We often get asked why our pricing is structured the way that it is. When we launched our service in 2007, we were the only testing provider to have a flat-fee, subscription pricing model. Now some other providers have followed suit. With the annual subscription fee, you get unlimited testing for every test in our portfolio. The subscription price is based on the number of employees in your company, or the number of employees in a particular department or branch for which you want to administer pre-employment tests.
We believe that for most companies, flat-fee pricing has a number of advantages over per-test pricing models. For one, you will have more predictable costs. You know exactly what the total cost will be before getting started, and you don’t have to factor in additional costs if you decide to administer more tests or hire more people than you expected.
Second, flat-fee pricing almost always helps customers lower the total costs of administering pre-employment tests. With online tests, the incremental cost of delivering tests is relatively low, and the transactional pay-per-test model, which originated in a time when test scoring wasn’t automated, doesn’t make much sense anymore.
Third, flat-fee pricing actually helps you drastically reduce time spent in the hiring process by encouraging you to test early in the process. Pre-employment testing adds the most value when it’s done early in the hiring process because it helps you cut through large applicant pools to find the candidates who are most qualified for the job. However, testing early in the process as opposed to testing a smaller, pre-filtered group of candidates later on requires you to administer a massive number of tests. Flat-fee pricing allows you to administer tests to large groups of applicants in the early stages of hiring without having to worry about the additional fees associated with per-test pricing models. No more rationing tests!
But why do we structure the prices of our subscriptions around employee headcount? We use employee head count as a proxy for a company’s level of hiring activity. Companies with 200 employees are likely to hire more people within a year than companies with just 5 employees. The number of employees at a company allows us to make a (pretty accurate) estimation of how many people that company is likely to hire in that year.
If you’d like a quote for your company, email pricing@criteriacorp.com.
