Seeing a personality test or a logical reasoning test show up in a finance recruitment process still surprises many candidates, even though the practice has become widespread. Understanding why these tests exist and how they're used helps approach the exercise without unnecessary anxiety.
Why companies use tests in recruitment
According to a study by Apec 🔗, France's association for executive employment, 71% of companies with ten or more employees use tests during their recruitment process. The stated goal is to complement the interview with a more standardized evaluation element, meant to reduce some of the subjectivity in the final decision - though tests never replace the interview, they generally confirm or nuance it.
For finance roles, where the volume of applications stays high at junior level, these tests also act as an upstream filter before interviews: a score well below the expected average can rule out a candidate before they ever speak with a recruiter.
The main types of tests: logic, numerical, personality
Three families of tests come up most often in finance recruitment processes. Logical reasoning tests assess the ability to identify a rule or a sequence from abstract shapes or patterns. Numerical reasoning tests, such as SHL's Verify test 🔗, measure the ability to analyze data presented as charts or tables and draw correct conclusions from it - a skill directly transferable to financial analysis.
Personality questionnaires, on the other hand, don't measure performance but a set of behavioral traits (rigor, stress tolerance, appetite for teamwork) that are then compared against the profile sought for the role. A cognitive test generally takes 20 to 45 minutes, a personality questionnaire 15 to 30 minutes.
📊 For the most formalized processes in investment banking, our guide on assessment centers and recruitment tests explains how these exercises fit alongside in-person interviews.
How results are interpreted
Reasoning test results are generally compared to a reference group (a norm), meaning a score is read as a relative position rather than an absolute value. A recruiter rarely rejects a candidate on a test score alone, unless it falls well below the threshold expected for the role; most often, the result feeds into the interview discussion rather than replacing it.
For personality questionnaires, there is in principle no "good" or "bad" answer in absolute terms - what matters is the fit between the candidate's profile and the role's requirements, which is why the same profile can be an asset for one role and a point of attention for another.
Preparing without misrepresenting your personality
Practicing sample logical and numerical reasoning tests before an interview remains useful to get familiar with the format and manage time pressure, a factor that often weighs more than the actual difficulty of the questions. On the other hand, trying to "guess" the expected answers on a personality questionnaire to fit an assumed ideal profile usually backfires: the most widely used questionnaires include mechanisms to detect inconsistent or overly favorable answers.
⚠️ Watch out: too large a gap between the answers given on the personality test and the behavior observed at interview is itself a negative signal for the recruiter. Consistency matters more than optimizing your answers.
💼 Once the tests are behind you, our guide to preparing for an investment banking interview helps you approach the rest of the process with the same level of preparation.
What happens after the test
In most processes, test results feed into one or more subsequent interviews, where the recruiter may come back to specific points in the identified profile - a strong preference for autonomous work, for example, or conversely a clear need for structure. A candidate who understands the logic of their own profile can anticipate these questions and answer with more ease rather than being caught off guard.
🎯 To avoid the most common mistakes once in the interview, our article on mistakes to avoid in a recruitment interview rounds out this preparation ahead of the tests.
Approaching a recruitment process that combines tests and interviews requires consistent preparation, from the resume through to the interview. FinanceCV lets you build a structured resume compatible with the automated screening tools used ahead of these steps, so you can focus your preparation energy on the tests themselves.
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