Situational judgement test (SJT): can it really measure soft skills?

The situational judgement test (SJT) is gaining ground in hiring processes: the candidate is presented with a realistic professional situation, then asked to choose or rank possible reactions. The intuition is appealing: rather than asking someone whether they are good at conflict management, you put them in front of a conflict. But is a scenario enough to make a measure?

What a situational judgement test is

An SJT consists of three elements: a described professional situation (an unhappy client, a team disagreement, a trade-off under deadline), a set of possible reactions, and a scoring rule that values certain answers. The format has existed for decades in personnel selection, notably for managerial and sales roles.

Its great merit is to shift the question. A declarative questionnaire asks "are you diplomatic?" and measures self-image. An SJT asks "what do you do in this situation?" and approaches reasoning in context. This shift goes in the direction of what psychometrics calls ecological validity: the more the assessment task resembles real work, the shorter the inference between test and job.

The real strengths of the situational format

It reduces the weight of pure declaration. Faced with a scenario, the candidate mobilises reasoning rather than self-description. Social desirability does not disappear, but it has less grip than on a scale reading "I am rigorous: strongly agree".

It standardises comparison. All candidates face the same situations, in the same order, with the same scoring. Where successive interviews suffer from the contrast effect and the mood of the day, the SJT compares comparable answers. This is one of the key mechanisms we detail in our analysis of cognitive biases in hiring.

It adapts to the job. A good SJT is built from real critical situations of the target role. This job contextualisation is exactly what generic typologies lack when they assign the same profile to a field manager and an IT project lead.

The limitations SJT vendors rarely mention

A scenario is not a framework. Knowing that a candidate picks the "right" reaction to an unhappy client does not say which competency produced that answer: emotional regulation, empathy, industry experience, or mere knowledge of social conventions? Without an explicit competency framework behind the scenarios, an SJT produces a global score that is hard to interpret and impossible to turn into a development plan.

Common sense can be copied. In many SJTs, the expected answer can be guessed through simple knowledge of social norms: stay calm, listen, escalate at the right level. The test then measures the ability to identify the socially expected answer, not the ability to produce it under real pressure.

An opaque scoring key is just another black box. Who decided that one reaction is worth more than another, and on what basis? A serious SJT documents the construction of its scoring key. A commercial SJT merely asserts that it is "validated". The questions to ask are the same as for any assessment tool, and we detail them in our guide on the predictive validity of tests.

The Rising Up position: situational is a building block, not a method

Rising Up's Soft Skills Scan uses contextualised professional scenarios, and that is no accident: the situational format is the most defensible approach research offers for approximating behaviour. But three choices distinguish a situational building block from a complete method.

A public framework behind every situation. Every scenario in the Scan is attached to the framework of 18 behavioural competencies: published definitions, documented families, described observable behaviours. The score does not merely say "right or wrong answer", it shows which competency is expressed, and at what level.

Several formats combined. A competency assessed through a single question format inherits the biases of that format. The Scan combines several assessment formats for each competency, which limits the weight of the "copyable common sense" typical of classic SJTs.

A decision aid, not a guillotine. The result is a 0-100 score with a behavioural analysis, designed to equip the recruiter's or manager's judgement, never to decide in their place. This requirement joins the European framework we analyse in our article on the AI Act and recruitment tests.

What to remember

The situational judgement test is a good format and a poor complete method. A good format, because it approaches behaviour where the declarative questionnaire approaches self-image. A poor complete method, because without a public framework, combined formats and documented scoring, it produces a plausible but uninterpretable score.

The stakes deserve better than a plausible score. Behavioural skills predict professional success, contribute to it causally, and can be developed (research by James Heckman, Nobel laureate in economics). And the market is equipping itself: according to APEC, 41% of companies recruiting executives now formally assess soft skills, up 9 points in one year.

Recognised as Deeptech by the European Innovation Council (EIC) in 2023, Rising Up integrated the best of the situational format into a complete method, backed by a public framework. To see how it works on your own hiring, discover the recruitment test grounded in cognitive science.