What Criteria Corp actually costs a small business
Criteria Corp lists per-assessment rates as low as $5. It doesn't list the contract you actually sign to use them. Here's what the platform covers, what real buyers pay, and how to weigh it if you're hiring without a recruiter.
AI summary
- Criteria Corp is a talent assessment platform (cognitive, personality, skills, and video interviewing) sold in three tiers: Assess, Interview, and Hire. None of the three list a price. You request a quote.
- Reported deal data puts real annual contracts anywhere from about $5,000 to $75,000+, with a reported median around $13,225 a year. The per-assessment list price looks cheap. The contract floor is built for buyers assessing dozens of roles a year, not three or four.
- If you're hiring without a recruiter and filling a handful of roles a year, that contract math doesn't pencil out. A self-serve, credit-based screening platform is worth pricing out before you book a call.
Criteria Corp advertises assessments for as little as $5 a candidate. What it doesn’t advertise is the contract you sign to use them, and that number is where the real decision happens.
If you searched “Criteria Corp pricing” hoping for a number on the page, you already know it isn’t there. The company sells cognitive, personality, and skills testing plus video interviewing under three unnamed-price plans, and every one of them ends at “request pricing.” That’s a normal model for a platform built to sell into procurement. It’s a rough one if you’re an owner or GM hiring three or four roles a year with no recruiter and no time for a sales cycle.
This post covers what Criteria Corp actually is, what its assessments measure, what real buyers report paying, and where that pricing model stops making sense for a small operation. If you’re comparing it against a self-serve alternative, the pricing section is the one to read closely.
What Criteria Corp actually is
Criteria Corp is a talent assessment company founded in 2005 and based in West Hollywood, California. It’s not one test. It’s a platform of pre-employment tests plus a video interviewing product, sold to more than 4,000 organizations across 60 countries, built on a claimed 80 million assessments completed and a research team with a scientific advisory board behind it.
The platform is organized into three products. Assess is the testing side: cognitive aptitude, personality, emotional intelligence, risk, skills, and game-based tests, plus AI proctoring for remote testing. Interview covers structured video interviewing, both one-way and live, with an optional AI scoring add-on. Hire bundles Assess and Interview into one package. A fourth product, Develop, is a separate post-hire add-on for manager check-ins and coaching, not part of screening.
Most people who’ve heard of Criteria Corp know it for one test: the CCAT. That’s a fraction of what the company actually sells, and it’s just one name on a longer list of assessment vendors small businesses end up comparing.
What the assessments measure
Each Criteria test does a narrow job, and it’s worth knowing which one you’d actually be buying.
Cognitive and personality tests
The Criteria Cognitive Aptitude Test, or CCAT, is the flagship: 50 questions in 15 minutes, covering verbal, math, and spatial reasoning, scored as a percentile against other test takers. It measures processing speed under pressure, not job skill. We covered the format, the scoring, and its limits in a full breakdown if you want the detail.
The Employee Personality Profile measures work-style traits like conscientiousness and extraversion through a self-report questionnaire, in the same family as the Big Five research Truffle’s own Personality assessment is built on. Criteria also sells an emotional intelligence test and a risk assessment aimed at roles involving cash handling, safety, or compliance exposure.
Skills and game-based tests
The skills library covers role-specific tasks: Excel, customer service scenarios, data entry, and dozens of job-family tests. The game-based assessments are shorter, gamified versions of the cognitive battery, aimed at candidates who’d otherwise drop off a 50-question multiple-choice test.
Video interviewing
Criteria Interview lets you send one-way or live video questions and adds an AI scoring layer on top of the recordings. It’s a direct answer to the same job Truffle’s one-way video interviews do: seeing how someone communicates before you book a live call. The difference is where it sits. Criteria treats interviewing as a separate purchasable tier. Truffle treats it as one of three screening layers inside the same plan.
What Criteria Corp actually costs
Here’s the part the pricing page won’t tell you. All three plans, Assess, Interview, and Hire, route to “request pricing,” and the site says plainly that cost is “built around your headcount.” There’s a “start free trial” button, but no self-serve checkout and no number until you talk to sales. Criteria Corp is one of several assessment vendors that work this way. We checked what a pre-employment assessment actually costs across four of them, and the pattern holds across the category, not just here.
The list price
Vendr, a procurement platform that publishes anonymized SaaS deal data, fills in some of the gap. It puts Criteria’s own per-assessment list pricing at roughly $5 to $25 a candidate depending on the tier, cheaper at higher volume. On its own, that number reads like a rounding error.
The real contract
The contract behind it doesn’t. Vendr puts the median Criteria Corp contract at $13,225 a year, with reported deals ranging from about $5,000 to $75,000 or more. Vendr’s own tier breakdown lines up with that spread: a starter band around $5,000 to $12,000, a growth band from $12,000 to $35,000, and an enterprise band from $25,000 up past $100,000.
The cheapest listed rate is $5 a candidate. The cheapest contract most buyers actually sign starts at five thousand dollars a year. That gap is the entire story.
Lined up side by side against what a self-serve credit plan would cost to cover the same range, the gap is easier to see than it is to explain:
| Reported Criteria Corp annual band | Roughly covers | Comparable Truffle plan, priced monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Starter, about $5,000 to $12,000/yr | Smaller testing programs | Starter, $49/mo ($588/yr), 200 credits/mo, no annual lock-in |
| Growth, about $12,000 to $35,000/yr | Mid-size, multi-role hiring | Team, $239/mo ($2,868/yr), 1,500 credits/mo |
| Enterprise, about $25,000 to $100,000+/yr | High-volume, many open roles at once | Scale, $599/mo ($7,188/yr), 4,000 credits/mo |
None of these are apples to apples. Criteria’s contract covers cognitive, personality, and risk testing that Truffle doesn’t replicate test for test. But even Criteria’s lowest reported band, $5,000 to $12,000 a year, lands in the same range as a full year of Truffle’s Scale plan, its highest tier, built for 25 to 50 roles a month billed monthly. A small operator hiring three or four roles a year is being quoted contract math sized for that kind of volume.
Why the pricing model works against a small hiring volume
A $5,000 floor makes sense if you’re testing hundreds of candidates a year across many roles. Spread across 500 assessed candidates, that’s $10 each, competitive with the per-assessment sticker price. The math holds together at that scale, because that’s the buyer the model is built for.
It falls apart at small-business scale. An owner filling three or four roles a year, screening maybe 60 candidates total, is paying the same $5,000-plus floor to cover a fraction of the volume that makes the number reasonable. You’re not paying for what you use. You’re paying for the minimum the sales team can justify writing up, whether or not it matches your actual hiring, on a decision where a wrong hire already costs you months before the assessment bill does.
That’s not a knock on the product. Criteria’s cognitive and personality research is genuinely well established, and the CCAT in particular has more evidence behind it than most quick online tests. It’s a pricing model built for a buyer with a hiring team, a procurement process, and dozens of roles a year to spread the cost across. If that’s not your situation, the sticker price you’d actually pay isn’t the $5 headline. It’s whatever the sales call lands on, and it’s sized for someone else’s hiring volume.
Where Criteria Corp is genuinely strong
Some credit where it’s earned. Criteria has been in this business since 2005, and the research base behind the cognitive and personality tests is deep by industry standards, with a scientific advisory board and published validity work most quick-build assessment tools can’t claim. Serving 4,000-plus organizations across 60 countries is real scale, and the skills library covers more job-specific tests than most competitors bother building.
For a company with a recruiting team, a defined testing budget, and enough hiring volume to justify a negotiated contract, that’s a legitimate stack. The three-tier structure (test-only, interview-only, or both) also means you’re not forced to buy video interviewing you don’t want.
The honest limit isn’t the science. It’s the buying process wrapped around it: no published price, no self-serve signup past a free trial, and a contract built around headcount you may not have.
What to ask before you request a quote
If you’re still weighing Criteria Corp, these are the questions worth asking on the sales call, not after signing.
- What’s the minimum contract length, and is there a monthly option, or only annual?
- Which specific tests do we actually need for this role, and what does the quote change if we drop the ones we don’t?
- What does the AI Proctoring or AI scoring add-on cost on top of the base tier?
- How is the price actually calculated: seats, headcount, assessment volume, or some combination?
- What happens to the price if our hiring volume drops next year?
- Can you show us adverse impact data for the tests we’re considering, and how current is the norm group behind the percentile scores?
If the answers point to a 12-month commitment sized for hiring you’re not currently doing, that’s worth naming out loud before the contract, not after.
Where self-serve screening fits instead
Truffle is an AI screening platform for small teams doing high-volume hiring. You choose how to screen each role, resume screening, one-way video interviews, talent assessments, or any mix, and AI reads every applicant against the criteria you set and hands you a ranked shortlist with the evidence. You make the call on every hire.
Pricing works on a shared monthly credit pool instead of a headcount contract. A resume scored by AI Match costs 1 credit, an assessed candidate costs 2, and a completed one-way interview costs 5. Plans start at $49 a month with 200 credits, enough for roughly one to three roles depending on how deep your funnel runs, no annual commitment and no sales call required.
Running your own hiring volume through it
Say you’re hiring three roles this year and screen 60 candidates total: resumes for all 60 (60 credits), talent assessments for your top 20 (40 credits), one-way interviews for your top 8 finalists (40 credits). That’s 140 credits across the whole year, inside a single month’s Starter pool, for well under what a single month of a five-figure Criteria contract would run. Credits also roll over on the paid tiers above Starter, so a slow quarter doesn’t waste what you already paid for.
None of this replaces judgment. Truffle’s Personality assessment is built on the same validated Big Five research Criteria’s Employee Personality Profile draws from, and neither one hands you a verdict. Both surface a signal. You still decide who gets the job. The difference for a small operator is whether you can find out what that signal costs before you’ve booked a demo.
If Criteria Corp’s pre-employment assessment pricing is the thing holding up your decision, run your actual hiring volume through Truffle’s self-serve pricing first. The 7-day free trial comes with 30 credits and no card required, enough to screen a real role and see the shortlist before you decide anything. You’ll have a real number in minutes, not after a call about your headcount.
Frequently asked questions about Criteria Corp
How much does Criteria Corp cost?
Criteria doesn’t publish a price. All three plans, Assess, Interview, and Hire, route to a “request pricing” form, and the company describes cost as built around your headcount. Reported per-assessment list pricing runs roughly $5 to $25 a candidate, but the contract behind that number is what actually determines cost. Procurement platform Vendr reports a median annual contract of about $13,225, with real deals ranging from roughly $5,000 to $75,000 or more depending on volume and tier.
Does Criteria Corp offer a free trial or self-serve plan?
There’s a “start free trial” button on the pricing page, but no published self-serve plan or checkout past that. You still request pricing to move onto a paid tier, so there’s no way to see a real number without talking to sales first.
Is Criteria Corp a good fit for a small business?
It depends on your hiring volume more than your company size. The research behind the cognitive and personality tests is solid, and the platform genuinely works for teams with a testing budget and enough roles a year to justify a negotiated contract. For an owner or GM filling a handful of roles a year with no recruiter, the reported $5,000-plus contract floor usually costs more than the hiring volume it’s meant to cover, which is worth pricing against a self-serve alternative before you commit.
What’s the difference between the CCAT and the rest of Criteria Corp’s platform?
The CCAT is one test inside Criteria’s Assess product: a 15-minute cognitive aptitude measure scored as a percentile. Assess also includes separate personality, emotional intelligence, risk, and skills tests you can run alongside or instead of the CCAT. Criteria Interview and Criteria Hire are separate products layering in video interviewing and a combined bundle. If someone tells you “we use Criteria Corp,” ask which of the products they actually mean.
