EY-Style Assessment

What the real one is reported to be

Discover EY has three steps: a short application form with no CV, the online assessment, and the programme itself in April, where the last day is assessed for a fast track to a summer internship interview. Up to the April 2026 intake the online stage was built by Cappfinity: a strengths assessment of workplace scenarios ranked most to least likely, with sliders between two statements about how you work, then a job simulation of about 14 items built on emails, a news article about a fictional company and a few charts, mixing ranked scenarios, short written replies, chart questions with a calculator, and two or three recorded video answers. Untimed, with the time recorded; candidates call the job simulation the hardest stage.

EY's early careers privacy notice, updated in September 2026, names SHL as the platform for the 2027 cycle, and its FAQ lists the formats: choose from options, interpret a table or chart, drag items into position, spot a pattern or apply a rule, record a video. Each assessment is scored against set criteria and a miss is rejected without human review; the videos are scored by people. Nobody has written up the SHL version yet, so treat the shape here as reported, and read the invitation for the time limit.

How it is scored here

A run is 44 items: 12 scenarios drawn from a bank of 20, all 20 slider pairs, and 12 numerical questions generated and checked before they are served. Each scenario and each numerical question is worth 10 points, so the most a run can score is 240. A ranking scores by its distance from the key: one adjacent swap costs two points and the reverse order scores nothing. A most and least pick scores five for each end, three when your pick is one place in. The sliders are never scored.

The scale is ours; EY publishes none. It pays for a near miss because the ranking between two plausible answers is the skill. The run is capped at forty minutes and ends when the last item is answered.

Where we had to choose

The firm, Aldery Nash, and the week are fictional and every scenario is written by us; nothing copies a published question. The scenarios need no accounting to answer, because the real ones are about people, deadlines and information rather than the work: a teammate who is behind, a figure that does not match, a friend who asks about a client, a tool you have never used, blunt feedback. The key is simplytk's judgement, argued from the eight skills on EY's key skills page (proactive, doing the right thing, curious, building relationships, agility, thinking critically, embracing technology, motivated) and explained item by item at the end of a run. The sliders have no key anywhere: the readout says where you sat and whether your two answers on a trait agreed, which is the thing the provider is described as checking.

The numerical questions reuse the generator behind Numerical Reasoning in three answer styles: pick, type and rank. The student version is reported with few or no numerical items and the graduate one with about a dozen, so the twelve here are the upper bound.

The parts that are not here

The job simulation asks for two or three written replies of about a thousand characters, usually an email to a client or manager explaining a delay or summarising a few figures, and two or three recorded video answers on why EY, why the service line and a strength of yours, with a couple of minutes to prepare and two to answer, no retakes. No drill here can mark those. Before you sit it, draft one three-line email (what happened, what you are doing, when they will hear from you) and say a two-minute answer to why EY out loud once, on a laptop with the camera on. Firm Prep has EY's questions, and the mock interview will time you.

How to work through one

On the scenarios, rule out the two you would not do first, then decide which of the rest keeps the right person informed and owns the problem; that one usually wins. Raise a doubt early and with the specifics. On the sliders, answer as yourself and consistently: the same trait comes round twice in different words, and a profile that contradicts itself reads worse than any lean. On the numbers, read the column header for the unit before you calculate, and use the calculator.