Falling at the first hurdle: undergraduate students’ readiness to navigate the graduate recruitment process

Making the transition from university to employment is a challenging process for many students. One common method used by recruiters to sift through graduate applications is the use of psychometric tests which typically consist of numerical and verbal reasoning tasks. To explore how frequently these tests are used by graduate employers, an audit of the Times Top 100 graduate schemes selection processes was conducted. To identify how well-prepared students are to navigate these assessments, an experiment tested whether 169 undergraduate finalist students can pass either a verbal or numerical reasoning test. Two one-sample t-tests show that more than 50% of students failed the verbal and numerical reasoning tests (53.53% vs 83.57%). The only predictor of an increased likelihood of passing the numerical reasoning tests was having previous experience with those tests. This study highlights that more training needs to be given to help students navigate two common selection methods.