Hogan is one of the most respected names in personality assessment, with decades of research behind its tools for personality, derailers and motives. For executive assessment and leadership development, if you've got the budget, it's hard to beat.
But it's built for a particular kind of use. Before anyone in your organisation can interpret Hogan reports, they need to complete Hogan's certification workshop, which currently costs around £2,500 per person, and per-candidate pricing sits at the premium end of the market. That works for a handful of senior hires a year. It's much harder to justify if you want personality insight across all your hiring, from entry-level roles to senior ones, and if your certified person leaves, that knowledge goes with them. So it's worth being aware of some alternatives.
Criteria
Criteria is a self-service assessment platform covering cognitive ability, personality and skills tests, with personality assessments based on the Big Five. No certification is needed, reviewers consistently highlight how easy its reports are to read, and it's rated 4.7 out of 5 across more than 200 reviews on Capterra.
What you give up is depth. Criteria's personality tools don't offer the derailer focus that makes Hogan valuable for leadership roles, and some reviewers report price increases at renewal, so it's worth agreeing terms carefully.
Alva Labs
Alva Labs offers a Big Five personality test that adapts to each candidate in real time, reaching a result in around 12 to 15 minutes. It's built around transparency: candidates receive the same report the recruiter sees as soon as they finish, which is a very different experience from Hogan's practitioner-led approach. Reviewers rate it highly for both ease of use and quality of support.
The flip side of that simplicity is that some managers find the reports too light when they want more detail, and it isn't designed for the kind of in-depth leadership and derailer assessment Hogan specialises in. Worth considering if candidate experience and simplicity matter more to you than depth.
Test Partnership
Test Partnership offers validated personality questionnaires grounded in the Big Five and no training or certification is needed to use them or read the results. Reports are written for hiring managers, not psychometric specialists, so anyone on your team can pick one up and act on it.
Rather than one questionnaire for every situation, you can choose the assessment that fits the role. The TPAQ-45 Complete Personality Questionnaire gives you a full profile, which would be suitable for all situations, but for senior hires there's a dedicated Leadership Profile, and we also offer strengths-based assessments, role-specific soft skills, learning agility and emotional intelligence. Because personality sits in the same platform as our ability tests and situational judgement tests, you can build a complete assessment for any role in one workflow, with unlimited users included.
I like the format of their soft skills, numerical reasoning, verbal reasoning tests and reports. They are easy to understand with the necessary level of detail to help us make the best hiring decisions. For an SME like us, Test Partnership makes hiring easier and cost effective.
Where we go furthest is bespoke personality assessment. Rather than measuring candidates against a generic profile, or focusing on negative traits the way Hogan's Development Survey does with derailers, we can build an assessment around your own competencies, values or the traits your highest performers share, so it tells you how closely each candidate matches what success actually looks like in your organisation. Vitality, for example, worked with us on a validity study to identify the behaviours linked to success in their roles, which became the basis of a custom assessment to identify the applicants most likely to stay, be engaged and perform well.
And when you do want expert input, on cut-scores, reasonable adjustments or interpreting a borderline result, our business psychologists are on hand, without you needing to train your own.
Conclusion and next steps
Hogan remains a strong choice for executive assessment and leadership development, and if that's your main use, it's well worth the investment. But if you want personality insight across all your hiring, the choice comes down to how much depth you need.
If you want simple, readable personality results for mid-level and volume roles, Criteria and Alva Labs are both easy to get started with. If you want depth without the certification, Test Partnership gives you a choice of questionnaires matched to the role, from a quick express version to a dedicated leadership profile, with reports anyone can read. And if you want an assessment built around what success looks like in your own organisation, our bespoke assessments go further than any off-the-shelf tool.
You can explore our personality tests and bespoke assessments, or see what's included on our pricing page.
Sources: Hogan Assessments, Hogan on G2, Hogan certification costs, Criteria, Criteria on Capterra, Alva Labs, Alva Labs on G2.
Joshua Hancock
Digital Marketing Manager at Test Partnership. Over seven years' experience as a writer, content strategist, SEO and digital marketer.
