Every bad hire you ever made interviewed great.
First Move Assessment is an online assessment you send to a job candidate. They work through real moments from a contracting shop on their phone, 10 to 20 minutes, picking the move they would make first. You get a report on how that instinct fits the seat you are filling, what to ask in the interview, and what to watch in the first 90 days. One assessment is $149.
Your first report is covered by a 30-day refund.
You were about to hand them a board.
How it works
- 1. Pick the seat and send the link.Enter their name and email. About a minute of your day.
- 2. They answer on any phone or computer.10 to 20 minutes. No account, no login, no download.
- 3. The report lands in your inbox.As soon as they finish, ready before the interview.
A seat is the job you are filling, from Service Technician and Dispatcher to General Manager and Chief Financial Officer.
"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."
Results differ from shop to shop.
You can teach skill. You can't teach instinct.
Everybody has one move they reach for first when a job goes sideways, before anybody has time to manage the impression. It is the part of a person an interview rarely reaches, and it never shows up on a questionnaire about yourself.
Most hiring assessments ask your candidate to describe themselves. First Move Assessment asks five questions about instinct, and your candidate answers each one by picking a move:
01
Checks it out first, or jumps in and adjusts.
02
Stops for the person, or keeps the work moving.
03
What keeps causing it, or the one in front of them.
04
Handles it themselves, or passes it to the right person.
05
Holds firm, or makes an exception.
The assessment is one working day in a contracting shop, broken into short moments. Five practice screens come first and don't count. Then a morning and an afternoon, and depending on the seat, 60 or 72 moments are scored. The afternoon runs busier on purpose, so you see whether the same instinct held when the pressure came on.
Both moves in every moment are ones a good operator would make, written to look about equally good. There's no right answer to look up, so the interview version of your candidate has nowhere to hide.
It's 2pm. A tech calls in. The job turned into something bigger than what got sold, and the customer's standing right there asking what it's going to cost. Two more calls are on the board this afternoon.
Every moment is written in the words your trade already uses. Your candidate will never meet a question about cross-functional stakeholders.
Same person. Six seats. Six different answers.
One candidate's instinct held up against six seats. Their answers never change. Only the seat does. Click through and watch what that does to the match.
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.
There's no good instinct or bad instinct, only instinct that lines up with a seat or doesn't. The same person who lines up with a truck may not line up with a dispatch board.
Read a finished report before you buy one.
This is a finished Dispatcher report for an HVAC shop, from a sitting taken end to end on the live assessment, exactly as it lands in an owner's inbox. The candidate scored 65: right on three of the five questions, and away from the seat on the one a dispatch board depends on. The report shows you which one and what to ask about it. Nothing was rewritten for the website.
Get the other two, free.
In one email: a Service Technician at 85 who lines up with the seat, and a CSR at 21 whose answers pull away from the seat on the two questions that matter most.
All three land in one email in about a minute. No call, no card, no salesperson. Unsubscribe in one click. Privacy policy.
Every sitting was taken end to end on the live assessment.
Interviewing well is a skill. It's just not the job.
You've done this one. Somebody sits across from you, says the right things, has the right answers. You hire them. They start strong because they're capable. Then it starts to slip.
Whatever that seat costs you for a week, multiply it by six months. That's before the callbacks you ate and the customer who stopped calling.
A hiring plan for one specific person, back when they finish.
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.
You see where they sat on every question and where the seat needs a person, so you can read for yourself which parts line up and which parts pull the other way.
Whether their answers, their pace and their consistency held when the afternoon got busy.
How to build around them, what to ask in the interview with what to listen for, and what to watch in the first 90 days.
The written standard itself, in plain words, so you can check what the seat was measured against.
The same answers always produce the same number. And when a sitting doesn't say enough to support a score, the report gives no number and tells you why.
What you're choosing between.
| FIRSTMOVE 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, 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.
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.
Four seats filled at one company. Two hires out of six at another.
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.
Pricing
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.
Hiring at volume or coaching clients
25 Pack: 25 assessments, $1,995, $79.80 a candidate. Several crews or more than one location buying from one balance.
Choose 25 PackPractice License: 100 assessments a year, $4,950 billed annually ($49.50 a candidate), renewing each year until you cancel. Each year's 100 arrive with that year's payment, and any you don't use stay in your account.
Choose Practice LicenseEnterprise: several locations, or a purchase that has to go through somebody first. Tell us what you are hiring and we will set it up with you.
Talk to usA contractor pays about $129 for one paid search lead who may never pick up the phone. One assessment is $149 to read the person they are about to hand a truck and a customer list to.
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.
- 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 support@firstmoveassessment.com, 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 write to support@firstmoveassessment.com.
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.
Send one to a real candidate.
Pick the seat, send the link, and read the report before the interview. One assessment is $149, and your first report is covered by a 30-day refund.
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About the assessment, pricing, your account or a purchase. Send a message and we reply by email.