Workplace lesson 11 min read

Where people skills are tested

Aptitude sections get most of the attention in placement season, but people skills are assessed at almost every stage after them: a behavioural or "psychometric" section in the online test, a personality questionnaire from a global vendor, and above all the HR and managerial interviews. This lesson maps where each one appears, what the format looks like, and what it is really checking.

The shape of a typical campus drive

Formats change every season and differ between on-campus and off-campus drives, so treat the details below as a guide to what to expect, not a promise. Most large IT and consulting recruiters follow a similar arc.

Aptitudequant, verbal,logical or gamesBehaviouralpersonality orsituational itemsTechnicalMCQs, codingTech interviewteamwork andproject storiesHRbehaviouralquestionsOrder and content vary by company, year and drive
Where people skills appear in a typical IT services drive. Filled markers are stages where the workplace skills in this subject are assessed.

What candidates and prep sites currently report for some well-known recruiters:

  • Accenture. Candidates report a behavioural assessment ("psychometric", 54 questions in about 20 minutes) in the first round alongside a gamified cognitive assessment, followed later by a communication assessment and a combined technical and HR interview.
  • Capgemini. Candidates report a behavioural or "PowerSkills" assessment of around 100 statements, with the note that whether it appears, and when, differs between on-campus and off-campus drives. It sits alongside Capgemini's game-based cognitive assessment and ends in technical and HR interviews.
  • TCS and Infosys. Candidates report technical and HR interview rounds after the online test, with HR questions such as "Tell me about yourself", strengths and weaknesses, and whether you can work under pressure.

None of these is an official specification. They are the most recent candidate reports we could find, and your own invite is the authority.

Government and defence selection in India

People-skill assessment is not only a private-sector habit.

  • UPSC Civil Services. The final stage is a Personality Test (interview) worth 275 of the 2,025 marks that decide the merit list.
  • Services Selection Board (SSB). Officer selection for the armed forces includes a battery of psychological tests. One of them, the Situation Reaction Test, gives candidates a booklet of 60 situations to respond to in 30 minutes, a close relative of the situational judgement test. A Self-Description Test asks how your parents, teachers or employers, friends and you yourself see you.

Global assessment vendors

Multinationals, consulting firms and many off-campus roles buy assessments from specialist vendors. The main ones you may meet:

Vendor toolWhat it asks you to doWhy the format matters
SHL OPQ32rCandidates report blocks of three statements: choose the one most like you and the one least like youForced choice, scored with a Thurstonian IRT model designed to reduce response bias and faking
Saville Wave Professional StylesRate statements in blocks of six on a 9-point scale; if you give statements the same rating you may be asked to rank themA "rate and rank" hybrid; Saville states that checks are built in to validate consistency
Hogan Personality InventoryAnswer statements about yourself; profiles seven primary scales such as Adjustment, Ambition and PrudenceWidely used for selection from entry level to leadership; about 15 to 20 minutes
Aon ADEPT-15A questionnaire on 15 aspects of personality grouped into six work stylesAon (formerly cut-e) also sells the "shapes" family of questionnaires
pymetrics (Harver) FacesCandidates report identifying the emotion on faces, some with a caption giving contextThe closest commercial cousin of an emotion recognition task
Emotion labelHappySurprisedNeutralSadSituational judgementA client says the build is late. Rate each reply:A. Explain the cause and a new dateB. Promise it will be there tomorrowC. Ask the manager to reply412Rating scale (Likert)I stay calm when my plans fail.15Forced choice (most / least)I push for a decision quicklyI check the evidence before committingI bring people round to a shared planMostLeast
Four answer formats you will meet. The first two have keyed answers; the last two have none.

Situational judgement tests

SJTs are one of the commonest selection tools worldwide. In a global survey of 1,406 HR professionals, 43% said their organisations used them. They turn up as a standalone section, inside a "behavioural" block, or as video scenarios. The instructions come in two flavours, and it is worth noticing which you have been given:

  • "What should you do?" or "rate the effectiveness": a knowledge question. Answer with what works best.
  • "What would you do?": a behavioural-tendency question. Still answer with what you would realistically do on a good day, not a fantasy; McDaniel and colleagues found these versions lean more on personality.

Common response formats are picking the most and least effective option, ranking all options, or rating each on a scale. Our TeamChat lesson walks through a method for all three.

Emotion recognition tasks

Standalone emotion tasks are rarer in hiring than personality questionnaires. You are most likely to meet them in game-based batteries, where candidates report that pymetrics includes a Faces task, and in ability EI tests such as the MSCEIT, whose perceiving branch includes judging the emotions shown in faces. Research tools you may read about, such as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test and the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test, are used in studies rather than recruitment. Our E-Motions lesson covers the task in detail.

Interviews: where people skills are judged most

The HR round is where almost every candidate's people skills are actually assessed. Well-run interviews ask past-behaviour questions ("Tell me about a time you disagreed with a teammate") and score answers against a rubric. Research favours this style: in Taylor and Small's meta-analysis, past-behaviour questions with anchored rating scales showed higher validity than hypothetical ones.

The standard way to answer is STAR: Situation, Task, Action, Result. MIT's career office suggests spending roughly 20% of the answer on the situation, 10% on the task, 60% on your actions and 10% on the result, and using "I" rather than "we" so the interviewer can see what you did.

SituationTaskAction: what I did, step by stepResult20%10%60%10%
STAR as MIT's career office suggests weighting it: most of the answer is what you personally did.

Who uses what

Publicly reported uses. Formats change, so check the latest invite you receive.

  • AccentureCandidates report a psychometric behavioural assessment (54 questions, about 20 minutes) in round one, then technical and HR interviews
  • CapgeminiCandidates report a behavioural or PowerSkills assessment of about 100 items whose placement varies by drive, plus HR interview
  • TCSCandidates report technical or managerial and HR interview rounds with behavioural questions after the online test
  • UPSCPersonality Test (interview) worth 275 of 2,025 final marks in the Civil Services Examination
  • SSBSituation Reaction Test (60 situations in 30 minutes) and Self-Description Test in officer selection
  • Saville AssessmentWave Professional Styles: rate-and-rank personality questionnaire with built-in consistency checks
  • HoganHogan Personality Inventory: seven primary scales and 42 subscales, 15 to 20 minutes
  • pymetricsCandidates report a Faces game: identify the emotion on a face, sometimes with a context caption
2 practice questions
  1. An SJT asks 'What would you most likely do?' rather than 'What is the most effective response?'. What changes?
  2. In MIT's suggested STAR weighting, which part should take the most time?
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Sources
  1. PrepInsta. Accenture recruitment process and exam pattern (candidate-reported). prepinsta.com/accenture
  2. PrepInsta. Capgemini Exceller exam pattern (candidate-reported). prepinsta.com/capgemini
  3. PrepInsta. TCS interview questions and rounds (candidate-reported). prepinsta.com/tcs/interview-questions
  4. PrepInsta. Infosys recruitment process (candidate-reported). prepinsta.com/infosys
  5. Civil Services Examination (India). Wikipedia, scheme of examination. en.wikipedia.org
  6. Services Selection Board. Wikipedia, psychological tests. en.wikipedia.org
  7. SHL. Occupational Personality Questionnaire (OPQ). shl.com
  8. WikiJob. SHL OPQ32 test guide (candidate-reported format). wikijob.co.uk
  9. Brown, A. Thurstonian models for preference judgements (notes that SHL's OPQ32r was built on this methodology to reduce response biases and faking). annabrown.name
  10. Brown, A., & Maydeu-Olivares, A. (2011). Item response modeling of forced-choice questionnaires. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 71(3), 460–502. doi.org/10.1177/0013164410375112
  11. Saville Assessment. Introducing Wave Professional Styles (candidate preparation). savilleconsulting.dk
  12. Hogan Assessments. Hogan Personality Inventory. hoganassessments.com
  13. AssessmentDay. Aon (cut-e) assessments. assessmentday.com/aon.htm
  14. GraduatesFirst. Harver/pymetrics assessments and practice games (candidate-reported). graduatesfirst.com
  15. Berry, C. M., Lievens, F., Zhang, C., & Sackett, P. R. (2024). Insights from an updated personnel selection meta-analytic matrix. Journal of Applied Psychology. doi.org/10.1037/apl0001203
  16. McDaniel, M. A., Hartman, N. S., Whetzel, D. L., & Grubb, W. L. (2007). Situational judgment tests, response instructions, and validity: A meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 60(1), 63–91. doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2007.00065.x
  17. Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., Caruso, D. R., & Sitarenios, G. (2003). Measuring emotional intelligence with the MSCEIT V2.0. Emotion, 3(1), 97–105. doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.3.1.97
  18. Baron-Cohen, S., et al. (2001). The "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test revised version. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42(2), 241–251. doi.org/10.1111/1469-7610.00715
  19. Schlegel, K., Grandjean, D., & Scherer, K. R. (2014). Introducing the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test. Psychological Assessment, 26(2), 666–672. doi.org/10.1037/a0035246
  20. Taylor, P. J., & Small, B. (2002). Asking applicants what they would do versus what they did do. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 75(3), 277–294. doi.org/10.1348/096317902320369712
  21. MIT Career Advising and Professional Development. The STAR method for behavioral interviews. capd.mit.edu