Honest comparison
The Interest Profiler is genuinely free, validated, and a defensible RIASEC choice. JobCannon adds Big Five, EQ, Skills Audit, AI career match across 2,536 careers, and an institutional dashboard. Pick by what your programme needs to track.
The O*NET Interest Profiler is the U.S. Department of Labor's free RIASEC instrument — well validated, permanently free, and a defensible choice for single-counsellor workflows. JobCannon ships a comparable RIASEC plus 52 other validated assessments (Big Five, EQ, Multiple Intelligences, Skills Audit, IQ, critical thinking), maps results across a 2,536-career knowledge graph, and includes a coordinator dashboard for cohort tracking, completion reporting, and ESSA/WIOA evidence. If your only need is RIASEC and your workflow is hand-rolled, stay with the Interest Profiler. If you need broader assessment depth, mapped pathways, or institutional dashboards, JobCannon adds the layers the Interest Profiler does not provide. Migration is additive — Interest Profiler Holland Codes carry forward as starting context for JobCannon RIASEC and Skills Audit.
Free DOL tool vs full battery with dashboard.
What each platform ships.
For an institution running 1,000 participants per year
Many institutions keep the Interest Profiler as a free citizen-facing entry point and add JobCannon for assessment depth and institutional dashboards. The free tier covers small cohorts permanently; Business tier adds the dashboard flat at $199/mo.
Try it with a micro-team
For independent coaches and therapists
For startups, teams and HR
For agencies, L&D and scale-ups
For 200+ person companies
All plans currently activated manually via the contact form — we review each request within 24 hours and provision access the same day. Self-serve checkout coming once we've heard from the first wave of teams.
Tell us your current Interest Profiler workflow, your cohort size, and your reporting requirements. We respond with a switch plan within three business days.
Yes. The Interest Profiler is published by the U.S. Department of Labor and is permanently free for any individual or institution to use. It is the canonical RIASEC instrument in the public domain, with sound psychometric validation in the DOL technical report. If your only need is a clean RIASEC score and you have your own counselling workflow around it, the Interest Profiler is genuinely a defensible choice and you do not need to pay for an alternative.
Three layers. (1) Assessment depth — JobCannon ships 53 validated assessments including Big Five (OCEAN), EQ, Multiple Intelligences, Skills Audit, IQ, critical thinking, and numerical reasoning, beyond the single RIASEC instrument the Interest Profiler provides. (2) Career mapping — the Interest Profiler returns a three-letter Holland Code; JobCannon maps results across a 2,536-career, 1,533-skill, 64,317-edge knowledge graph and produces a concrete Career Guide with skill gaps and recommended free courses. (3) Institutional dashboard — the Interest Profiler is a single-user web tool; JobCannon includes a coordinator dashboard for caseload management, cohort completion tracking, and aggregate reporting that workforce boards and schools require.
For some programmes, yes. If your counsellors run a paper-based or hand-rolled workflow, hand each student the Interest Profiler URL, and walk through results in a 1:1 session, the Interest Profiler is a defensible choice. Where it breaks down: when you need to track completion across hundreds of students, produce ESSA or WIOA reporting evidence, run mid-cohort intervention checks, or map results to specific pathway recommendations. The Interest Profiler does not provide any of those institutional layers, by design — it is a free citizen-facing tool, not a programme-management system.
Yes. JobCannon ships a RIASEC assessment derived from the same Holland Code framework underlying the Interest Profiler. The instruments are not identical — JobCannon uses a calibrated short-form (60 items vs the Interest Profiler 60-item full plus 30-item short) — but the output is comparable Holland Codes mapped to careers. Counsellors familiar with the Interest Profiler can read JobCannon RIASEC results without retraining.
Three scenarios. (1) Single-counsellor private practice running 1:1 sessions with low volume. (2) Tight-budget programmes where the only assessment need is RIASEC and a counsellor will hand-build the pathway recommendation. (3) Programmes where the U.S. DOL provenance is itself a procurement requirement (rare but not unheard of in some federal contexts). For everything else — multi-counsellor caseloads, cohort reporting, broader assessment battery, AI career match — JobCannon is a different category of tool.
Most institutions running the Interest Profiler are doing so as one piece of a larger workflow. Migration is additive rather than replacement: students who already completed Interest Profiler keep their Holland Code, counsellors enter the code into JobCannon as a starting context, and JobCannon adds Big Five, Skills Audit, and Career Guide on top. New cohorts run the JobCannon RIASEC instead. Standard rollout is two to four weeks for a single-school deployment, six to eight weeks for a district.