HR Tests turns any KnowStack Knowledge Base into a timed, AI-graded assessment. Generate questions from your real docs, invite internal employees or external candidates, let AI grade open-ended answers, and override any score where human judgment matters. Included on every paid plan.
Why we built HR Tests
When teams build a Knowledge Base in KnowStack, they're capturing the actual expertise their business runs on — the policies, the processes, the product details, the edge cases. A KB makes that knowledge findable. But finding information isn't the same as knowing it.
We kept hearing variations of the same question from customers:
- "Did the training from last quarter actually stick with the team?"
- "Is this candidate going to be able to handle tickets about our product, or will they escalate everything for weeks?"
- "How do we verify that our contractors understand the playbook before they start representing us?"
- "Can we make sure someone knows the runbook before we hand them production access?"
The answer every time involved some combination of homemade quizzes in Google Forms, subjective interview panels, take-home assignments that consumed candidates' weekends, or — honestly — just hoping. None of it was grounded in the actual documentation teams had already put together.
HR Tests is our answer. It's the same KB you're already building, now able to certify that the people on your team and the people you're hiring actually know what's in it.
How it works
The flow is deliberately short. You go to the Operations tab in your dashboard, click New Test, and point it at a Knowledge Base. You pick the question mix (multiple choice, true/false, short answer, essay), set a time limit, and set a passing score. AI generates the questions directly from the KB content you selected — no external facts, no made-up scenarios.
Once the questions are generated, you review them. You can edit, delete, mark a different option correct, or add your own manual questions alongside the AI drafts. When you're happy, you assign the test.
Assignment works two ways:
- Internal employees: pick people from your workspace. They get a bell notification and an email with a link to take the test while signed in.
- External candidates: enter an email address. KnowStack sends them a secure link. They take the test without creating any account. Their name and email are captured so you can match results back to the person you invited.
When someone submits, grading starts immediately. Multiple choice and true/false get scored instantly. Short answer and essay responses are graded by AI against the question's reference answer and the source KB — so the "correct" answer is always grounded in content you wrote, not in something the model decided to invent.
The override that makes this actually work
AI grading is fast and usually right, but "usually right" is not acceptable when someone's job offer depends on the score. Every AI-graded answer can be manually overridden by a manager. You can adjust the score, add written feedback that the candidate will see, and the total automatically recalculates.
This is the design decision that turned HR Tests from a toy into something our beta customers trusted: AI handles the volume, managers handle the judgment. The two are not in conflict.
Four use cases we're seeing already
1. Candidate screening
Replace the take-home assignment that eats a candidate's weekend with a 45-minute KB-grounded test sent from your inbox. You evaluate on what the candidate knows about your product and processes, not on how well they can write a generic coding sample or a fake strategy memo.
2. Onboarding verification
The LMS says "training complete." KnowStack tells you whether the training actually landed. Assign a short assessment after each onboarding phase — new hires show you they understood the material before they move on.
3. Post-change knowledge confirmation
You updated a policy or shipped a new process. You sent the email, posted in Slack, maybe ran a meeting. Now push a five-question KnowStack assessment to the affected team. You find out within a day who absorbed the change and who still thinks the old rule applies — before a customer-facing mistake.
4. Access certification
Granting access to sensitive systems based on tenure alone is risky. Instead, require a passing score on a KnowStack test built from your runbooks and escalation procedures. If someone fails, they get study material and can retry. You stop handing out dangerous permissions based on feelings.
Pricing
HR Tests is included on every paid plan — Professional, Business, and Enterprise. There's no separate module, no per-test fee, and no per-candidate cost. AI usage for question generation and grading is billed through the same transparent pay-as-you-go AI pricing that covers the rest of KnowStack; you see the cost estimate before each generation.
External candidates don't need a KnowStack account, don't count against your user limit, and don't cost extra. Invite as many as you want.
What's next
We're going to keep investing in HR Tests based on what early customers are telling us. On our near-term list: scheduled recurring assessments, question banks that cross multiple KBs, richer candidate-level reporting, and whitelabeled test-taking pages for enterprise customers.
If you have a specific workflow you'd like HR Tests to handle better, the fastest way to tell us is to email the team or drop a note in support.
Try it now
HR Tests is live for every paid account. To get started:
- Open Operations in the dashboard
- Click New Test
- Pick a KB, set question count and time limit, and let AI generate
- Review the questions, assign, and watch the results come in
The full HR Tests documentation walks through every configuration option, the external candidate flow, grading and overrides, analytics, and troubleshooting. If you're weighing KnowStack against other tools, the hiring use case and the training and certification use case go deeper on specific scenarios.