If you’re a job hunter, it is very likely that you’ve done a hefty amount of research to make sure that you’re prepared for anything that the company you want to join throws at you or requires of you.
This can range from making sure that you have an updated portfolio of certifications/training or having to pass their own pre-employment test which can be the ‘industry standard’ or something that is specially designed or curated to fit their own needs.
Fortunately, however, most companies tend to choose one that is highly trusted in the industry that they are in or by many institutions for its ability to confirm the competency of the test-taker, cognitive or otherwise.
So, in order to make sure that unworthy applicants are turned away early on in the hiring process so that the company can focus its time, money, and resources on candidates that meet their expectations in terms of cognitive skills, most of them will turn to the Wonderlic test.
Used by numerous companies, organizations, and even educational institutions all over the U.S., the Wonderlic test, when adjusted to act as a pre-employment assessment, has two versions: The Wonderlic Personnel Test and the Wonderlic Quicktest.
While both of these tests have the same subject matter, they have a number of key differences that may or may not work in your favor if your would-be employer gives you the option of choosing which exam to take.
That being said, let’s take a look at what both tests are so that you can familiarize yourself with them and be prepared in case you have to encounter one or the other in your job application.
- The Wonderlic Personnel Test
Mostly called as the ‘normal’ or ‘usual’ version of the Wonderlic test, this assessment was designed to measure three key abilities of a test-taker, these being:
1) Cognitive
Unlike other pre-employment tests where they try to bombard you with questions that are focused on the industry or position that you are applying for, the Wonderlic assessment questions limit themselves to subjects that nearly everyone can answer without having to study some hyper-specific topic from the second semester of their freshman year or something they only encountered once while studying.
Specifically, the Wonderlic Personnel Test contains 50 questions revolving around:Â
- Verbal reasoning – so that the employer can confirm that the applicant has sufficient reading comprehension skills.Â
- Numerical reasoning – so that the employer can be confident enough in them to make simple to complex calculations while on the job. Questions here will be focused on basic operations, percentages, some algebra, and word problems.
- Logical reasoning – so that they can be sure that they have good problem-solving skills and can think out of the box when facing an unfamiliar situation or conflict at the workplace. Questions here can also include 3D cube interpretation, as well as spatial reasoning, questions.
- Data interpretation – so that they can be sure that they can understand and interpret data coming from graphs and statistical data.
2) Time Management
If there’s something that every test-taker of the Wonderlic exam can say that they will never forget about, it would be its unforgiving time limit.
This is because for the 50-item question set that you have to answer, you are only given 12 minutes to answer as much as you can.
Although it goes without saying that even a single point can make a difference between being hired or not, this means that you are forced to only invest around 14 seconds per question and not a second later if you want to answer the entirety of the exam.
3) Critical Thinking
The main key feature of the Wonderlic assessment is that you are actually expected to ‘skip’, or at least make an educated guess, on a number of questions.
This is most prevalent on what the test developers call ‘time traps’, which are purposefully designed to be incredibly difficult to solve within the 14-second timeframe and are only there to prevent test-takers from answering the other questions that might be easier for them, depriving them of a number of ‘sure’ points in the process.
- The Wonderlic Personnel QuickTest
The Quicktest version of the Wonderlic, like what its name implies, is a ‘quicker’ or shortened version of the Wonderlic Personnel Test.
In this version of the exam, instead of 50 questions, you will instead be made to answer 30, with all of them also only worth 1 point each.
However, unlike the normal version of the Wonderlic test, the key difference here is that you are only given 8 minutes to answer everything. But when partitioned per question, this means that you have exactly 16 seconds to spend compared to the 14-second-per-question limit of the full version.
Unfortunately, time traps are also present in this version, so despite the additional 2-seconds, if you get unlucky with the presence of time traps or fail to recognize them, this may cost you a good score or a chunk of time.
Furthermore, considering the fewer number of questions, this also lowers the possible amount of points that you can get, making the competition between you and other applicants even tighter.Â
So, with this information in mind, if you were given a choice by your employer to choose which Wonderlic assessment should you take, weigh in if you want the full version or the quicktest because they both have their own strengths and weaknesses like having more chances of getting points like in the normal version to a possibly lower ‘minimum score’ like in the shorter one.
