The Most Honest Comparison in This Series
This is the eighth article in our competitive series, and we need to say something up front: this one is different.
We’ve written about HireVue’s dominance and opacity. We’ve traced Harver’s private equity acquisition chain. We’ve documented Modern Hire’s absorption into HireVue and Pymetrics’ disappearance inside Harver. We’ve covered chatbot automation, resume screening, and dev-only technical vetting.
Every one of those stories had a structural vulnerability we could identify — acquisition instability, category misalignment, opacity, or scope creep. Criteria Corp doesn’t have those problems.
Criteria was founded in 2006 in Los Angeles by Josh Millet and David Sherman — two PhDs (Harvard and UCLA, respectively) who wanted to bring scientifically validated pre-employment testing to companies that couldn’t afford enterprise I/O psychology firms. Josh Millet is still CEO. Nearly twenty years later. Same founder, same mission, same company. In an industry where most competitors have been acquired, absorbed, rebranded, or PE-rolled, that alone is remarkable.
Criteria has been on the Inc. 5000 eight years in a row. They serve 4,500+ organizations across 60 countries. They’ve made two acquisitions — Revelian (game-based assessments, 2020) and Alcami Interactive (video interviewing, 2021) — both thoughtful, both integrated. Their product reviews on G2 and Capterra are genuinely strong. Their science is real.
So why write a comparison at all?
Because Criteria and SageScreen do fundamentally different things — and the difference matters more precisely because both platforms are well-built. When you’re choosing between a bad product and a good one, the decision is easy. When you’re choosing between two good products built for different purposes, the decision requires you to understand what you’re actually trying to accomplish.
What Criteria Built
Criteria is, at its core, a psychometric assessment platform. They built their reputation on pre-employment tests — cognitive aptitude, personality, emotional intelligence, risk, and job-specific skills — designed by I/O psychologists and validated against real-world performance data. The science here is not marketing language. Their assessments are backed by decades of industrial-organizational research, and they’ve been administered over 25 million times.
The product suite breaks down into three tiers:
This is a broad platform. It covers pre-hire assessment, structured interviewing, and post-hire development. For an HR team that wants a single vendor to handle testing, interview structure, and employee development, Criteria offers a real, coherent solution — not an acquisition Frankenstein, but a deliberately expanded product line.
What SageScreen Built
SageScreen does one thing: AI-powered behavioral interviews.
Not assessments. Not personality tests. Not games. Not surveys. Not post-hire coaching. Interviews — adaptive, conversational, structured interviews conducted by AI interviewers called Sages, designed to evaluate how candidates think through real scenarios, not how they perform on standardized tests.
The scope difference is intentional. SageScreen doesn’t try to be your assessment platform, your ATS, or your employee development tool. It occupies one specific position in the hiring funnel — the behavioral screening interview — and it does that with a depth that a broader platform can’t match because it isn’t trying to do twelve other things at the same time.
This is not a criticism of breadth. It’s a description of architectural decisions and what they optimize for.
The Category Distinction That Actually Matters
Here’s the question you should be asking: Do I need to measure what a candidate is, or hear how a candidate thinks?
That’s not a trick question. Both answers are legitimate. And they lead to fundamentally different tools.
Criteria gives you a profile. SageScreen gives you a story. Both are valid hiring signals. The question is which one your hiring managers will actually use to make better decisions.
Interview Intelligence vs. Interview AI: A Closer Look
In May 2025, Criteria launched Interview Intelligence (IIQ) — AI-powered scoring for their one-way video interviews. This is the feature that brings Criteria closest to what SageScreen does, so it deserves careful examination.
Here’s what IIQ does: candidates record video responses to preset interview questions. The AI transcribes those responses, then scores them using BARS (Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales) guides — evaluation rubrics that Criteria’s I/O psychology team developed based on structured interviewing best practices. The scoring model was trained on thousands of expert-reviewed transcripts. Criteria claims the AI scores with the same accuracy as an expert human grader.
That’s genuinely impressive work, and we want to be clear about what it accomplishes. IIQ solves a real bottleneck: hiring teams that collect hundreds of one-way video interviews but don’t have time to watch and score them all. Automated scoring means every single video gets evaluated — consistently, without reviewer fatigue or bias creep.
But there’s a structural difference between scoring recorded answers and conducting a live interview. And it’s not a small one.
🔍 Diagnostic: Where the Conversation Diverges
Imagine a candidate answering the question: “Tell me about a time you had to manage a difficult stakeholder.”
Criteria IIQ — One-Way Recording
The candidate gives a prepared answer to a camera. The AI scores that answer against a BARS rubric. If the candidate gives a vague answer, mentions a generic example, or pivots to a different story — the recording is over. There’s no follow-up. The AI works with what it got.
SageScreen — Adaptive Conversation
The Sage asks the same opening question. But when the candidate says “I scheduled a meeting and we worked it out,” the Sage follows up: “What was the stakeholder’s specific concern? How did you prepare for that conversation? What would you have done differently?” The interview deepens in real time, adapting to what the candidate reveals — and what they don’t.
The first approach scores a performance. The second approach conducts an investigation. Both produce data. One produces richer data.
This isn’t a criticism of IIQ for what it’s designed to do. Scoring one-way videos at scale is a real capability that solves a real problem. But one-way video + AI scoring is fundamentally a grading tool applied to pre-recorded content. SageScreen’s interview model is a discovery tool that generates content through conversation.
The difference compounds. A candidate who gives a weak initial answer in a recorded video gets a weak score and that’s the end of it. The same candidate in a SageScreen interview might get a follow-up question that unlocks a much stronger answer they didn’t think to lead with. The adaptive model doesn’t just evaluate better — it elicits better.
The Assessment Paradox
Here’s something the assessment industry doesn’t talk about enough: assessments are prediction tools, and predictions are only as good as the model that generates them.
Criteria’s cognitive aptitude tests predict a candidate’s ability to learn. Their personality assessments predict behavioral tendencies. Their emotional intelligence tests predict interpersonal effectiveness. All of these are statistically validated, and all of them are genuinely useful for narrowing a candidate pool.
But none of them answer the question a hiring manager actually asks in the final decision: “Can I picture this person doing this job?”
That question requires context. It requires hearing the candidate describe how they’d handle a situation specific to your role, your team, your industry. A personality profile tells you someone is “high in conscientiousness.” An interview tells you they once caught a $200K billing error because they built a personal reconciliation checklist that wasn’t part of their job description. The first is a trait. The second is evidence.
The Hiring Manager Test
Consider what actually happens when a hiring manager receives a screening report. Which of these outputs leads to a faster, more confident decision?
Assessment Report
Critical Thinking: 82nd percentile
Conscientiousness: High
Emotional Intelligence: Above Average
Risk Profile: Low
What does the hiring manager do next? Schedule an interview to learn what this person is actually like.
Interview Report
Leadership: 4/5 — described building a cross-functional team under deadline
Problem Solving: 5/5 — identified root cause that two prior teams missed
Communication: 3/5 — answers were thorough but could be more concise
What does the hiring manager do next? Decide whether to bring them in — because they already know what this person sounds like.
Assessments generate a reason to interview. Interviews generate a reason to hire. Both are necessary stages, but they serve different functions in the decision chain.
Architecture: Broad Suite vs. Deep Tool
Criteria’s architecture is designed to be your entire pre-hire evaluation stack — plus post-hire development. One vendor, one login, one contract covering assessments, interviews, and employee growth tools. That’s appealing from a procurement standpoint and from a data integration standpoint. When your assessments and your interviews and your development tools all live in the same platform, you can (theoretically) track correlations across the full employee lifecycle.
SageScreen’s architecture is designed to be the best possible behavioral interview tool — period. It doesn’t try to replace your assessment platform, your ATS, or your employee engagement survey. It slots into your existing stack at the screening stage, does its job, and passes structured output downstream.
Criteria’s Architecture Model: The Swiss Army Knife
One platform does everything. Strength: breadth. Risk: each blade is thinner than a purpose-built tool.
SageScreen’s Architecture Model: The Scalpel
One tool does one thing exceptionally. Strength: depth. Design: integrates with what you already use.
Neither model is wrong. The Swiss Army Knife is ideal when you’re building a hiring process from scratch and want a single vendor. The scalpel is ideal when you already have an ATS, you may already have assessment tools, and you need the strongest possible signal from the screening interview specifically — which is where most hiring decisions actually get made or broken.
The Candidate Experience Difference
Criteria has invested heavily in candidate experience — gamified assessments through Cognify and the Revelian game suite, mobile-first design, practice questions, the ability to retake recordings. Their candidate support is 24/7. The Alcami video platform includes branded portals where companies can showcase culture videos. This is genuine effort, and it shows in their completion rates.
But there’s a difference between making a test feel less like a test and making it feel like a conversation.
SageScreen’s candidate experience is designed around the interview metaphor because that’s what it is — a real interview. Candidates talk to an AI interviewer that listens, responds to what they say, and asks follow-up questions that demonstrate it understood their previous answer. The psychological experience is closer to talking with a thoughtful colleague than to completing a test battery.
For candidates, that distinction matters. Assessments carry inherent anxiety because they feel like pass/fail gatekeeping. Interviews — even AI interviews — feel like opportunities to be heard. The difference in candidate perception affects the quality of the signal you get back. A relaxed candidate in conversation reveals more about their actual competency than an anxious candidate optimizing for test performance.
Transparency and Explainability
Criteria’s assessments produce scores, percentiles, and competency ratings. Their Illustrait personality assessment generates work-style reports with tailored interview questions. Their Interview Intelligence scores video responses against BARS guides. All of this is rooted in validated psychometric science, which gives it statistical credibility.
But statistical credibility and practical explainability are not the same thing.
When a hiring manager asks “Why wasn’t this candidate recommended?” the answer from an assessment is statistical: their cognitive score was below the threshold, their personality profile diverged from the target model. The manager has to trust the model. They can’t interrogate the reasoning because there’s no reasoning to read — there’s a score.
SageScreen’s transparency model produces something different: a full interview transcript, competency scores with rubric explanations, and the candidate’s actual words alongside the evaluation. If a hiring manager disagrees with a score, they can read the transcript, find the relevant answer, and override the AI’s assessment with a documented rationale. The entire decision chain is in natural language, not statistical inference.
This matters practically for compliance, for manager trust, and for candidate feedback. When you can show a candidate why they scored the way they did — by pointing to their own words — the process feels fundamentally more fair than a percentile rank derived from a proprietary algorithm.
Pricing: Suites vs. Credits
Criteria uses a tiered subscription model with three plans: Assess (testing only), Assess + Interview (adds video and live interviewing), and Assess + Interview + Develop (adds post-hire tools). Pricing is quote-based, but third-party sources indicate starting points around $1,200/year for the base tier. Annual contracts appear standard, with multi-year terms available for discounts.
SageScreen uses a credit-based model: you buy interview credits and use them when you need them. No annual commitment required. No per-seat licensing. No feature tiers to navigate. One credit equals one AI interview, and you can see the per-interview cost before you buy.
The pricing models reflect the product philosophies. Criteria’s subscription model makes sense for an always-on assessment platform that your team uses across every open role. SageScreen’s credit model makes sense for targeted use — when you want AI-powered interviews for specific roles, specific hiring surges, or specific stages of your pipeline without paying for capabilities you aren’t using.
Who Should Use Which — And When to Use Both
Here’s where we say something this series hasn’t said before: these two platforms are not mutually exclusive.
Criteria and SageScreen occupy different positions in the hiring funnel. One measures candidate attributes through standardized testing. The other conducts behavioral interviews through adaptive conversation. They don’t compete for the same slot in your workflow — they complement each other.
Decision Framework
Choose Criteria alone if:
You primarily need pre-employment testing to filter large applicant pools by cognitive ability, personality fit, and skills proficiency. You want a single-vendor solution covering assessments, basic interview structure, and employee development. Your hiring decisions rely more on psychometric data than on interview performance.
Choose SageScreen alone if:
Your bottleneck is the screening interview, not the assessment. You need to evaluate how candidates think through role-specific scenarios, not just what traits they possess. You want transparent, readable output that hiring managers can use without statistical interpretation. You need flexible, pay-per-use pricing.
Use both if:
You want to use Criteria’s assessments to measure cognitive and personality traits early in the funnel, then use SageScreen to conduct deeper behavioral interviews with the candidates who pass. Assessment first, interview second. Different signals, combined confidence. This is the most rigorous screening process available — and it’s what evidence-based hiring research actually recommends: multiple independent evaluation methods, each measuring different dimensions.
Respect Where It’s Due
We’ve spent seven previous articles identifying structural problems with competitors: acquisition instability, category confusion, opacity, vaporware, or scope creep without depth. Criteria has none of those problems. They built a real company, maintained founder leadership for nearly twenty years, developed genuine science, earned strong customer reviews, and expanded thoughtfully.
The reason to compare them with SageScreen isn’t to find flaws. It’s to draw a clean line between two legitimate approaches to a shared goal: helping companies make better hiring decisions.
Criteria answers the question “What attributes does this candidate have?” SageScreen answers the question “How does this candidate think and communicate?” Both questions matter. Both deserve good tools.
We just think the second question — the one you answer through conversation, not through testing — is where the hiring decision actually lives. And we built an entire platform around making that conversation as rigorous, transparent, and useful as possible.
If you’re already using Criteria for assessments, SageScreen doesn’t ask you to stop. It asks you to add the missing layer — the one that turns test scores into hiring stories.
