How to prepare for psychometric tests

Last updated 26 August 2026 · Capply team

What psychometric tests are

Psychometric tests are timed online assessments that most large graduate employers use to filter applications before a human ever reads your CV. They measure things like numerical reasoning, verbal reasoning, logical (or inductive) reasoning, workplace judgement and personality. Banks, consultancies, engineering firms, retailers and the civil service all use them, typically as the second stage of an application, right after the online form.

Employers buy these tests from specialist assessment providers. The names you will most often meet as a UK graduate applicant are SHL, Korn Ferry (formerly Talent Q), Saville Assessment, Talogy, Aon (cut-e) and Arctic Shores. Each has its own house style, but the underlying skills tested overlap heavily, which is why general practice transfers well between them. (Capply is an independent practice platform and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any test provider.)

Why capable students fail them

The single biggest reason strong candidates score badly is that they sit the real test cold. Psychometric tests are strange the first time you meet them: unusual question formats, aggressive time limits, and answer options engineered to catch predictable mistakes. Someone seeing a True/False/Cannot Say question for the first time in a live assessment is competing against candidates who have done two hundred of them in practice.

The good news is that this cuts both ways. Because the tests reuse a limited set of underlying question patterns, familiarity produces fast improvement. Once you have seen the ways a currency-conversion question or a rotating-shape sequence can be constructed, new questions stop being novel and start being recognisable.

The main test types

• Numerical reasoning: interpreting tables and charts, percentages, ratios and currency conversions under time pressure.
• Verbal reasoning: reading a short passage and judging statements as True, False or Cannot Say based only on the passage.
• Logical reasoning: abstract pattern questions, usually completing a sequence or matrix of shapes by working out the hidden rules.
• Situational judgement (SJT): realistic workplace scenarios where you rate how effective different responses would be.
• Personality questionnaires: untimed questionnaires profiling your workplace style. There is no pass mark, but understanding how they are scored helps you answer consistently and honestly.
• Game-based and speeded assessments: shorter, faster item formats delivered as mini-games or rapid-fire questions, increasingly common with modern providers.

How to prepare: the pattern-recognition approach

1. Practise the real formats

Generic maths or vocabulary revision transfers poorly. Practise questions built in the same formats as the real assessments: the same chart types, the same True/False/Cannot Say structure, the same shape-sequence logic. Format familiarity is most of the battle.

2. Practise short and often

Twenty to thirty minutes a day beats a three-hour weekend session. Timed reasoning is a skill, and skills consolidate with spaced repetition. Daily practice also builds the calm that time pressure otherwise destroys.

3. Review every wrong answer

The improvement is in the review, not the attempt. For every question you miss, identify which step failed: misread the chart, picked the trap option, ran out of time. Wrong answers cluster into a small number of repeating causes, and fixing one cause fixes dozens of future questions.

4. Train at the right difficulty

Questions far too easy or far too hard teach you little. Adaptive practice, where the difficulty moves with your performance, keeps you at the edge of your ability, which is where improvement happens fastest. It also mirrors how several real assessments now behave.

5. Rehearse the time pressure

Always practise against the clock. A common target across numerical and verbal tests is roughly 45 to 75 seconds per question. Knowing when to abandon a question and move on is a scoring strategy in itself.

A simple two-week plan

1. Days 1 to 2: sit one untimed session per test type to learn the formats. Score does not matter yet.
2. Days 3 to 10: one timed session a day, rotating through numerical, verbal and logical. Review every mistake before closing the session.
3. Days 11 to 13: focus on your weakest test type, plus one session of situational judgement.
4. Day 14: a full timed run-through of each type as a dress rehearsal.

On the day of the real test: sit it on a laptop or desktop, not a phone, in a quiet place, with rough paper and a calculator ready if numerical is involved, and do it at the time of day you feel sharpest.

How Capply fits in

Capply is a graduate application platform built around exactly this approach: adaptive practice tests for numerical, verbal and logical reasoning that adjust to your level, plus situational judgement, personality and speed reasoning, with AI feedback that shows where you stand and what to fix. It also covers the rest of the application, with an AI CV checker that rewrites your CV, a cover letter builder and a live feed of graduate jobs, for £6.99 a month.