This page focuses on free services in the Japanese pre-employment assessment market. For a broader explanation of Japanese aptitude testing, terminology, and paid options, see the main comparison.
Latest comparison
| Personality | Service / provider | Ability-test subjects | Monthly fee | Per-candidate fee | Details | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Big5 | HaKaSe Recruiting
Human Assets Research Institute |
- | Free | ¥0 | ||
| Up to 10 candidates per month | ||||||
| Big5 | BIG5-JOB
|
- | - | - | ||
| (required Japanese commercial-disclosure information appears noncompliant) | ||||||
| Proprietary | Scouter
SCOUTER TECHNOLOGY PTE.LTD. |
Verbal Calculation |
Logic Spatial |
Free | ¥0 | |
| Focused on identifying candidates described as likely to leave, fail to grow, or show low effort. Paid add-ons include trait, psychological, and retention assessments. | ||||||
| Proprietary | Compass
GDL |
Verbal Calculation |
Logic Spatial |
Free | ¥250 per subject | |
| The paid option closest to free pricing. English testing is also available. | ||||||
- Prices exclude tax. Price sorting assumes 30 assessments. Higher per-candidate fees become less favorable as volume increases.
- Japanese ability tests often use the older verbal/non-verbal classification. Because the broad cognitive-ability framework is no longer a useful comparison basis here, this table instead lists concrete tasks such as calculation and logical reasoning.
Three recommended services, plus one
Personality assessment: Hakase Recruiting
This is a free personality-assessment option based on the Big Five, giving it a more standardized basis than proprietary personality models. The free plan is limited to 10 candidates per month; costs rise discontinuously beyond that limit.
- https://www.hakase.tech/recruiting-assessment Human Assets Research Institute
Ability test: Scouter
Its ability test can be used free of charge. If what you want is essentially a school-style academic test, this is the closest match among the fully free services.
The proprietary personality assessment is paid, so the service is not necessarily the lowest-cost option once personality testing is added.
- https://scouter.transition.jp/ SCOUTER TECHNOLOGY PTE. LTD.
Ability test: Compass
Compass is a paid service, but its pricing is the closest alternative to free use without an abrupt jump in cost.
Employers can select only the needed subjects from five categories: verbal ability, numerical ability, English ability, spatial recognition, and logical inference.
For example, if you use only one subject, the price is ¥250 per candidate. A half-price plan is also available once usage exceeds 100 assessments.
- https://www.gdl-cubic.com/compass/ GDL Inc.
Also worth considering: Decider® personality assessment
Decider is not free, but for large-scale personality assessment it offers one of the strongest cost-performance profiles. Because pricing is fully flat-rate, at 200 assessments per month the effective cost is ¥250 per candidate, the same level as Compass.
That is unusually low for a full-service product used by listed companies.
Decider is a pioneering personality assessment based on the Big Five, the scientific standard for personality analysis: conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness, extraversion, and agreeableness. Its core product includes both pre-employment assessment and talent-management functions. It also uniquely supports multi-rater assessment for a more objective view.
Free trial of Decider® pre-employment assessment
Biases and limits of free services
If you are looking for the school-test-style web assessments traditionally associated with Japanese aptitude testing, Scouter is available for free. If you need vendor support, Compass offers a low-cost migration path without an abrupt increase in price.
However, the case for broad ability testing has weakened as its explanatory power as a general predictor has declined.
For personality assessment, which is increasingly the more useful general-purpose option, Hakase Recruiting is available for free but has a hard usage cap. If your hiring volume exceeds that cap, there is effectively no fully free option.
Pre-employment assessments are most useful when they are applied consistently before interviews rather than only to a small subset of applicants, so a limit of 10 candidates per month is restrictive for many employers.
A common source of confusion in the free-assessment market is the use of MBTI-style tests. Do not repurpose free 16-type personality quizzes for hiring decisions.
Although these tests are popular among young people, corporate use in hiring is disproportionately concentrated in Japan, South Korea, and China.
The biggest gap in the free market is that there are almost no true work-sample options for areas such as programming or spoken English.
Overall, this market has not developed into a freemium model where employers can use a lower-function version of a full assessment product at no cost.
An aptitude test is not automatically better than having no test at all. If what it measures cannot be related to the actual job, it adds little value. Even free services require administrative work, so it is more useful to compare both free and paid options from the beginning.
Using free trials
If you are introducing a pre-employment assessment for the first time, it is reasonable to include a pilot stage before relying on the tool in normal hiring.
There are two separate things to check during the pilot:
- Is the assessment workflow feasible within your actual recruiting process?
- Run the full process with a small number of sample candidates and confirm how it works in practice.
- Does the assessment eventually show useful predictive validity for your own hiring?
- This requires comparing assessment results with what actually happens after people are hired.
Free trials are useful mainly for the first question. Assessment products differ not only in what they measure but also in how they are administered, such as web testing versus paper testing. At this stage, the employer can check whether the workflow fits the real hiring process: venue requirements, time, staff workload, and other operational constraints.
The practical value of a free trial is therefore that it can identify tools whose administration and workflow do not fit before the employer commits to them.
The second question is much harder. Whether an assessment predicts useful outcomes in your own organization cannot normally be established during a short free trial.
That requires observing what happens after hiring, and free trials generally do not last long enough to provide that evidence.
In practice, a hiring process can accommodate only one or two assessment tools. A real pilot therefore means operating the selected tool over time, accumulating data, and evaluating what the results appear to predict. During this period, existing selection methods such as interviews should remain the primary basis for hiring decisions, while the new assessment is used only as a supplementary source of information.
For that reason, even at the beginning of a pilot, the role of a free trial is limited. Employers should compare the regular pricing from the start rather than optimizing only for the free period. Evaluating an assessment requires enough observations to learn from the data, so products with high per-candidate fees are less cost-effective for this kind of longer pilot.
