SHL Practice Test: A New Zealand Job Seeker’s Guide to SHL Assessments

Quiz SHL Practice Test

Guide to preparing for the SHL assessment

If a recruiter in New Zealand has asked you to complete an “SHL assessment” as part of a job or graduate programme application, this guide explains what that actually involves, how the process typically runs, and how to use practice questions to walk in feeling prepared rather than caught off guard.

What is an SHL assessment?

SHL is one of the most widely used publishers of workplace psychometric and aptitude tests, and its assessments are used by employers around the world, including many operating in New Zealand, to screen candidates during graduate schemes, professional hiring, and internal promotion processes. Rather than testing job-specific knowledge, SHL-style tests measure general reasoning abilities that employers believe predict how well someone will perform and learn on the job. The three formats most New Zealand candidates run into are numerical reasoning, verbal reasoning, and situational judgement tests (SJTs), sometimes alongside logical or inductive reasoning and personality questionnaires, depending on the role and employer.

Who uses SHL-style tests, and why

SHL assessments are commissioned by the employer, not run by SHL as an independent public exam, so it is the hiring organisation, not SHL Group, that decides which tests to use, what level of difficulty to set, and how heavily the results weigh into a hiring decision. In New Zealand, these tests show up most often in graduate recruitment programmes, large corporate and professional services hiring, call-centre and customer-facing roles, and government or public-sector intakes, where there are too many applicants to interview everyone and an objective, standardised first filter is useful. If you have been sent a testing link from an employer’s applicant tracking system, there is a good chance it is an SHL product or one built on the same question styles.

What the different test formats actually look like

A numerical reasoning section usually presents data in tables, graphs or charts and asks you to work out things like percentages, ratios, trends or currency and unit conversions, often under a time limit of somewhere around 17 to 25 minutes for a set of questions, though the exact timing varies by employer and test level. Verbal reasoning sections give you a short passage of text and ask whether a statement is true, false, or impossible to say based only on what is written, which tests careful reading rather than general knowledge. Situational judgement tests describe a realistic workplace scenario and ask you to judge which response would be most effective, least effective, or to rank several possible actions, and these are often untimed since they are measuring judgement rather than speed. Some employers combine several of these into a single “general ability” style test rather than sending separate numerical and verbal tests.

Eligibility: who gets asked to sit one

There is no formal eligibility criteria to sit an SHL test in the way there is for a licence or certification exam — you are invited to complete one because you have applied for a specific role or programme and the employer has chosen to include it in their process. It typically arrives by email once your application has passed an initial CV or application-form screen, and you are usually given a window of several days to complete it online, in your own time, before moving on to interviews or an assessment centre.

How the process generally works

Most SHL-style testing today is delivered online and untimed in terms of when you sit it, though the test itself is often timed once you begin. You will usually need a stable internet connection, a quiet space, and sometimes a webcam if the employer uses remote proctoring to verify identity and reduce cheating. After submitting your application, you receive a personalised testing link, complete the assessment in one sitting, and the employer receives your results, usually expressed against a comparison or “norm” group of other candidates rather than as a simple percentage score. Some employers follow this with a second, supervised verification test at an assessment centre to confirm your result wasn’t achieved with outside help.

Scoring, pass marks and how long results count

Because SHL licenses its tests to individual employers, there is no single published pass mark — each organisation sets its own threshold based on the role, the volume of applicants, and how competitive that hiring round is, and this is rarely disclosed to candidates. Your result is typically reported as a percentile against a relevant comparison group (for example, other graduate applicants), rather than a raw score out of a total. Results are generally understood to remain valid for around twelve months with a given employer, though this is set by the employer’s own policy rather than a universal rule, and a result from one employer does not carry over to another company’s hiring process.

What happens if you don’t meet the bar

If your score doesn’t meet an employer’s threshold, you are usually simply not progressed to the next stage of that particular application, rather than facing any formal penalty. Many employers allow you to reapply for a future intake after a waiting period, which can range from a few months to a year depending on the organisation, and some will let you retake an equivalent test if you apply for a different role within that window. Because thresholds and policies vary so much by employer, it’s worth checking the recruiter’s instructions or careers page for specifics on reapplying.

Are there fees to sit the test?

SHL assessments are arranged and paid for by the employer as part of their recruitment process — as a candidate, you are not generally charged a fee to sit the official test itself. Where costs come in is on the preparation side, if you choose to use paid practice resources ahead of time, which is an optional choice rather than a requirement of the hiring process.

How to prepare effectively

The most useful preparation tends to focus on familiarity and speed rather than memorising “answers,” since SHL questions are designed to measure reasoning rather than recall. For numerical reasoning, brushing up on mental maths fundamentals such as percentages, ratios and reading data from charts under time pressure makes the biggest difference. For verbal reasoning, practising the discipline of answering strictly from what the passage states — not what you assume or know from elsewhere — helps avoid easy mistakes. For situational judgement questions, it helps to think about the workplace values an employer is likely to prize, such as safety, teamwork, or customer focus, when weighing up which response seems most effective. Working through realistic practice questions beforehand, in conditions similar to the real test (quiet room, a timer, no shortcuts), is widely considered the most effective way to reduce exam-day nerves and build the speed and accuracy that these formats reward. This SHL Practice Test is built around that approach: numerical reasoning, verbal reasoning and situational judgement questions modelled on the formats New Zealand employers commonly use, so you can get comfortable with the style and pacing before it counts.