Harver’s Situational Judgement Test (SJT) is an assessment designed to not only test candidates on their behavioral tendencies, but also give candidates a realistic preview of the role. SJTs present candidates with different situations and offer multiple options to respond to these situations. All situations presented are related to the job and challenge key behaviors and characteristics related to success.
These two elements are key in allowing the candidate to get an idea for the role and if they’re suited for it, while enabling you to understand the answers to questions like.: Does the candidate have a good understanding of effectively dealing with these situations? Do they know how they should respond? And also, how not to?
Within this article go through the basics of SJTs including how to understand results
How SJTs are developed
Harver’s People Science team develops SJTs custom to your organization and open vacancy by performing a job analysis of a specific job or job group, by working with subject matter experts in your organization. The goal of a job analysis is that SJT developers get a full understanding of the different situations employees face each day, the most effective response to these situations, and the impact it has on their job performance. From here, they create scenarios that can then be measured based on this analysis.
Candidate Experience
SJT questions can be presented as separate unrelated situations, but can also be part of a larger scenario and relate to different parts of relevant job behaviors. In this way the 'story' of the job can be told as well providing the candidate with a realistic job preview.
During the Situational Judgement Test, a candidate is presented with situations that may happen on the job as well as multiple options of how to respond. The candidate must then choose both the best and the worst option. Oftentimes, situations are presented with a video or image.
Candidate Results
The SJT results will be included in the matching profiles to help predict performance. Individual SJT results will also be presented and are based on how many correct and incorrect answers the candidate chose during the experience.
Below you can find how points are calculated for each SJT question. The higher the score, the more accurately the candidate answered the situations.
- If candidate chooses 'best' for 'best' answer, score = +1
- If candidate chooses 'worst' for ‘worst’ answer, score = +1
- If candidate chooses 'best' for 'empty' answer, score = 0
- If candidate chooses 'worst' for 'empty' answer, score = 0
- If candidate chooses 'best' for worst' answer, score= -1
- If candidate chooses 'worst' for 'best' answer, score = -1