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.
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. Its candidate hub says you will be told in the instructions about any time limit, and before you begin if an assessment is time recorded.
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 some cognitive assessments are time recorded, and that you will be told before you begin if yours is.
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. Bringing in outside knowledge, however correct, is an easy way to lose marks on a verbal test.
Cappfinity Critical Reasoning Test
Critical Reasoning is a separate named type. Cappfinity says its Critical Reasoning questions assess problem solving and decision making, and that they come in several different question types, but it does not publish a list of those types. General critical thinking practice, such as spotting assumptions, judging whether a conclusion follows and weighing an argument, is sensible preparation, but treat it as preparation rather than a description of Cappfinity's own items.
Cappfinity Diagrammatic Reasoning Test
Diagrammatic reasoning is the fourth named cognitive type. Cappfinity says you are shown sequences of images involving shapes and patterns and asked to work out which option comes next, based on the rules you identify in the sequence.
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 can take a situational judgement form. Cappfinity says you may be asked to order responses from the approach you would be most to least likely to take, select the most appropriate response, place your actions or views on a scale, or rate statements on how well you can do something and how much you enjoy it.
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 part of Cappfinity 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. Cappfinity's advice for a strengths based interview is to think in advance about what you enjoy doing and do well, and to draw on whichever examples feel most authentic, from work or from your personal life.
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. Cappfinity's advice is to relax and answer naturally, and it suggests that understanding what you enjoy and do well is the best preparation, so genuine self knowledge is worth more here than a rehearsed answer.
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, Credera and Kingston University London.
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 most reliable guide from the publisher itself, alongside the instructions your employer sends.
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.
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 does not necessarily mean you are doing badly. 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 says it is measuring both how good you are at something and how much you enjoy it, and advises against trying to pre-empt what the organisation might want you to say. Answer as yourself, at a natural pace.
