Which Companies Use the CCAT Test? What Is Actually Known

Before applying to your dream job, you might be wondering: does this company use the Criteria Cognitive Aptitude Test (CCAT)? What score do they require? How does their threshold compare to other employers?

They are the right questions. Here is the answer nobody selling CCAT prep wants to give you: there is no reliable public list of companies that use the CCAT, and there is no reliable public list of their score cutoffs. Not on this site, not on any other.

You will find pages naming fifty employers, each with a tidy percentile requirement and a note about where the test sits in their hiring process. Those pages are assembled from candidate forum posts, guesswork, and each other. This page used to be one of them. It is not any more.

What follows is what can actually be established: the one cutoff that is genuinely known, the employer profile that reliably predicts CCAT usage, the companies you can be fairly confident do not use it, and five concrete ways to find out about your specific employer in an afternoon. For general preparation, see our how to pass the CCAT guide and first-time taker checklist.

Why no complete list exists

This is not an oversight anyone can fix with more research. It is structural, and understanding why saves you from trusting the next list you find.

Criteria sells to employers under commercial agreements, not into a public register. Criteria Corp licenses the CCAT to businesses the way any B2B software vendor licenses a product. There is no obligation, commercial incentive, or regulatory requirement to publish who buys it. Criteria publishes case studies where a customer has agreed to be named, and that is the entire public record.

Employers have a positive reason to stay quiet. An assessment works as a screen only if candidates have not optimised specifically for it. A company that announces “we use the CCAT and our cutoff is 34” has just told every applicant exactly what to drill. Most hiring teams will confirm that an assessment exists when asked directly, and go no further.

Usage varies inside a single company. Even where an employer does use the CCAT, it is rarely applied uniformly. It may be used for one department and not another, for graduate hiring and not experienced hiring, in one country and not another, and it may be switched on for a hiring surge and off again six months later. A company-level entry in a table cannot capture any of that, which is part of why those tables feel authoritative and are not.

The score requirement is set per role, not per company. Criteria provides employers with score profiles and lets them set their own thresholds. Two roles at the same company can have different bars. A single number attached to a company name is, at best, one candidate’s experience of one requisition.

Put those four together and the honest conclusion is unavoidable: any page presenting a comprehensive directory of CCAT employers with numeric cutoffs has invented most of it.

What is actually confirmed

Crossover

Crossover uses the CCAT as an early-stage screen, and its bar is 35 for most entry-level roles, rising to 40 and above for the high-paying roles at $100K and up.

This one is first-hand. I worked at Crossover, and those are the thresholds the hiring funnel applies. It is worth being precise about the status of that information: Crossover does not publish those numbers anywhere public. They sit inside the hiring portal, not on a careers page or a blog post, which is exactly why every prep site quotes a different figure and why you will most often see “38 to 42” repeated. That is not where the line sits.

A few things follow from it that are genuinely useful:

• The bar is high in absolute terms. Against Criteria’s published mean of 24.2 and standard deviation of 8.58, a 35 is roughly the 90th percentile and a 40 is roughly the 97th. Crossover’s entry-level screen therefore sits at a level nine out of ten test takers do not reach.
• Crossover allows one attempt per email address per six-month period. Using multiple email addresses to get around that gets your application rejected outright, which turns a six-month delay into a permanent one.
• A near miss is not a bad score. If you posted a 31 and did not clear the bar, you scored around the 78th percentile. You did not fail a test of your ability, you missed one employer’s number.

Our Crossover CCAT insider guide goes deeper on the process itself.

Vista Equity Partners and its portfolio

Vista is the most frequently reported CCAT user in tech, and the use of cognitive aptitude testing across Vista’s portfolio companies has been written about widely enough to take seriously. What has never been published is a role-by-role cutoff.

Candidates consistently report targets in the mid to high thirties for technical roles. Treat that as an aggregate of individual accounts, which is what it is. If you are interviewing at a Vista portfolio company, aiming at 35 or better puts you around the 90th percentile, which is a sound plan whatever the real threshold turns out to be.

The employer profile that predicts CCAT usage

Since you cannot look your company up in a directory, look it up in a pattern instead. The CCAT concentrates heavily in employers with a specific set of traits, and the more of these that describe your target company, the more likely an assessment link is coming.

1. They hire at volume relative to their size. The CCAT’s entire value proposition is cutting a large applicant pool quickly and cheaply. A company receiving thirty applications per opening has no reason to buy it. A company receiving three thousand does.

2. They are remote-first or hire globally. Distributed employers cannot rely on in-person impressions, and they are often screening candidates across many countries whose CVs and credentials are hard to compare directly. A standardised 15-minute test gives them one number that means the same thing everywhere. This is the strongest single predictor in the list.

3. They are private equity backed. A PE owner applying a common hiring standard across a portfolio of companies is one of the most common ways the CCAT enters an organisation. If your target company was acquired by a software-focused PE firm in the last few years, the odds go up sharply.

4. They are enterprise or B2B SaaS rather than consumer tech. The large consumer technology companies build their own hiring processes and can afford to. Mid-market enterprise software companies mostly cannot, and buy assessments off the shelf.

5. The role is a generalist one with a long ramp. Operations, analysis, customer success, programme management and similar roles are where employers care most about learning speed, because the person will spend months getting to full productivity. Highly specialised roles are more often screened on demonstrated skill.

6. They are a staffing, recruitment or outsourcing firm. These businesses screen enormous candidate pools on behalf of clients and are among the heaviest users of pre-employment testing generally.

None of that tells you your company definitely uses the CCAT. It tells you whether to expect one, and it is a great deal more useful than a list where half the entries are made up.

Which companies almost certainly do not use it

This is worth saying plainly, because the fabricated lists cause real harm here. Candidates prepare for a test they are never going to be sent.

The FAANG companies. Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google are not known to use the CCAT for engineering hiring. They run their own coding challenges, system design interviews and behavioural loops, all built in-house. If you see Google or Amazon in a CCAT score table, that is a reliable signal that the whole table is invented.

The strategy consultancies. McKinsey, BCG and Bain are not known to use the CCAT. They run case interviews, and where they screen cognitively they use their own instruments. Claims that they “expect 42 to 50” are doubly wrong: wrong about the test, and wrong about the score, since Criteria states that fewer than 1% of candidates answer all 50 questions at all.

The large investment banks. Same pattern. Where these firms test, they typically use assessment publishers built for high-volume graduate schemes rather than the CCAT.

If a page lists any of these with a CCAT cutoff attached, stop reading it. It is not a page that checks things.

What the employer is actually screening you on

Whichever company sent the link, the test underneath is the same, and it helps to know what they are buying.

The CCAT covers three areas: verbal reasoning, math and logic, and spatial reasoning. Criteria does not publish an exact question count per area, so any claim that “there are exactly 17 math questions” is a third-party estimate rather than a fact from the publisher. The questions are mixed rather than grouped, so you are switching between an analogy, a number series and a shape rotation from one item to the next, which is itself part of the difficulty.

Employers use it because a general cognitive score is a cheap proxy for how fast someone gets to full productivity. That is the whole pitch: not “is this person clever,” but “how long before this hire pays for themselves.” It explains why the CCAT clusters in roles with long ramp-up times and why it is used as a gate rather than a ranking in most processes. Once you clear the threshold, the score usually stops mattering and your experience and interviews take over.

Five ways to find out about your specific employer

Method 1: Ask the recruiter directly

This is by far the highest-yield thing you can do, and it takes one email:

“Can you walk me through the hiring process? Will there be any assessments or tests as part of it, and if so, is there a threshold I should be aware of?”

Recruiters answer this routinely. Naming the assessment is administrative information, not a secret, and asking does not mark you as a weak candidate. A useful number of recruiters will also tell you the cutoff outright, which is more than any published list can give you.

Method 2: Read the job description properly

Employers frequently disclose testing in the posting itself, in language that is easy to skim past. Look for:

• “Assessment required” or “assessment stage”
• “Cognitive ability testing”
• “Online evaluation” or “online assessment”
• “Criteria assessment” or “Criteria Corp”
• “Pre-employment testing”

If the posting names Criteria specifically, you have your answer without asking anyone.

Method 3: Search employee and candidate reviews

Glassdoor and Indeed interview reviews are the single best public source, because candidates describe the process in detail while it is fresh. Search “[Company Name] CCAT”, “[Company Name] cognitive test”, or “[Company Name] Criteria assessment”.

Two cautions. Reviews are individual experiences, so three people describing a CCAT tells you far more than one does. And they age: a process described in 2021 may have changed twice since.

Method 4: Ask someone who went through it

A short, polite LinkedIn message to someone who joined the company in the last year, asking what the hiring process involved, gets a reply more often than people expect. Recent joiners remember the assessment stage vividly, and most are happy to help.

Method 5: Check the careers page

Some high-volume employers document their process under a “What to Expect” or “Hiring Process” heading, occasionally naming the assessment. It is rare, but it costs you thirty seconds to check and it is the most authoritative source available when it exists.

What score to aim for when you cannot find the cutoff

Most people will run all five methods and still not get a number. That is fine, because you can set a defensible target from Criteria’s own published data instead.

Criteria states that the average test taker only gets 24 questions right out of 50, and that fewer than 1% answer all 50 within the 15-minute limit. The published standardisation sample of 985 working adults produced a mean of 24.2, a median of 24, and a standard deviation of 8.58. From those figures, raw scores convert to approximate percentiles as follows:

The practical rule: aim for 35. At roughly the 90th percentile it clears the only confirmed cutoff in the market, and it leaves headroom for a bad day. If your baseline is well below that, aim for 30 to 32 first, since that alone puts you past three quarters of candidates. Our guide to what counts as a good CCAT score breaks the percentiles down by role, and the tech jobs guide covers the technology sector specifically.

Preparing when you do not know the company

The good news is that the CCAT does not vary by employer. The format is identical no matter who sends it: 50 questions, 15 minutes, roughly 18 seconds per question, no calculator, no penalty for a wrong answer, and five answer options per question. That means company-specific preparation is largely a myth, and general preparation transfers completely.

Take one full-length diagnostic first. Sit a complete free CCAT practice test under strict timing before you study anything. Do not pause, do not stop early. The result tells you two things: your baseline against the 24-question average, and which of the three areas is costing you the most.

Be careful about which practice you trust here. Criteria is candid about its own free samples, describing them as “shortened, simulated versions” that “do not reflect the exact experience or full difficulty level,” and noting that the practice test “is not scored and no results will be available.” A five-question teaser is useful for format familiarity and useless as a score predictor.

Then drill the weakest area and the clock. Almost everyone has one area doing most of the damage, and it is rarely the one they expected going in. Spend roughly half your practice time there and the rest on timed mixed sets, building the pacing habit until 18 seconds per question feels normal rather than frantic.

Finally, rehearse the two habits that reliably add points. Skip anything that has not resolved in about 15 seconds. And in the last 30 seconds, fill every remaining blank with a single letter. With five options and no penalty for a wrong answer, a blind guess is worth 0.20 of a point and a blank is worth zero, so leaving anything unanswered is the only guaranteed way to lose marks.

FAQ

Q: How many companies use the CCAT?

A: Criteria does not publish a customer count for the CCAT specifically, and no independent register exists. Anyone quoting a precise number is estimating.

Q: Is there any company whose CCAT cutoff is actually known?

A: Crossover, at 35 for most entry-level roles and 40 and above for roles paying $100K and up. That is first-hand from having worked there, and it is not published publicly by Crossover.

Q: Does Vista Equity Partners use the CCAT?

A: It is very widely reported by candidates, and Vista’s use of cognitive aptitude testing across its portfolio has been written about at length. No role-by-role cutoff has ever been published.

Q: My employer is not on any list. Does that mean I will not be tested?

A: No. Absence from a list means nothing, because the lists are not real inventories. Use the employer profile above to judge how likely an assessment is, then ask your recruiter.

Q: Do different companies use different versions of the CCAT?

A: The format is the same everywhere: 50 questions, 15 minutes, three areas. What varies is the score profile the employer sets and where the test sits in their process.

Q: If I take the CCAT for one company, does another company see it?

A: No. Scores are not shared between employers, and Criteria does not maintain a cross-employer record of your attempts that other companies can query. Each application is independent.

Q: Should I mention my CCAT score in an interview?

A: Only if the interviewer raises it. In most processes the score is a gate rather than a talking point, and the hiring manager you speak to later may never see the number at all.

Q: Can a company see that I took the CCAT for a different employer?

A: No, and this is worth internalising because it changes how much a rejection costs you. Your result belongs to the employer who administered it. A score that missed one company’s bar has no bearing on your next application, even to another CCAT user.

The CCAT is the most controllable variable in most application processes. You cannot add three years to your CV before Thursday, but you can walk into a 15-minute test knowing the format cold, having rehearsed the pacing, and knowing that 24 out of 50 is the number you are actually competing against.

Start with a full-length free practice test to find your baseline, then aim at 35 and work backwards. And if your target employer layers other assessments on top of the CCAT, PrepClubs covers 20+ other pre-employment tests, with a pass guarantee.