Core Abilities Assessment

Hire the right person with the Core Abilities Assessment to screen an applicants’ ability to learn and perform on the job.   Screen your applicants’ general intelligence in 15 minutes

With more resumes for an average job than ever before, managers don’t need more applicants – they need screening tools to quickly identify the best ones. More effective than a phone screen, the Core Abilities Assessment measures an individual’s verbal, numerical and abstract reasoning skills – the building blocks for success in any job.  The score provides insight into someone’s ability to learn and perform on the job. Let Core Abilities guide you to the applicants who should advance to the next stage or interview.

What’s It Best Used For

• Rapid Applicant Pre-Screening: Replacing or enhancing early phone screens to filter out large resume pools before inviting candidates to formal interviews.
• Vetting Entry-Level Staff: Assessing individual contributors in task-heavy roles like maintenance employees, truck drivers, or reservation agents.
• Evaluating Administrative Candidates: Testing foundational cognitive skills for office managers, administration assistants, and customer service agents.
• Screening New Leadership: Grading problem-solving readiness for frontline supervisors and newly promoted managers.
• Predicting Problem-Solving Success: Utilizing a scientifically validated tool backed by over 20 studies to accurately forecast real-world workplace performance.

Who is it for?

Use the Core Abilities Assessment to screen your entry-level staff and individual contributors, including:

• Maintenance Employees
• Truck drivers
• Reservation Agents
• Office Managers
• Customer Service Agents
• Frontline Supervisors and New Managers

Validity Studies

• An individual who scores well demonstrates strong verbal, numerical, and overall reasoning skills and can learn a job quickly
• Strongly correlated with the Wonderlic Personnel Test (r = .84)
• Shown to predict supervisors’ problem solving behavior (r = .32) at a national manufacturing company
• Overall, 20+ studies support the relationship of the underlying items that make up the Core Abilities Assessment to job performance

Sample Question

Verbal Reasoning: The test includes sentences that have the first word and the last word left out. You are to pick out the words that will fill in the blanks so that the sentence will be true and sensible. You are to choose from among 5 pairs of words to fill in the blanks. The first word of the pair you choose goes in the blank space at the beginning of the sentence and the second word, at the end of the sentence.

_____ is to water as eat is to _____

­ continue – drive
­ foot – enemy
­ girl – industry
­ drink – food
­ drink – enemy

© Harcourt Assessment