Japanese Pre-employment Assessments Compared: 19 Recommended Options / 37 Services

What are Japanese pre-employment assessments?

In Japan, pre-employment assessments are tests used to analyze applicants before interviews.
They supplement interviews with information from different approaches, such as personality assessment and task-based testing, and provide interviewers with additional evidence for evaluating candidates.

How to choose

Choose a Big Five personality assessment as the main method. If you need additional dimensions, add a job-specific or ability test as a supplementary method.

Personality assessments are easier to compare now that the Big Five has become the scientific standard.
Older services, and personality tests bundled as add-ons to ability tests, often use proprietary analysis methods that are not a common language across services.

link A practical introduction to the Big Five

Many established Japanese services have evolved into isolated proprietary systems even when they are well known. Start by looking at the leftmost column of the comparison table.

Choose job-specific tests for job performance

To assess fit with a specific job, it is useful to have candidates perform tasks that resemble the actual work.
If the job-specific and work-sample assessment list contains a relevant category, it is a strong candidate.

Work samples necessarily cover a narrower range of jobs, so there may be no suitable off-the-shelf option for a given position.
Assessments that depend on prior job experience also tend to be more suitable for experienced hires than new graduates.

Misconceptions about ability tests and replacing SPI-style tests

There is no longer a general reason that every employer needs to administer an ability test. Quiz-style task tests can measure narrow abilities such as these:

• A high score on a Japanese reading-comprehension test suggests that the person is less likely to misread Japanese text.
• A high score on an arithmetic test suggests that the person is less likely to make mistakes in addition and subtraction.

Their general usefulness is limited because few jobs resemble school-style academic tests.
Services that let employers select only the subjects actually needed therefore tend to offer better value.

In Japan, SPI was once the most widely used pre-employment assessment, and some businesspeople still assume that ability testing is the default standard for aptitude assessment. That view is outdated.

The widespread use of web tests in Japanese recruiting reflects an older misconception that people who score well on reading and calculation tests must have stronger general cognitive ability.

For ability testing, each department should administer only subjects that measure tasks important to the actual job. There is no need to preserve compatibility with an existing test simply because it has already been adopted. If you have used SPI in the past, there is no reason to worry if the new set of subjects changes or becomes smaller.

Latest feature and pricing comparison

General-purpose: personality and ability tests

Many Japanese services sell personality and ability tests as a package. Services that combine a proprietary personality test with a conventional ability test often reflect models popular around 2003. Today, having more test categories does not by itself indicate stronger predictive power and can instead increase the distance from the actual job.

editor_choice Recommended visibility Personality visibility Ability sort Lowest price

• Prices exclude tax. Price sorting assumes 30 assessments. 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.

Big Five pre-employment assessment: Decider®

Job-specific and work-sample assessments

In Japanese pre-employment assessment, a work sample evaluates candidates with tasks that resemble specific activities performed on the job.
The services listed here include tools for jobs that require everyday spoken English and for software roles that involve writing program code.

For a work sample, sufficient similarity between the assessment content and the actual job provides evidence for validity based on content. The fidelity of the task matters. For example, an English speaking test may look broadly relevant to a job that mainly requires reading and writing in English, but it does not sample the same work. In that case, the result is only a weak indicator.

editor_choice Recommended sort Lowest price

• Prices exclude tax. Price sorting assumes 30 assessments. Per-candidate fees become less favorable as volume increases.

Three recommended services

Personality assessment: Decider®

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.

Because pricing is fully flat-rate, it becomes one of the lowest-cost paid options at roughly 25 assessments per month, and the cost advantage grows relative to per-candidate services as volume increases.
For smaller-scale use, the free Hakase Recruiting plan supports up to 10 assessments per month.

The same model has been used for both new-graduate and experienced-hire recruiting, from startups to listed companies.

Big Five pre-employment assessment: Decider®

Ability test: ef-1g

This is a widely used Japanese ability test and a common alternative to SPI3. The ability-test-only option costs ¥1,000 per candidate, so at an average of three or more candidates per month it can be more cost-effective than SPI.

It is a reasonable option for organizations that cannot easily discontinue ability testing. If a suitable job-specific or work-sample assessment exists for the role, that should generally take priority.

• https://www.e-falcon.co.jp/ef-1g e-Falcon Inc.

Ability test: Compass

Compass lets employers select only the needed subjects from five ability-test categories: verbal ability, numerical ability, English ability, spatial recognition, and logical inference. Excluding the free Scouter service, it is among the lowest-cost options.
Three subjects cost ¥750 per candidate, making it cheaper than ef-1g when the test can be narrowed to a few subjects. This pricing model is intended for smaller-scale use of up to 100 assessments per year; higher-volume plans can reduce the price by half.

As explained above, ability tests should no longer be treated as measures of a broad latent ability. There is therefore little value in administering many unrelated subjects. Offering tests at the subject level is the most rational approach.

• https://www.gdl-cubic.com/compass/ GDL Inc.