So what are situational judgement tests and how do they work?
Situational Judgement Tests (or ‘SJTs’, as they are often abbreviated to) come in a great variety of guises and have been growing in popularity as an assessment method since the late nineties. Currently organisations as diverse as Waitrose, the NHS, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Sony, Wal-Mart, Deloitte, John Lewis, the law firm Herbert Smith, the Fire Service and many more, are using SJTs as part of their recruitment process.
Situational judgement tests present candidates with a range of different situations that they might experience in the job for which they are applying. For each situation, a number of possibleactions are suggested. There are usually around 4 or 5 actions but this varies. It is the candidate’s job to choose between these possible options and judge which is the most effectivecourse of action to take and therefore which action they would take if faced with this situation. SJTs are always multiple-choice; no answers other than the options listed are allowed.
The situations (or scenarios as they are sometimes called) are almost always reflective of a real-life aspect of the job. So for example, if you are applying for a job as a call centre operative, one of the questions on the SJT might be as follows.
A quick example question
You are working in a call centre for a major UK telecommunications company. You have received a call from a customer who has been waiting in for an engineer who has failed to arrive within the scheduled time slot . The customer is upset and is talking in a raised voice. Of the following options indicate which would be the ‘most effective’ and which the ‘least effective’ action to take first of all:
• 1) Apologise to the customer and say you will arrange for a re-scheduled appointment.
• 2) Listen to the customer’s feedback and tell them that you can understand why they are upset and that it must be very inconvenient for them.
• 3) Explain that the engineer has a very busy schedule and its difficult for her to always be on time but you’re sure she will arrive soon.
• 4) Ask the customer to hold while you contact the engineer to establish where she is. This is the most effective response as it directly takes control of the situation, and will ultimately provide the information to make a more informed decision. After contacting the engineer you will know whether to re-schedule the appointment, or whether a re-schedule will not be necessary. Although customers may not like to be put on hold, it is the only way to solve the issue at hand.
Why employers use situational judgement tests
For employers, SJTs are a very cost effective, powerful and convenient way to select the potential strong performers from a large group of candidates. Employers will be more likely to use an SJT if they have a high volume of candidates applying for a role or position and if they recruit for this position on a regular basis. So the recruitment process for a graduate trainingscheme or internship programme is a likely place to find an SJT whereas assessments for more senior positions are less likely to include one.
Employers may use SJTs on their own as a sifting tool or sometimes they will include SJT questions in a realistic job simulation which might also include an in-tray exercise and ability measures such as numerical reasoning. Job simulations are usually presented online or computer-based. They can incorporate various different media such as video, animation and written text. Employers use these to try and create as realistic a situation as possible for the candidate to test how the candidate will respond to the ‘real’ demands of the job.
For example, in a job simulation test for a sales manager role, as a candidate, you would log on to a specified website. You would then be told to imagine that you are the manager of a team of sales people and given access to an email inbox and folders of documents. You would be asked to make decisions