Assessments in Germany, France and the Wider EU: Einstellungstest, EPSO and Your Rights

Continental European hiring is not one market with a shared test culture. Germany has its own genre of hiring test with its own vocabulary. France regulates the assessment itself rather than the vendor. The EU institutions run a selection machine that belongs to neither national tradition. What the bloc does share is a legal floor, and that floor gives you more to work with than candidates usually realise.

Germany: the Einstellungstest is a different genre

The German word for a hiring test is Einstellungstest, and translating it as aptitude test misleads you about the content. In the German public-service tradition the test commonly includes Allgemeinwissen, meaning general knowledge, a German language component and a concentration test, sitting alongside the logic and numeracy a British candidate would expect.

The Bundespolizei, the German federal police, publishes its Auswahlverfahren in enough detail to show what that means in practice.

If you are an international candidate applying into a German public-service or apprenticeship-style entry route, the preparation split is roughly: reasoning practice for the parts that look familiar, German orthography drills for the Diktat, and current affairs plus German political and historical basics for the Allgemeinwissen section. The last two are the ones people skip and the ones that are hardest to improvise.

The works council is why the instrument is documented

Germany has a structural feature with no British or American equivalent. Section 94 of the Betriebsverfassungsgesetz, the Works Constitution Act, states that Personalfragebogen, personnel questionnaires, require the consent of the works council, and that where no agreement is reached a conciliation body decides. Paragraph 2 extends the same rule to the establishment of general assessment principles, the Beurteilungsgrundsätze.

The practical consequence for a candidate is that in a German company with a works council, the questionnaire and the principles behind the assessment have been negotiated and written down. That does not give you a right of access to the agreement, but it does mean the employer can usually tell you, accurately, what instrument you are about to sit. Asking is far more likely to produce a straight answer in Germany than in the UK.

One more German specific: if a German employer names a test you do not recognise, check whether it is a domestic publisher rather than an Anglo vendor before you conclude there is no information about it. Hogrefe, based in Göttingen, describes itself as the leading European scientific publisher in psychology, lists over 2,000 psychological test procedures and runs a Hogrefe Consulting arm for occupational suitability diagnostics.

France: the law tells you more than the vendor does

France regulates recruitment assessment directly in the Code du travail, and the relevant articles are short enough to memorise. Article L1221-8 reads, in full:

That is three separate rights packed into three sentences.

Two neighbouring articles tighten it further. Article L1221-6 restricts what may be asked of a candidate to information with a direct and necessary link to the job on offer or to the assessment of professional aptitudes. Article L1221-9 states that no information personally concerning a job candidate may be collected by any device that has not been brought to their attention beforehand. Read together with L1221-8, that covers proctoring, screen recording and behavioural data capture during an online test: in France these must be disclosed before they happen.

The CNIL, the French data protection authority, sets out the accompanying information duty. A recruiter must tell candidates the identity of the controller, the purpose and legal basis, whether answers are mandatory and what happens if they are not given, who receives the data, how long it is kept, and how to exercise rights of access, rectification and objection and to complain to the CNIL. The CNIL also confirms that an individual can obtain a copy of the data concerning them, including recruitment records and evaluations, without having to justify the request.

The tactic that follows is specific to France: ask, in writing, what you will be sitting, before you sit it. You are not making an unusual request. You are asking the employer to do something the Code du travail already requires.

For French public-sector entry the picture is different again. Recruitment runs through concours, competitive examinations set per corps and per grade, with the exercises published in the notice for each competition rather than drawn from a standard commercial battery. We could not verify the current exercise list for any individual concours from an official source while writing this, so we are not going to describe one.

EPSO: working for the EU institutions

The European Personnel Selection Office runs selection for permanent staff across the EU institutions, covering graduates at AD5, specialists at AD6 to AD9, assistants at AST, secretaries at AST/SC, lawyer-linguists and translators, plus contract staff across Function Groups I to IV. The reasoning component is verbal, numerical and abstract reasoning, delivered as multiple-choice tests. EPSO describes abstract reasoning as identifying logical patterns and relationships between concepts without relying on language, numbers or spatial orientation.

The AD5 Graduates competition shows the current scale and shape. EPSO received 174,727 applications and split the competition into two parts across two years. Part 1 is the reasoning tests, starting in November 2026 and taken in two separate sittings. Part 2, in 2027, comprises the EU knowledge test, the digital skills test and the free-text essay on EU matters, the EUFTE. To progress from Part 1 a candidate needs at least 10 out of 20 in the verbal reasoning test and a combined score of at least 10 out of 20 across the numerical and abstract tests.

Which language you sit it in is a decision, not a default

This is the single most consequential EPSO rule for an international candidate. You choose two languages, and the reasoning tests are administered in Language 1. For contract staff procedures EPSO sets this out explicitly: Language 1 requires thorough knowledge, minimum C1, of one of the 24 official EU languages, and Language 2 requires satisfactory knowledge, minimum B2, of English, French or German, and the two must differ. For open competitions the permitted combinations are set by the "Languages used in this competition" section of the Notice, and the choice cannot be changed after the application deadline.

EPSO is unusual in letting you make that choice. Most national employers do not. In several continental systems the language of the assessment is fixed by the employer when your candidate record is created, which means the moment to raise it is before the invitation is issued, not after you have opened it. If you are in a Dutch process, the capaciteitentest guide and the Dutch vendor identification guide cover that market specifically.

What GDPR actually gives you across the bloc

Our guide to what happens to your assessment data covers access requests, retention and what a subject access request returns, so this section only adds what is specific to assessment inside the EU.

Article 22 of the GDPR gives a data subject the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning them or similarly significantly affects them. There are exceptions where the decision is necessary for entering into or performing a contract, authorised by Union or Member State law, or based on explicit consent. Where an exception applies, the controller must provide safeguards including the right to obtain human intervention, to express your point of view and to contest the decision.

The practical question that turns on is whether a human looked at your result. An automated sift that rejects candidates below a cut score with nobody reviewing it is precisely the shape Article 22 is aimed at. Asking whether a human reviewed the decision is a reasonable question anywhere in the EU, and in France it sits on top of the advance-notice duty in L1221-8 rather than replacing it.

The EU AI Act adds a second layer. Annex III point 4 classifies as high risk AI systems intended to be used for the recruitment or selection of natural persons, in particular to place targeted job advertisements, to analyse and filter job applications, and to evaluate candidates. The classification is settled. The date from which the Annex III obligations bite has been moved during the Digital Omnibus process, so treat any specific compliance deadline you read as provisional and check the current position rather than relying on an older article.

A short checklist by country

If you are preparing across several of these markets at once, the useful habit is to label by country in your own notes. The reasoning content travels. The dictation, the general knowledge section, the language regime and the rights you can exercise do not.