AssessFirst BRAIN, SWIPE and DRIVE: What Each One Asks and How to Prepare
AssessFirst BRAIN is now an adaptive build-the-figure test, not the four-part paper prep sites describe. What SWIPE, DRIVE and BRAIN ask, and how to prepare.
An invitation from AssessFirst, the Paris-based assessment company used by French banks, rail operators and a growing list of UK and Italian employers, usually names three things: SWIPE, DRIVE and BRAIN. Together they make one profile. Two have no right answers, one does, and the one that does is not the test most preparation sites describe.
The three questionnaires
SWIPE replaced an older text questionnaire called SHAPE in May 2023. If an employer’s careers page says “Shape, Drive and Brain”, it was written before then, and the personality part you will actually get is SWIPE.
BRAIN: the test that changed
Search for the AssessFirst BRAIN test and you will find descriptions of a twenty-minute paper with numerical tables, verbal passages, analogies and shape series. That was the old BRAIN. AssessFirst’s own interpretation guide says the current test was developed in 2020 to replace a predecessor with four types of reasoning that took twenty minutes and ran only on desktop browsers. A candidate who practises tables for today’s BRAIN is practising the wrong test.
Today’s BRAIN has one item type. You see a row of figures with a question mark in it, and a handful of loose pieces above. You build the missing figure by dragging one or more pieces onto the question mark. Dropping a second piece lays it on top of the first, so two diagonal lines make a cross. When you are happy you press Submit; if the slot is wrong you press Reset and start again; and if a sequence will not give up its rule you can press Pass.
What the BRAIN score means
BRAIN reports a single score from 1 to 10. The scale is shaped like a bell: 5 and 6 are the middle 40 per cent of people, and 1 and 10 are the extreme 2 per cent at each end. An employer that uses BRAIN picks one of four minimum levels for a role, or none at all:
AssessFirst also reports how long you took, separately from the score, and flags styles such as haste and indecisiveness. Indecisiveness is defined as a strong tendency to skip questions, so Pass is a tool to use after a real attempt, not a way round hard items.
How to prepare for BRAIN
SWIPE and DRIVE: no right answers
SWIPE shows two photographs, each with a short caption such as a working habit or a way of dealing with people, and you swipe towards the one that is more like you at work. DRIVE does the same with two written statements about what would motivate you. Both are forced choices, and AssessFirst matches the two options in each pair so that neither is the obviously desirable one. There is nothing to get right, so there is nothing to revise.
What you can prepare is the pace and the frame of mind. SWIPE is 75 pairs in about five minutes, around four seconds each, so the right approach is to take the first honest reaction rather than weigh every pair. Answer about yourself at work as you actually are, not as the ideal candidate for the role. The profile is read against the job, and many employers, including LCL, discuss it with you at interview, where a profile you do not recognise is hard to talk about.
One profile, for a year
This is the rule that catches people. Your AssessFirst results belong to your account, not to one application. Every employer whose invitation you accept gets access to the same profile, and it stays valid for twelve months. AssessFirst’s help centre says results are not reset on a candidate’s request; a reset needs the recruiter to ask for it.
So there is no such thing as a practice run on the real site. A free personal account produces your actual profile, the one the next employer will see. If you want to try the formats first, do it somewhere else, and treat the real sitting as the only one.
Practise the formats
Our AssessFirst hub has a generated, adaptive BRAIN practice test with the same build-and-submit interface and a Pass button, free, plus SWIPE-style and DRIVE-style questionnaires that show you which way your answers lean on each dimension. Nothing you do there touches your AssessFirst profile. If you are not sure your invitation is from AssessFirst at all, our provider lookup guide turns a product name into a vendor, and how long assessment results last covers the lock-in rules at other providers.