Hiring at this customer used to mean one test and a hope. It now means five different assessments for five different jobs, 4,800 candidates a month, each scored on what that particular seat actually demands. It costs a quarter of what a global language test costs, and half of what the nearest Indian platform charges.
What changed
The old question was whether a candidate could speak English. The new question is whether this candidate can hold the specific seat we are hiring for, on the worst day that seat has. Four things changed.
What it cost
Same 4,800 candidates, three price tags, expressed against ours. These are list rates at this volume.
| Platform | Per assessment | Relative cost | Gap to Kalibr |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kalibr | Baseline | 1.0x | — |
| Competing Indian platforms | Twice the price per assessment | 2.0x | 50% above Kalibr |
| Versant by Pearson | Four times the price per assessment | 4.0x | 75% above Kalibr |
Same 4,800 candidates, three price tags. Half the price of the nearest competing Indian platform and a quarter the price of Versant by Pearson, the global testing incumbent, on identical volume.
Put it another way. The whole month of assessment at this customer, all 4,800 candidates, costs what Versant would charge to test barely a fifth of them.
And the comparison is not only price, which is the part worth slowing down on. Versant by Pearson is a language test: one capability, priced at four times ours. Kalibr covers spoken, written, reading and listening in English and twelve Indian languages, plus psychometrics, plus a question bank the customer controls with audio, image and video validation, plus proctoring that analyses screen, keystroke and camera data independently to judge whether a candidate was assisted. Then it takes scenarios from what goes wrong on the customer's own floor and puts them in next month's test. So the honest comparison is not a quarter of the price. It is a quarter of the price for roughly five times the scope, and nothing else in the category does that last part at all.
What contextual actually means
This is the part that does not show up in a price comparison. It is not one assessment with five job titles on it. Each one measures what that particular seat fails at.
Note the last row. Screening frontline agents at volume is one kind of trust. Putting the people who will manage that floor through the same platform is another, and it is usually the last thing a customer is willing to do.
Where the questions come from
Every assessment platform lets you build a question bank. This one gets told what to put in it by the audit running on the same customer's live conversations. Here is one example, from one month.
Audira, running on the same customer, found that tickets raised during a weather surge, the state where order volumes spike and delivery times stretch, were failing differently from ordinary tickets. Not a hunch from a sample. A pattern visible because every ticket was scored.
Weather-surge activation scenarios were fed into Kalibr as customised test data, producing a harder and more visually demanding assessment built for the specific judgement that seat requires under surge.
A 90 percent threshold on that assessment now decides who may handle weather-surge tickets at all. Not a training deck. A qualification bar on a specific queue.
An audit finding became assessment content, and assessment content became a hiring gate, inside a single month. It needs both halves live on the same customer at the same time, which is why no competitor can produce an equivalent. That other half is Audira, and its own case study is here.
How it passed review
Customer anonymised pending approval. Figures are one calendar month, supplied by the customer. Competitor rates are list prices supplied by Singularium and used only for cost comparison at this volume.
Talk to us
The fastest way to know whether any of this transfers to your floor is to point it at your floor. Send us a sample, we run it, and you tell us where we got it wrong.