Cappfinity is a talent assessment company whose online assessments, video interviews and strengths interviews sit between an application and a job offer at a long list of employers. It describes what it measures as two things: how good you are at something, your capability, and how much you enjoy doing it, your motivation. That second half is what makes a Cappfinity assessment feel different from a conventional aptitude test, and it changes how you should prepare.
What Is A Cappfinity Assessment?
Cappfinity builds branded online assessments for employers, most visibly in graduate and early careers hiring, and also in internal talent management. It has teams in the UK, the United States and Australia, and describes itself as the world leader for measuring and developing potential in talent acquisition and talent management.
A Cappfinity assessment is not one fixed test. Employers commission a configuration of components, so what you sit depends on the employer and the role you applied for. The core platform is called Assessment in Context, and it has four named dimensions:
- Motivation in Context, what energises you
- Behaviour in Context, how you work
- Cognitive in Context, the reasoning element
- Technical in Context, role specific and technical skill
Alongside that sit Task-based Simulations, Video Interviews described by Cappfinity as fully asynchronous and brand aligned, a Digital Assessment Centre, the Skills and Strengths Assessment, and leadership products including Leadership Assessment and the High Potential and Manager Assessment. Where a role calls for a coding test, Cappfinity delivers it through its platform partner Codility.
The idea underneath all of it is what Cappfinity calls "can do, love to": that people perform at their best when they are doing something they are good at and enjoy.
The Structure Of Cappfinity Assessments
There is no single Cappfinity test format. What you meet is a combination of behavioural questions, cognitive questions and, on some routes, a video interview or a simulation of the work itself.
The cognitive question types Cappfinity names are Critical Reasoning, Numerical Reasoning, Verbal Reasoning, Diagrammatic Reasoning and Coding Potential. Cappfinity describes its cognitive assessments as adaptive, time recorded or time limited to manage difficulty levels, so which of those three you get is a decision the employer makes, and you are told which in the instructions.
That is why preparation should target the question types rather than a format. The format changes between employers; the reasoning does not.
Cappfinity Numerical Reasoning Test
A Cappfinity numerical reasoning test gives you data, usually as a table or a chart, and asks you to draw a conclusion from it. The work is in selecting the relevant figures out of a larger set and then applying straightforward arithmetic: percentages, ratios, rates of change and proportions.
Cappfinity does not publish a standard question count or duration, because both are set by the employer. It does say that where a cognitive assessment is time recorded, the time you take may be considered when calculating your score, and that in that case you should work as quickly and accurately as possible.
Cappfinity Verbal Reasoning Test
The Cappfinity verbal reasoning test assesses how accurately you read. You are given a passage followed by statements or questions, and asked to judge what the passage does and does not support: whether something is true, false or cannot be determined from the text, or which reading the passage best supports.
The discipline it rewards is answering from the passage alone. Outside knowledge, however correct, is the most common way to lose marks on a verbal test.
Cappfinity Critical Reasoning Test
Critical Reasoning is a separate named type, and it goes a step beyond comprehension. Rather than checking that you have understood a passage, it asks you to work with an argument. Expect to have to:
- Make or be alert to inferences
- Recognise assumptions
- Make deductions
- Interpret information
- Evaluate arguments
In practice you are deciding whether a statement is true, false or somewhere between the two on the evidence given, or picking the best or worst fit from a set of conclusions.
Cappfinity Diagrammatic Reasoning Test
Diagrammatic reasoning is the fourth named cognitive type. You are shown shapes, sequences or process diagrams governed by rules you are not told, and asked to work out the rule and apply it to a new case.
The approach that works is systematic rather than intuitive: track one changing feature at a time, such as shape, shading, rotation, position or count, instead of trying to read the whole sequence at once.
Cappfinity Behavioural And Situational Questions
Cappfinity's behavioural assessments sit under Motivation in Context and Behaviour in Context, and they often take a situational judgement form: a scenario, written or presented visually, followed by responses you rank, rate, or pick the most and least effective from.
This is the part of a Cappfinity assessment most likely to be untimed. Cappfinity states that, aside from video and written questions, its behavioural assessments are not timed. That is not a reason to drift, but it does mean you can read each scenario properly before answering.
Scenarios are tailored to the employer and the role, so they can cover anything from a customer service dilemma to a clash of priorities or a question of professional conduct.
Cappfinity Strengths And Skills Assessments
This is the part of Cappfinity most often searched for by name, and it is worth understanding properly, because it changes how you should answer.
Cappfinity measures each skill on three axes: Performance, how well you perform it; Energy, how energised or motivated you feel when using it; and Use, how often you use it. When a skill is not only performed well but used regularly and enjoyed, Cappfinity recognises it as a strength. The underlying product, Skills Discovery, measures 80 behavioural skills, and Cappfinity says every one of its skills has been benchmarked against workplace performance over multiple years.
The same model drives the strengths based interview. In Cappfinity's own words, unlike competency based interviews, which generally only focus on your past experiences, strengths based interviews are designed to assess your potential and what motivates you, whether or not you already have experience in these areas.
That makes the questions sound different. Instead of "tell me about a time you led a team", you get questions about what you would choose to spend a day doing, what you find easy that others find hard, or which tasks leave you with energy. A rehearsed answer is worth much less here than genuine self knowledge, and because the same underlying skills are probed from several angles, an engineered answer tends to show up as inconsistency.
One point on vocabulary: Cappfinity's own marketing now leans towards skills and motivation rather than strengths. Both describe the same model.
Which Employers Use Cappfinity?
Cappfinity states that it works with more than 200 clients and offers more than 40 integrations, which means an assessment can reach you through an employer's own careers portal without being obviously branded as Cappfinity.
Employers named in Cappfinity's own customer stories include British Airways, which Cappfinity describes as the first airline to adopt strengths based hiring, Credera, Kingston University London and Shoosmiths. Sky, Deloitte, HSBC, NIHR and Mott MacDonald appear in the awards section of its site, and older Cappfinity press releases have also named Linklaters, EY, Nestlé and Zurich.
If you have been sent an assessment and are not sure who built it, the instructions and the assessment URL will usually tell you. Cappfinity also runs its own candidate preparation hub, which is the only fully authoritative guide to what you are about to sit.
Tips To Pass Cappfinity Tests
1. Find The Time Limit Before You Start
Do not assume it either way. Cappfinity says some assessments have no time limit while others set one for the full assessment or for each question, and that you will be told which in the instructions and within the assessment itself. That single fact determines your whole approach. Where an assessment is untimed, Cappfinity says most will let you return to it later if you are interrupted.
2. Pay Attention To What Is Actually Being Asked
Most or least, rank or rate, best or worst fit. Getting this wrong loses marks you would otherwise have won, and it is the easiest error to avoid. Reread the question stem before you commit.
3. Make Notes
Note down the relevant figures and words as you read, so that when you come to select an answer you can be confident about what the material actually said rather than what you remember of it.
4. Avoid Distractions
Find somewhere quiet where you will not be interrupted, turn off notifications on your computer and phone, and tell the people around you that you are taking a test. This matters more than usual if your assessment includes a video interview.
5. Know Where Adaptivity Applies
Cappfinity describes its Cognitive in Context assessments as adaptive, time recorded or time limited to manage difficulty levels. Where an adaptive version is used, the difficulty of the next question responds to how you answered the last, so a run of hard questions is a sign that you are doing well rather than a sign that you are failing. Nothing on Cappfinity's site describes its behavioural, motivation, technical or strengths assessments as adaptive, so do not read difficulty as a signal in those.
6. Do Not Try To Second Guess The Strengths Questions
There is no ideal personality to perform here. Cappfinity is measuring what you enjoy and do well as much as what you can do, and the assessment is designed to notice when those two things do not line up. Answer as yourself, at a natural pace.
