Saville Swift Analysis Tips: Three Sections, Eight Minutes Each

Saville Assessment's flagship product, Swift Analysis, puts three aptitudes into a single sitting of about half an hour: Verbal Analysis, Numerical Analysis and Diagrammatic Reasoning, each 11 questions in 8 minutes. Some employers add an Error Checking test of 32 items in 7 minutes. It is used across financial services, UK government and large corporate graduate schemes.

The timing is the first thing to notice

Eleven questions in eight minutes is about 44 seconds each. SHL numerical reasoning gives you roughly 75. If you have practised on SHL material and walk into Saville with the same rhythm, you will not finish, and the sections are short enough that a slow start cannot be recovered.

The other structural difference is that the three sections run back to back. There is no gear change built in, so decide in advance how you will reset between them rather than carrying the pace of one section into the next.

Verbal Analysis

Passages of business text with statements to judge as True, False or Cannot Say, on the same evidence rules that SHL verbal uses: True means the passage establishes it, False means the passage contradicts it, Cannot Say means the passage is silent.

At 44 seconds you cannot read the passage twice, so read the statement first and then read the passage looking for the specific thing that would settle it. The traps are the usual ones and worth naming: quantifier swaps such as many becoming most, causal claims built on passages that only report co-occurrence, and superlatives the passage never makes.

Numerical Analysis

Revenue tables, budget charts and business data, with arithmetic and trend questions. What distinguishes Saville numerical from its competitors is how often a question is genuinely multi-step: two extractions and then a ratio or a growth rate, rather than one lookup and a percentage.

• Write the figures down before you compute. Most wrong answers on multi-step items are extraction errors rather than calculation errors, and they are invisible once you are three operations deep.
• Check the units and the base year every time. Tables mixing absolute values with indexed or percentage columns are common here.
• Estimate first when options are far apart, which resolves a surprising number of items in ten seconds.

Diagrammatic Reasoning is the section to actually practise

This is not shape sequences. Saville's diagrammatic format traces an input through a flowchart of operators, each of which transforms it in some way, and asks what comes out the other end. Most candidates have never seen it before, which is exactly why it is the section where practice moves a score most.

• Derive the operators from the simplest path first. Somewhere in the diagram there is usually a route where only one operator acts, and that route tells you what that operator does with no ambiguity. Solve those, then use them to unpick the longer paths.
• Track one attribute at a time. Follow shape through the whole chain, then colour, then order. Trying to hold three transformations of three attributes simultaneously is what makes these feel impossible.
• Order matters. Two operators applied in the opposite order frequently give a different result, and one of the options will be the result of getting the order wrong.

Error Checking

Thirty-two items in seven minutes is about 13 seconds each. You compare a master record against a copy and identify the fields that differ.

The mistake is reading the records. Reading invites your brain to normalise what it sees, which is exactly the wrong reflex when the planted difference is a transposed digit or a swapped character in a reference code. Compare field by field in a fixed order, moving your eyes between the two records for each field rather than reading one record then the other. Numbers, codes and dates are where the errors are concentrated; free text is where they are rarest.

Answer everything

Saville tests are not negatively marked, so unlike Aon there is no reason to leave anything blank. If a section is about to expire with items unanswered, fill them.

Where Saville sits relative to SHL

Structurally the verbal and numerical tests are close cousins of SHL's, with tighter timing and more business-flavoured data. The two real differences are the diagrammatic format, which has no direct SHL equivalent, and Error Checking, which has none either. If your preparation time is limited, spend it on those two, because the verbal and numerical practice you have already done transfers.

All four tests are available as timed simulations with the real section clocks.