Pass the test before the interview

This hub carries a dedicated guide for every major test and provider used in graduate and early-career hiring. Each one explains what the assessment is, what it actually measures, how it is scored, what a real question or task looks like, and exactly how to prepare, so you walk in knowing the format rather than meeting it cold on the clock.

The listing below groups every guide into the four families employers draw from. Whether your target is an investment bank, a consultancy, a Magic Circle or US law firm, a Big Four practice or a graduate scheme in industry, the tests you will face come from this same set of vendors, and each card opens the full walkthrough for that test.

Recorded video interviews ask you to answer a fixed set of questions to a webcam with no interviewer present. There is no live conversation: you get a short time to think, then a capped time to record. They screen communication, motivation and competency evidence at scale, and they are usually the first stage where the firm sees and hears you.

Game-based assessments are short interactive tasks that measure cognitive and behavioural traits, such as risk appetite, attention, memory and effort, from how you play rather than from right or wrong answers. McKinsey Solve is the best-known case-simulation variant, where you work through an ecosystem-building scenario against the clock.

Aptitude tests are timed, multiple-choice numerical, verbal and logical or inductive reasoning tests that measure reasoning speed and accuracy against a norm group of other candidates. They are typically the first automated sift, and a low percentile here ends the application before anything else in it is read.

Situational judgement tests present realistic workplace scenarios and ask what you would do, ranking or rating a set of responses. They measure practical judgement and fit against the behaviours and values the firm has decided the role needs, rather than raw intelligence.

Every firm picks its own providers, and they differ by division, region and recruiting cycle. Practising a generic numerical test is close to useless if your firm runs cut-e adaptive items or a Cappfinity strengths game, because the format, timing and scoring are different. The firm-to-test matrix maps the major employers to the exact provider each one uses for early-career hiring, so you can go straight to the right guide and practise the format you will actually sit.

These vendors operate on both sides of the Atlantic, so one set of guides serves both markets. Where a figure appears we show it in pounds and dollars (GBP and USD), and where the terminology differs we pair it: a CV in the UK is a resume in the US, and the final in-person round is an assessment centre in Britain and a superday on Wall Street. The online tests on this hub sit upstream of both, as the sift that decides who reaches that final day.

Use the hub in order. Start by finding which providers your target firm uses in the matrix, open the guide for each one to learn the format and scoring, then practise until the timing feels routine. The goal is simple: by the time the real assessment loads, nothing about it is a surprise.