include an onboarding tour to help you start creating assessments and screening candidates quickly. TestGorilla also has an online help center with tutorials explaining how to create assessments, how to send emails to candidates, and more.

Topgrading’s customer support

Topgrading offers support by phone and email. There’s no online help center, and new customers don’t receive an onboarding tour.

Customer support: Comparison chart at a glance

	TestGorilla	Topgrading
Live chat	Yes	No
Help center	Yes	No
Email support	Yes	Yes
Training and onboarding tour	Yes	No
Phone assistance	No	Yes

TestGorilla vs. Topgrading: Pricing

Your pre-employment screening software shouldn’t break your budget. You should also have multiple plan options available to suit your business as your hiring needs change.

TestGorilla’s pricing

TestGorilla offers four pricing options (billed annually):

Free plan:

• Free forever
• Unlimited assessments for free tests
• 10 tests including communication, enneagram, and JavaScript

Pay as you go plan:

• $312 per year. One assessment and up to 100 candidates per year
• $150 for each additional assessment and $1.20 for each additional candidate
• All tests in TestGorilla’s library
• Create custom questions using essay, multiple-choice, and file upload formats

Scale plan:

• $3,900 per year
• 15 assessments and up to 1,500 candidates per year
• $120 for each additional assessment and $0.90 for each additional candidate
• Add your company’s brand to your assessments
• Integrate with 15+ ATS platforms

Business plan:

• $26,400 per year
• Includes 125 assessments and up to 12,500 candidates per year
• $95 for each additional assessment and $0.70 for each additional candidate
• API available for custom integrations

All TestGorilla plans require a yearly subscription. Large enterprises can contact TestGorilla for custom pricing options.

Topgrading’s pricing

Topgrading offers two pricing options:

Individual opening:

• $400 (one-time fee)
• Unlimited candidates for one job posting
• Valid for three months from purchase

Annual license:

• $1,375 per year
• Unlimited candidates for unlimited job postings

There’s no free plan available, but you can try out Topgrading’s Individual opening plan for one job posting for free.

Pricing: Comparison chart at a glance

TestGorilla		Topgrading
Plan	Price (billed annually)	Plan	Price
Free	$0	No free plan
Pay as you go	$26 per month	Individual opening	$400 (one-time fee)
Scale	$325 per month	Annual license	$1,375 per year
Business	$2,200 per month

TestGorilla vs. Topgrading: Ease of use

The easier your pre-employment screening platform is to use, the more likely your hiring teams are to use it.

TestGorilla’s user interface and ease of use

TestGorilla provides an outstanding user experience for hiring managers, recruiters, and candidates alike. 

When building assessments, you only need to enter the title of the role you’re hiring for. TestGorilla will automatically suggest tests to use. You can add custom questions to your assessment in minutes.

You can bulk-invite job applicants to take an assessment in a few clicks. Candidates can take the assessment from anywhere and on any device with no login required. 

TestGorilla also streamlines the process of communicating with candidates as they move through your hiring process, so they always know what their status is.

Topgrading’s user interface and ease of use

Topgrading emails a link to its questionnaire to every candidate who applies for an open role. Candidates can take the questionnaire from any device without logging in. Topgrading imports questionnaire responses into your ATS or offers online reports if you don’t have an ATS.

However, Topgrading doesn’t offer features for collaboration within your hiring team, such as comments or ratings. It also doesn’t support custom questions.

Conclusion: TestGorilla vs. Topgrading

TestGorilla and Topgrading take very different approaches to pre-employment screening. 

TestGorilla has a library of more than 280 tests that evaluate applicants’ skills and qualities. Topgrading offers a basic questionnaire that gathers information about a candidate’s last two jobs.

For the majority of companies, TestGorilla offers far more actionable information to make hiring decisions. You can add custom questions, rank applicants based on their responses, and share notes with your hiring team. 

TestGorilla also integrates with more than 15 popular ATS platforms and helps you communicate with candidates throughout the hiring process.

Streamline your hiring process with pre-employment testing

Pre-employment testing makes it easy to find the best candidate to hire for any open role. 

You can evaluate the skills and qualities an applicant can bring to your company. Even better, tests are data-backed and quantitative, so you can eliminate human bias from your hiring process.
TestGorilla is one of the top pre-employment screening platforms today. Check out our plans to start evaluating your job applicants and make better hiring decisions.