Situational judgement test
Fit & BehaviouralA screening test presenting workplace dilemmas and asking what you would do, measuring alignment with how a firm expects juniors to behave.
Also written: situational judgment test, SJT, situational judgement
A situational judgement test presents short workplace scenarios and asks you to choose, or rank, possible responses. Unlike a numerical test it has no objectively correct answer in the mathematical sense. It is scored against how the firm expects a reliable junior to behave.
What it screens for is consistent across firms: whether you escalate a problem you cannot solve, whether you flag an error against your own interest, how you prioritise when two things are genuinely urgent, and whether you communicate a delay before it becomes someone else's emergency.
The reliable trap is choosing the response that looks most impressive. Attempting a quiet rescue of a problem you are not equipped to fix reads as a risk rather than as initiative, and escalating early almost always scores better than resolving late.
You cannot revise for it in the way you can for a numerical test, but it is not unpreparable. Understanding what a junior in this specific job is actually responsible for is most of the work, which is why the test rewards having thought about the role rather than having practised puzzles.
Worked example
You spot an error in a model going to a client in an hour, and you caused it.
The impressive looking answer fixes it silently. The scored answer tells whoever owns the document immediately, because the cost of a wrong number reaching a client dominates the cost of admitting a mistake.
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