Situational Judgement Tests (SJTs) have been around for almost 60 years. They have become an increasingly popular tool in a recruitment process as they are able to assess job related reactions to situations that other assessments are unable to measure.

These psychological aptitude tests are designed to assess an applicant’s judgement when faced with certain scenarios. Strictly speaking, they assess a preference to make a judgement, but they can, to a certain degree, also assess decision making, interpersonal skills and problem solving. They are different to standardised tests, such as numeracy and literacy tests in several ways. They are individual to each company and there are essentially no specific right or wrong answers.

What SJTs give companies is the ability to not just test the applicant’s knowledge and intelligence, but to test their reactions in certain situations that are likely to come up whilst working. Unlike some numeracy tests, which technically an applicant could study for or pass based on their mathematical skills, an SJT is generally unique to each company or even a particular role. Preparing for one is therefore extremely difficult. You could study the company values and try and think what is most important to the company, but I doubt even this would make the higher marked answers jump out at you.

Even if you have done an SJT for a different company, what one company will mark highly on, another company might have as their lowest mark answer. In this way, SJTs are very effective for reducing the number of unsuitable applicants for a role. Candidates cannot simply get through the assessment stage on knowledge, just as they probably couldn’t simply do the job using knowledge and no logic or judgement.

However, are SJTs an infallible way of seeing exactly how a candidate would react?

If a candidate is taking an SJT for a company, they are not likely to react as they would in a real life situation, being that they are not in the situation but sitting in front of their computer, reading through something hypothetical. I would say the applicant is more likely to try and think of the answer the company would most like to see, rather than choose an option they would most likely act like.

For example, if a customer threw something at the applicant, they are likely to choose an option which says they will react in a calm way, rather than leaning over the counter and punching the customer. This doesn’t mean that if this happened, the applicant wouldn’t punch the customer but they would be aware that this is not something that the company would like in a potential candidate. Thus, they may choose the answer they feel the company would mark as the right one. In this way, the SJT is not perfectly accurate in gaining an insight into a candidate’s decision making, merely how successful they are at guessing which answer might get them the job.

Candidates also can’t make up their own answers to the scenarios presented to them. This is good in a way, as the set answers mean that there is no need for somebody to have to go through and mark the answers in accordance to what the company would mark highly. The test is marked automatically based on answers that the company have given. This cuts down on a lot of unnecessary administration and also provides a systematic process which allows for direct comparison of candidates.

However, by providing the candidate with set options, they are being limited on how they can choose to react. If a candidate doesn’t feel that they would react in any of the ways outlined by the options, there is no way around this – they have to answer using the options provided.

Overall, as a means to whittling down the number of applicants to a job, the results speak for themselves. Candidates who have scored highly on literacy or numeracy tests have not always passed an SJT. But you do have to wonder if they are a successful way to test a candidate’s judgement. Are we missing out on candidates who could be perfect? And gaining candidates who merely have the skill to pick the right answers?