How to Prepare for an Aptitude Test During Your Job Search
Aptitude tests are a form of pre-employment testing that helps employers best determine an applicant's ability to do the job, assist companies with making more informed hiring decisions and prevent employee turnover. While the tests may seem daunting, you can prepare for success by utilizing available resources and ensuring your skills are up to par.?
By Helen Harris
When you think about the skills section on your resume, some of these skills are hard skills and some are soft . The hard skills can be measured, and the soft skills, in most cases, are harder to quantify.?
How are these skills assessed? Employers sometimes use a form of pre-employment screening called aptitude testing.?
Knowing the potential impact pre-employment testing can have on your next career move , you may be wondering a few things: How influential are these tests in the hiring process for employers? How can you best prepare for testing? And most importantly, how can you test your aptitude for specific skills??
Why Do Employers Do Aptitude Testing??
“Ideally, an aptitude test is meant to clearly show alignment or misalignment between an employee's strengths, knowledge, and ability and what is needed in order to be successful in a specific role,” said Katelyn Richards , who is a personal branding and content creation strategist and career coach.?
Brianna Watts , who is a resume writer and career coach, explained that aptitude tests are designed to assess one’s capabilities for a role. While any company may administer an aptitude test to a potential candidate, industries such as tech often need to determine the hard skills necessary for a job.?
Adidas, Nokia, Toyota, Boeing, Nestle, Disney Pixar, Amazon, Unilever, Pfizer and Oracle are known to administer aptitude tests to help select the best candidates from the sea of applicants, according to Aptitude-test.com.?
Richards said that industries requiring very specific cognitive abilities such as a certain math level, pattern-recognition or category formation and those requiring very specific hard skills (think technical/coding, analytical or marketing skills) are the ones in which aptitude tests typically — and should — play a larger role.?
“It can be a good idea to test your aptitude for specific skills before applying to jobs to better position yourself as a candidate ensuring your skills are up to par,” said Watts.
And to do this, Watts added that you can start by taking courses, volunteering for projects at work or in your community, joining skill-specific online boards or using the skill to complete a task.
How To Improve Your Skills?
From working with a career coach to taking online courses, there are a variety of ways to brush up on your skills before an aptitude test.
“Treat this like any test you would take in school,” said Richards. “Get clarity and information from the recruiter ahead of time about the format of the test and what to expect. Practice aptitude tests that are specific to your industry, niche and role ahead of time.”
Richards states that basic tactics for success include making sure to read all of the instructions and follow them accurately. She reports that as easy as this sounds, this is a common error.?
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Additionally, make sure to get a good night’s sleep, eat a great breakfast,? keep track and manage your time efficiently during the test.?
“If testing is historically something that hasn't been an accurate reflection of your skillset in the past, transparency and being up front can go such a long way,” said Richards. “And there are other ways for a potential employer to assess skills beyond aptitude testing.”?
But if you have tested your aptitude for a certain skill, Watts states that the process of displaying your knowledge of those skills doesn’t stop there. You should keep the momentum going by displaying and advocating your knowledge of that skill on all career materials you have.?
“Build a portfolio to present to employers, optimize your LinkedIn profiles displaying your skill set and how well you use that skill — and what results those skills bring,” said Watts. “Display your? accomplishments, statistics and results throughout your resume highlighting the use of that skill.”
(A version of this article first appeared on November 2, 2022 on the Get Ahead by LinkedIn News page. You can read the full article, which was written and reported by Helen Harris , by clicking here .)
Once you’ve gotten through the application portals, cover letters, and perfectly-tailored resumes, it’s time to attack the next job search hurdle: the interview. Valerie Sutton , who is director of career services at Harvard School of Education and the instructor behind the popular LinkedIn Learning Course Master Common Interview Questions , joined me on the latest episode of the Get Hired podcast to dispel some interview myths and dig into key best practices for nailing the job interview. You can read a transcript of the conversation by clicking here . You can also listen to the episode below or by clicking here .
If you like the podcast, don't forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts by clicking here !
Pre-employment tests are common in the job process to show hiring managers your skills. But, don’t fret this LinkedIn Learning course tells you the best way to prepare. Ace that exam and show employers why you’re the best candidate. You can watch the course below or by clicking here.?
(Additional editing for this edition by Ciarra Maraj )
Senior Project Officer at Canada Revenue Agency - Agence du revenu du Canada
1 年I hate what CRA is using. It is called Korn Ferry test that makes no sense, and doesn't really relate to the job/qualifications they are looking for.
State of Utah
1 年Over the last 10 years hiring has certainly changed, I've been a manager thru some of this change. However, now I'm back on the job seeking side of this change. I've been asked to take a few aptitude tests. I must say I wasn't impressed with them. They all tested my leadership and management skills, but all I could think of "how does this companies policies and procedures read, is it their policy to only reach out to the manager who is over this person or situation to solve a problem, should I as a manager solve this issue now and then talk to the manager over this person or situation?" When there was multiple answers to a question, and you could pick all that applied, some questions none of the answers would be the best way to solve the problem, so I was back to my original problem. I would much rather talk to the recruiter, talk about how I would solve the issue, and then let them decide. However, from being on the other side of that, this process takes a lot of time also. With the number of applicants anymore there has to be some way of narrowing the candidates down. Hiring isn't easy, but neither is getting hired.
Career Counselor, Owner @ DIYCareerGuy; Outplacement + Executive Career Services | Helping talent transition jobs with empathy (I've been laid off, too) | Resume Rewrites (20 years)
2 年Tip: don't take it.
Problem solver | Creative | Continual learner
2 年Aptitude tests cause the same problem here as in an academic setting. Not everyone tests well. What happens when you have an otherwise perfect candidate that fails the aptitude test du to test stress. You lose out on a great employee.