At a franchise brand, the pre-hire assessment you choose runs at every location. It will screen more applicants than any hiring manager in your system ever meets.
That’s a lot riding on one tool. In CareerPlug’s 2026 Franchise Hiring Report, 6.2 million applicants across seven service industries produced 268,000 interviews, so only about 4% of applicants ever got one. When an assessment sits in front of that interview, it’s shaping what happens to the other 96%.
So before you buy one, or renew the one you have, you need to know it works.
How do you know if an assessment works?
Start with what “works” means. Some people judge an assessment by speed, because it thins out the pile and hiring moves faster. But speed is a low bar. Anything can make hiring faster if you don’t care what the answer is. Flip a coin for every applicant and you’ve cut your interviews in half.
An assessment that actually works helps you reduce turnover and hire people who do the job well.
That’s easy to lose sight of, because assessments look official. We tend to trust an answer more when it comes from a computer, something researchers call automation bias, and a score on a report looks definitive even when nobody has checked whether it produced correct information.
So the question to ask is whether anyone has shown that the score predicts how people do on the job. There are two ways to find out.
The best way: test it on your own people
Ask a group of locations to have current employees in the role take the assessment. Then compare their scores with what you already know about how they perform. If your high performers score noticeably higher than the people who struggle, the assessment is picking up on something that matters in your jobs. If everyone scores about the same, it isn’t. Worse, if the people who struggle score higher, it’s steering you toward the wrong hires.
For the comparison to mean anything, you’ll want at least a 100 people in the role, and a few hundred is better. That’s hard for one location and much easier for a brand pooling across its system. Expect the gap between high and low performers to look a little smaller than it really is, since the people who fit worst have already left. But you should still see a difference.
The next best way: ask the vendor to show you
If you can’t run your own, ask the vendor for the same comparison from somewhere else: roles like the ones you’re hiring for, at businesses like yours, where high scorers did better on the job than low scorers. The closer the match, the more it tells you. Results from call center reps won’t tell you much about house cleaners.
Be ready for a vendor to answer a question you didn’t ask. They might show you strong results for different roles, or show you how much faster the assessment made hiring for roles like yours. Neither one tells you whether high scorers do better in your jobs, so keep asking until you get that answer.
A vendor who has done this work will have it written up, usually in a technical manual, and one who can’t show you anything probably hasn’t done it.
Red flags to listen for
Some vendor claims sound reassuring but don’t answer that question. Watch for these:
- “It’s EEOC compliant.” A test can’t be compliant on its own. Whether it’s defensible depends on the job it’s used for and the evidence behind that use.
- “It’s validated.” Validated for what job, and showing what? Ask to see the comparison.
- “It’s proprietary.” That’s fair for how it’s built, but you should still be able to see whether it works.
- “Our clients saw turnover drop.” Turnover moves for plenty of reasons, like a new manager or a wage increase. Ask what they compared it to.
- “It finds your top performers.” Assessments do their best work screening out people who clearly won’t fit. Picking the best of the rest is what your interview is for.
- “Millions of candidates have taken it.” That tells you it sells, but not necessarily how good it is.
Why getting this right is a strategic advantage for franchise brands
Service franchises get a lot of applicants. In CareerPlug’s report, it took about 88 applicants to make one hire. That volume is where a working assessment pays off. When that many people apply, a tool that reliably screens out the ones who won’t fit means the people who reach an interview are already a better match for the job.
Spread that across a system and every location’s hiring manager spends interview time on stronger candidates. Fewer bad hires get through, which shows up where franchise hiring hurts: people leaving in the first few months, and the time spent replacing them.
There’s a fairness payoff too. When each location screens its own way, who moves forward depends partly on which location someone applied to. That’s a structural kind of hiring bias. Using the same validated assessment consistently across the system can reduce that location-to-location variability.Franchisees still make their own hiring decisions, and the brand’s job is making sure the tool they’re using works.
FAQs: What franchisors ask about pre-hire assessments
We already use an assessment. Where do we start? Run the same comparison on the people you’ve hired. Pull their scores and see whether the higher scorers performed better or stayed longer. If you can’t tell the groups apart, it’s time to ask your vendor some questions.
What types of bias in hiring should franchisors watch for? Some happen inside one person’s head, like first impressions or favoring people who remind us of ourselves. Automation bias, trusting a score more because a computer produced it, belongs on that list too. A franchise system adds a structural one: locations screening candidates differently. A consistent assessment addresses that one, and structured interviews, where every candidate gets the same questions and the same scoring, help with the rest.
The takeaway
The assessment license fee is the cheap part. What costs money is an assessment that screens people out at every location on a score nobody ever connected to the job. You pay for it in turnover, and in the candidates who would have been great and never got a call.
Before you buy or renew, ask one thing: “Show me the ROI.” That means proof that people who score higher do better on the job and stay longer. If the vendor can, or your own comparison does, you’ve got a tool that puts better candidates in front of every hiring manager in your system.
Better assessments are just one part of better hiring. CareerPlug helps franchise brands give every location a more consistent way to evaluate candidates, conduct interviews, and make confident hiring decisions.
See how CareerPlug helps you hire better →
Dave Dubin holds a PhD in Industrial and Organizational Psychology and runs People Strategies, an assessment and selection practice in Austin, Texas. He has spent 15 years focusing on the mechanics of hiring: assessment content, interview scoring, and predictive validity. He builds screening systems for hourly roles and conducts executive assessments for national brands. Learn more here.