Vista Equity Partners — the Criteria assessment stage

Vista’s own hires and recruits across its portfolio companies

Vista Equity Partners requires a CCAT-plus-personality battery for its own hires and, as a firm-wide policy, for employees and recruits across its roughly 85 portfolio companies (about 95,000 workers) — Vista’s Robert F. Smith discusses it publicly as a way to bypass bias, and candidates interviewing at Vista itself report that a lot of weight is placed on the IQ and personality tests. Two portfolio companies have first-hand confirmation: at Vertafore candidates describe taking the CCAT twice, the second time proctored by HR over webcam, and at PowerSchool (formerly Vista-backed) a roughly 15-minute CCAT follows the phone screen and is sometimes repeated later in the process. Prep sites publish long lists of other Vista-linked names; the portfolio-wide policy makes them plausible, but none is individually verified, so treat your invitation as the only authority. The CCAT is Criteria’s 50-question, 15-minute multiple-choice test — verbal ability, maths and logic, and spatial reasoning mixed together, no calculator, fixed test versions rather than an adaptive engine — on which the average candidate answers about 24 correctly and fewer than 1% finish all 50. The personality instrument is not named in public reports.