Which Assessment Provider Sent Your Test? How to Tell From the Invitation

The most expensive preparation mistake is not practising too little. It is practising the wrong test. Aptitude tests differ enough between vendors that a week spent on the wrong format buys you almost nothing, and on at least one dimension, whether to guess, two of the biggest providers want the exact opposite behaviour from you.

Why the invitation rarely says

Assessment vendors sell white-labelled products. The email you receive is sent by the employer or its applicant tracking system, carries the employer's branding, and often describes what you are about to sit only as an online assessment. Recruiters are not being evasive; the vendor name is simply not the part they think you need.

It also changes. The same employer commonly uses different vendors for different functions and different intake cycles, so last year's forum thread about a company's test is weak evidence about this year's. Treat any employer-to-provider mapping you read online, including ours, as something to confirm against your own invitation.

Step 1: look for the product name, not the company name

Vendors name their products, and those names leak into invitation emails, browser tabs and the test's own landing screen far more often than the company name does. These are the ones worth recognising:

One row in that table is a warning rather than an answer. BrassRing is an applicant tracking system, not a test. It is the software an employer uses to receive and track your application, and it hands the assessment step to a third party. Its current owner publishes the list of assessment vendors wired into it, and it runs to more than twenty names including SHL, Aon cut-e, Korn Ferry, Talogy, Thomas International, HireVue, Sova and Capp. So seeing a brassring.com address tells you who processes your application, not who is testing you. Wait for the assessment link itself.

"MAP" on its own is ambiguous, and it is the one genuine collision in that table. Aon cut-e sells a personality questionnaire called mapTQ, and Assessio sells a Five Factor questionnaire called MAP. They are different instruments from different publishers. The tie-breaker is what comes with it: if the invitation also mentions scales, smartPredict, ADEPT-15, chatAssess or cut-e it is Aon, and if it mentions Matrigma, Match-V, MAP Essence or the Assessio Platform it is Assessio. If it says neither, the test itself will: the Aon suite warns you that wrong answers lose marks, and nothing Assessio sells does.

If your invitation says eelloo, you are in the right place. eelloo renamed to Assessio Bloom in January 2024, and it was Meurs HRM until 2016. The Q1000 tests it sells under all three names are the same tests, and they belong to Assessio.

Three of the rows are ACER, and only two of them are about getting a job. ACER publishes assessments for schools, universities and employers, and most of what it sells is educational. GAMSAT, HPAT, ISAT, STAT, uniTEST and MSAP are university admissions tests. PAT and IBT are school assessments. HAST is the Higher Ability Selection Test, which sounds exactly like an employment selection test and is actually used by schools to identify academically gifted students for accelerated programs. None of those is a hiring screen. The ACER tests you sit for a job are the Victoria Police, Queensland Police and Fire Rescue Victoria entrance exams, and the ACER Select, TAR and MRT-2 tests employers buy off the shelf.

A related trap, and it catches people every year: there are three different things with UCAT-shaped names. The UCAT sat for medicine and dentistry in Australia, New Zealand and the UK is run by a consortium of universities through Pearson VUE and has nothing to do with hiring or with ACER. ACER used to run UMAT, the undergraduate medical admissions test, but 2018 was its final year and UCAT ANZ replaced it in 2019, which is why people still associate ACER with medical admissions. And the UCAT in our own library is Criteria Corporation's Universal Cognitive Aptitude Test, an employment aptitude test of maths, logic and spatial reasoning with no verbal questions at all. Three unrelated things, one overlapping name.

The sender domain is a weaker signal but still worth a look. Test links usually point at the vendor's own platform even when the email itself came from the employer, so hovering over the button before you click often settles it.

Step 2: the format is a fingerprint

If the email tells you nothing, the practice or instruction screens will. These combinations are close to unique:

• True, False or Cannot Say against information split across tabs, with a warning that wrong answers lose marks: Aon. No other major provider penalises wrong answers.
• 50 questions in 15 minutes, verbal, maths and spatial items mixed together, no calculator: the Criteria CCAT.
• 50 questions in 12 minutes: Wonderlic or the PI Cognitive Assessment.
• 51 questions in 20 minutes, verbal, numerical and abstract mixed together, and you can go back: the Revelian RCAT. The free navigation is the giveaway. The CCAT and Wonderlic are both forward only, and the RCAT also asks you to tick exactly two of six on some questions and to type the missing number on others rather than offering options throughout.
• No overall clock, but a countdown on each individual question, and answer lists of ten or more options: Talent Q Elements.
• Five answer options running from True through Probably True and Insufficient Data to False: the Watson Glaser inference section.
• Three eight-minute sections back to back, one of them tracing shapes through a flowchart: Saville Swift Analysis.
• Two lists of adjectives, the first about how others expect you to behave: the PI Behavioral Assessment.
• Blocks of statements where you pick the one most like you and the one least like you: SHL's OPQ32 or the ipsative version of Cubiks PAPI.

Step 3: ask, because it works

Asking the recruiter which assessment you will be sitting is a normal question and is usually answered. It signals preparation rather than anxiety. If there is a candidate portal, the assessment name is frequently listed there in plain text even when the email omitted it.

If you genuinely cannot tell, prepare the transferable core

Three skills carry across nearly every aptitude provider, so time spent on them is never wasted:

• Numerical reasoning from tables and charts, especially percentage change, ratios and unit handling
• Verbal reasoning under the True, False, Cannot Say rule, judging the passage alone rather than what you know
• Abstract and logical reasoning, working out the rule governing a sequence of figures

Learn the format-specific parts once you know the vendor. Format familiarity is worth a lot, but it is worth it only for the format you actually sit.

The one habit that does not transfer

These are not stylistic differences, they are opposite instructions. If you are running more than one process at a time, label the habit in your head by employer rather than trusting yourself to remember which rules apply once a clock is running.