Situational judgement tests and exercises
We firmly believe that resilience, emotional intelligence and other personal skills can be developed. That said, there is undoubtedly a role for assessment to play in ensuring everyone is equipped to meet the challenges they face at work.
Situational Judgement Tests (SJTs) are particularly well suited to helping you assess how someone is likely to deal with difficult circumstances and tricky situations.
In the past, SJTs focused on checking knowledge of specific techniques, rules and procedures. These days they’re much more sophisticated. Using design principles from years of research, the items test a blend of knowledge, judgement, personality and attitudes. This is a powerful combination that enables you to predict how someone is likely to respond to the challenges of the role.
Other benefits of SJTs include:
- Acceptability to candidates and hiring managers – the SJT presents a series of scenarios and options for action, all of which are realistic and directly relevant to your context
- Proven to add value to your selection decisions by providing extra information, over and above that provided by other kinds of test and questionnaires
- Efficient, up-to-date use of technology for administration, scoring and reporting.
As with all tests, SJTs have right and wrong answers and produce a set of scores for use in selection and other contexts where a specific decision needs to be made.
Situational Judgement Exercises
The method can also be adapted for use in training and development. The Situational Judgement Exercise still has right and wrong answers, but the output is provided in a format suitable for development – with feedback rather than detailed scores and cut-off points.
At Rusando we specialise in developing bespoke Situational Judgement Tests and Exercises for demanding roles and high risk work contexts – for example:
- Dangerous situations where the wrong decision puts you and others at risk
- Cross-cultural teams working closely together in an unpredictable environment
- Responsibility for judgement calls that could put the organisation’s reputation at risk
- Teams working to tight deadlines under high workloads
- High priority projects with complex dependencies and multiple stakeholders.
For more on what we offer on employee selection, see our page on Best-fit selection