Which Assessment Provider Sent Your Test? How to Tell From the Invitation
Employers rarely name the test vendor. How to identify SHL, Aon cut-e, Talent Q, Criteria, Arctic Shores, Pymetrics and the rest from your invitation email and the test format itself.
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:
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.
- 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.