Every bad hire you ever made interviewed great.
First Move Assessment is a pre-hire assessment built for the trades. Send it to a candidate and get back a report that shows how their instinct fits the seat you are filling, with the interview questions to ask and how to manage them after you hire.
From $149. Pay per assessment. Assessments never expire.
- No AI scoring
- Every seat, field to C-suite
- 9 trades
You were about to hand them a board.
Interviewing well is a skill. It's just not the job.
Now multiply that by every bad hire you ever made.
How it works
- 1Pick the seat, send one link.Pick the seat you are filling, in any of 9 trades. Your candidate gets one link by email.
- 2They complete it on their phone.10 to 20 minutes. No app, no account, no login.
- 3You get the report.Seat match, where their instincts pull away from the seat, interview questions written for those spots, and management guidance.
Same person. Six seats. Six different results.
One candidate's instinct held up against six seats. Their answers never change. Only the seat does.
One made-up candidate, so you can watch it work. The positions here are illustrative, and so is the seat match beside them. Where each seat actually needs a person lives inside the product where it belongs, so every candidate meets the assessment cold.
One seat match out of 100 against a written standard for the seat, with its margin of error printed beside it, 9 to 12 points depending on the seat. 72 and up lines up, 40 to 71 is mixed and worth a closer look, and under 40 does not line up.
See what lands in your inbox.
- Service Technician / Lead Technician
- CSR / Call Taker
- Dispatcher
Get all three full reports, free.
Three finished reports from your trade: Service Technician / Lead Technician, CSR / Call Taker, and Dispatcher. See exactly what you would get before you spend a dollar.
Loading the form.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Privacy policy.
What First Move Assessment measures.
Work instinct: the move a candidate reaches for first when work gets hard. Fixed scoring against one standard for every candidate, with no AI in the scoring or the report.
A method with 30 years of published evidence
First Move Assessment is built on situational judgment, one of the most researched methods in hiring science. Candidates face real situations from the seat and pick the move they would make first. What the published research on the method has found:
- A meta-analysis pooling 118 results found situational judgment tests predicted job performance at .26 (McDaniel, Hartman, Whetzel and Grubb, 2007, Personnel Psychology).
- Tests built around teamwork situations predicted at .38, leadership at .28 (Christian, Edwards and Bradley, 2010, Personnel Psychology).
- On fairness, these tests show a Black-White score gap of about .38, roughly a third of the gap on cognitive ability tests (Whetzel, McDaniel and Nguyen, 2008, Human Performance).
- The approach lines up with decades of research on tacit knowledge: the practical, rarely-spoken know-how that separates experienced performers (Sternberg and Wagner, 1985; Lievens and Motowidlo, 2016).
Built by Jim Cosmas, over 45 years in the trades as apprentice, technician, foreman, manager, owner, and consultant.
After 45 years of watching good interviews turn into bad hires, I wanted owners to see how a candidate thinks before they make the offer.
How the seat standards are built
Each seat's written standard was built from occupational research, including O*NET data on what the job involves day to day. AI tools helped draft the standards and the moments your candidate reads, and checked them against that research. Every standard then had to pass a fixed set of rules and was approved before use. No AI takes part when a candidate sits the assessment, when it is scored, or when the report is written. The standards describe what a seat demands.
Contractors who stopped guessing.
We are always hiring. All of our top candidates go through an assessment which gives us insight on their personality and skills but we've never really had an assessment which can give us a person's behavior based on instinct. First Move Assessment gives us exactly that. We successfully filled four positions, two of which ended up being the best hires we've made to date. Instinct wins every time.
I handle all the hiring for our company. For years I relied mostly on resumes, interviews, and references. It was always hit or miss. I ran 6 candidate assessments and hired 2. If I relied on my old methods I would have likely hired a few I would have regretted. I will absolutely continue to use First Move Assessment as a mandatory part of my hiring process moving forward.
What two customers told us about their own hiring. Results differ from shop to shop.
Built for the trades.
| FIRST MOVE ASSESSMENT | Personality inventories | Skills assessments | Your read in the room | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it actually measures | Instinct: the move they make first | Personality traits and types | A skill they learned | However they came across |
| Can a candidate study for it | There's no right answer to look up | Traits are easy to guess at | Yes, that's the point | Yes, and they do |
| What it compares somebody to | One written seat standard, never another candidate | A type or a trait profile | A correct answer | Whoever you hired last |
| Tells you what to ask afterward | Interview questions, with what to listen for | Generic prompts if any | Not usually | You improvise |
| Tells you how to manage them | What to watch in the first ninety days | Trait descriptions | No | You find out |
| Who it was written for | The trades. Seat by seat, out of a contracting business | Office work generally | One named skill | Your shop |
| Time it takes the candidate | About 10 to 20 minutes, every screen timed | Often 20 to 40 minutes | Varies widely | An interview |
| Margin of error printed on the score | On every report | Rarely shown to the buyer | Rarely shown to the buyer | None |
Every seat in the company. Nine trades.
Every seat, from the truck to the C-suite.
Every seat wants a different instinct, and each one carries its own written standard. A dispatcher is measured against what a board demands, a bookkeeper against what the books demand, a chief financial officer against what cash, banking and controls demand. Pick the seat first, and the report is written against that one.
The executive seats are written for a contractor running several branches or divisions, in the trade's own words and at a chief's level: the covenant, the surety, the lead source, the vendor contract, the pay band. For a chief, the report reads instinct on the two questions that decide that seat. The scope, the financial and technical depth, and the track record a chief needs are still yours to check, the way you always would.
- Service Technician
- Install Technician
- Apprentice / Helper
- Field Supervisor
- Crew Lead
- Production Manager
- Service Manager
- Operations Manager
- General Manager
- Estimator
- Crew Member
- CSR
- Dispatcher
- Comfort Advisor
- Commercial Sales Rep
- Canvasser
- Office Manager
- Office Administrator
- Bookkeeper
- Warehouse / Parts Coordinator
- Chief Executive Officer
- Chief Operating Officer
- Chief Financial Officer
- Chief Marketing Officer
- Chief Technology Officer
- Chief Information Officer
- Chief People Officer
Built for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, garage door, pest control, commercial mechanical, residential cleaning and commercial cleaning.
Simple pricing. Pay per assessment.
Your first report is covered by a 30-day refund.
For multi-location and high-volume hiring
What happens after I pay? Your account email arrives within a minute, and your first link can go out right after.
Assessments never expire. Buy ten, use two this month and eight next spring. The link you send is what has a clock: it works for 30 days, and if your candidate never starts it, the assessment returns to your balance on its own. Once they start, it counts as used. The packs are one-time purchases, and the Practice License is the only thing here that renews. Every seat costs the same, from Apprentice to Chief Executive Officer.
Send one assessment to a real candidate for a real seat and read the whole report. If it did not tell you something you had not already worked out, email us within 30 days of the report and we refund what you paid for that assessment. You keep the report either way. It runs once per customer, on your first completed assessment. No form and no explanation, and those three lines are the whole of it.
- It reads one candidate's instinct against one seat. It does not test skills or trade knowledge, describe personality or check backgrounds.
- It is one input. You make the hiring decision, and the report never tells you to hire or not hire.
- No AI scores a candidate or writes a report.
Straight answers
What happens after I pay?
Your account email arrives within a minute from First Move Assessment, along with your receipt. Click the link in it to set your password: it works once and lasts 48 hours. Sign in, pick the seat, and enter your candidate's name and email. The link goes out right away, and the report lands in your inbox when they finish. If no email arrives within five minutes, check spam, then send us a message.
How long does it take my candidate?
About 10 to 20 minutes. Every screen is timed and every candidate gets the same clock, which is what makes two sittings comparable. If somebody needs it untimed, for any reason at all, they ask whoever sent the link, you tell us, and it costs nothing.
What do I actually have to do?
Pick the seat, then enter their name and email. That's about a minute of your day. They open it on whatever they've got and go.
How fast do I get it back?
As soon as they finish. You get an email with their name, the seat, whether it lines up, and a link straight into the full report, so you can read it before the interview.
What if the seat I'm filling isn't on the list?
Pick the one it sits closest to and read the written standard the report prints for it. Seats that look alike on a job board can want different instincts. An Office Manager supervises staff and owns the financial close, while an Office Administrator runs a smaller office alone, and the two are measured differently. At the top, the Chief Technology Officer owns the field and customer technology and gets the company using it, while the Chief Information Officer owns the systems of record, data and security. If one person does both, pick the one closer to the job. Choosing the seat well is the one decision that matters before you send the link.
Does it work for my trade?
It is built for nine trades: HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, garage door, pest control, commercial mechanical, residential cleaning and commercial cleaning. Every moment your candidate reads is written in the words that trade already uses.
Who reads the report?
You do, and anybody you choose to share it with, like a coach or a partner who helps you hire. There is no candidate-facing report.
What does the AI do?
No AI is used when your candidate takes the assessment, when it is scored, or when the report is made. Answers are scored by a fixed formula written by people, and every written section of the report is a fixed template filled in from that formula's numbers. The same answers give the same result every time, and no candidate information is sent to any AI company. AI tools did help draft the seat standards and the moments before they were checked and approved (see How the seat standards are built). Some hiring laws apply to any scored assessment, AI or not, and the limits page lists what still applies to you.
Is my candidate's data safe?
Scoring material stays on our server. The candidate's browser only ever receives the moment, the two moves and meaningless identifiers for them. A completed sitting is kept for four years, or until you delete it, and deleting a result erases the candidate's name, email, answers and results.
Who gets the most out of this?
Shops filling seats they can't afford to get wrong, and shops filling them often enough that one bad hire costs them a season. If you hire once every few years and already know the person, you probably don't need it.
What research is the method built on?
Situational judgment, which has decades of published research behind it in journals such as Personnel Psychology. The main findings are summarized above, and the limits page explains how they relate to this assessment.
Stop hiring on gut feel.
Your next bad hire will interview great too. See how they think before you make the offer.
Hiring guides for contractors
Plain, specific guides to hiring technicians, CSRs, dispatchers, comfort advisors and managers in HVAC, plumbing, electrical and the other trades.
HVAC Technician Interview Questions: 13 Moments From a Service Call to Walk a Candidate Through
13 HVAC technician interview questions built on real service call moments, each with a strong and a weak answer, plus a bench fault with a live homeowner.
October 22, 2026 · 8 min readInterviewingQuestions to Ask When Hiring Cleaners for Your Cleaning Business
12 questions to ask when hiring cleaners for a maid service or residential cleaning company, with strong and weak answers, plus how to run the trial clean.
October 21, 2026 · 9 min readInterviewingJanitorial Interview Questions That Screen for Reliability
12 janitorial interview questions for commercial cleaning companies, each with a strong and a weak answer, built to screen for no-shows, trust and the route.
October 20, 2026 · 9 min readQuestions? Ask us.
About the assessment, pricing, your account or a purchase. Send a message and we reply by email.