Situational judgement tests: what employers look for

Last updated 26 August 2026 · Capply team

What the test looks like

Each item gives you a short scenario, for example a teammate missing deadlines, a client raising a complaint, conflicting instructions from two managers, followed by four or five possible responses. Depending on the format you might rate each response's effectiveness on a scale, rank them, or pick the best and worst. There is usually little or no time pressure compared with reasoning tests; the difficulty is judgement, not speed. SJTs appear across graduate schemes in consulting, banking, law, the public sector and retail, often built by providers such as SHL, Korn Ferry, Talogy and Arctic Shores or by the employer's own occupational psychologists. (Capply is independent and not affiliated with any provider.)

How they are actually scored

There is no trick and no single "correct" answer. Each response option has been rated in advance by a panel of assessors, and your score reflects how closely your judgement matches theirs. Under the surface, scenarios map onto a small set of workplace competencies that occupational psychologists use across the industry, covering broadly: leading and deciding, supporting and cooperating, interacting and presenting, analysing and interpreting, creating and conceptualising, organising and executing, adapting and coping, and performing under pressure. Every scenario is a probe of one or two of these.

The judgement principles that recur

• Deal with it, don't dodge it: options that ignore the problem or quietly hope it resolves itself almost always rate poorly.
• Go to the person first: raising an issue directly and constructively with the person involved usually beats going over their head immediately. Escalation is right when the issue is serious, repeated, or beyond your authority.
• Own your mistakes early: flagging your own error before it grows consistently rates highly. Concealing it rates worst of all.
• Protect the client and the team: responses that quietly serve your own convenience at a cost to colleagues or customers rate poorly, even when they are efficient.
• Gather facts before acting: when a scenario is ambiguous, options that check understanding first usually beat decisive action on incomplete information. But endless information-gathering when action is clearly needed also scores badly.
• Extremes are suspicious: both "do nothing" and "invoke the most drastic response available" are usually anchors at the bottom of the rating scale.

Can you prepare for an SJT?

Yes, and the "you can't prepare, just be yourself" advice is incomplete. You cannot memorise answers, but you can absolutely train the two things being measured: recognising which competency a scenario is probing, and calibrating your sense of what effective professional behaviour looks like. Practising scenarios with expert-rated feedback tightens that calibration quickly, especially for students who have not yet worked in a professional environment and have had few chances to build it. Practice also removes the format surprise, so you spend your attention on judgement rather than on working out how the rating scale works.