FAQs About SHL
SHL is a global provider of talent assessments and talent solutions used for hiring, development, and workforce planning. Organizations use SHL tools to measure cognitive ability, personality, motivation, technical skills , and job-relevant behaviors. SHL combines psychometric science, digital assessment delivery, and workforce analytics to support objective talent decisions across industries and regions.
SHL’s global headquarters is in Thames Ditton, on the outskirts of London, United Kingdom. SHL operates offices and delivery centers across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa. For more infomation visit SHL Global Offices.
Andrew Bradshaw is the Chief Executive Officer of SHL. A strategic thinker with diverse experience and a passion for people insight, Andy was responsible for successes for Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Sophos before taking the helm at SHL in 2018 to help establish it as an independent entity. Learn more about the SHL Leadership Team.
SHL is a great place to work. Offering an inclusive, innovative, and collaborative environment where employees are empowered to make an impact in talent assessment and people analytics. The company values authenticity, encourages professional growth, and supports staff through flexible working options, and well-being initiatives. With diverse teams worldwide and opportunities in technology, product, client sales and more, SHL enables employees to shape the future of work. For more infomation visit SHL Careers.
SHL was founded in 1977 as Saville and Holdsworth Limited, named after its founders. The company has since expanded globally and now operates under the SHL brand while maintaining its foundation in occupational psychology research.
FAQs on SHL Talent Solutions
SHL offers a comprehensive portfolio of talent solutions across hiring, development, succession planning and workforce planning. These solutions combine assessments, engaging experiences, participant reports, insights dashboards, and expert services to help organizations find, develop and mobilize top talent.
SHL Talent Acquisition Solutions are comprehensive, automated hiring offerings that combine tailored assessments, engaging candidate experiences, and data-driven insights to help organizations identify high-performing candidates efficiently and at scale. They leverage a broad portfolio of job-focused assessments - including cognitive, skills, coding, and language tests - alongside device-optimized and branded candidate workflows, recruiter and candidate reports, proctoring, and AI scoring models, all supported by expert deployment, onboarding, and technical services. Designed for volume, technology, and professional hiring across all role levels, these solutions deliver measurable business outcomes such as faster time-to-hire, improved candidate satisfaction, enhanced diversity, and increased business performance, with flexible packages and add-ons to meet specific organizational needs.
Explore: Talent Acquisition Solutions
SHL Talent Management Solutions are packaged, evidence‑based solutions that combine assessments, standard reports, and in‑platform insights configured to specific use cases or "lenses".
Built to apply objective skills data across programs so customers can target development, uncover hidden strengths, and match people to opportunities -boosting retention, innovation, and agility. Each solution uses a lens with frameworks grounded in SHL research; insights are generated against that lens.
Explore: SHL Talent Management Solutions
SHL helps organizations answer the questions that matter most about their people: Who should we hire? Who is ready to lead? Where are the skill gaps in our workforce? Our solutions span the full talent lifecycle from high-volume early careers hiring to executive succession and are built on the same validated science throughout. Whether you're looking to reduce time-to-hire, improve quality of hire, build a leadership pipeline, or move toward skills-based talent management, SHL has a proven solution.
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SHL helps organizations screen earlier and more consistently by using validated assessment to evaluate job-relevant behaviors, reasoning, and role-specific skills. This can reduce time spent on low-fit candidates and help teams make more confident decisions.
Yes. SHL's solutions are built to scale. Whether you're hiring hundreds of contact center agents or thousands of seasonal workers, SHL can automate assessment delivery, scoring, and shortlisting — processing large candidate volumes without sacrificing quality or candidate experience. Our platform supports multi-stage hiring workflows and integrates directly with your ATS to keep the process seamless end-to-end.
Yes. SHL has deep expertise in graduate and early careers assessment, with solutions purpose-built for this population. Our assessments are designed to be engaging and fair to candidates who may have limited work experience — evaluating potential and learning agility rather than past performance alone. Organizations using SHL for early careers hiring report that 88% of candidates named them as their #1 employer of choice after going through the process.
Yes. SHL offers targeted assessment solutions for mid-level and senior professional hiring, where the stakes are higher and the competency requirements more nuanced. Our Job Focused Assessments (JFAs) are validated for specific role families and levels, combining the right cognitive, behavioral, and skills measures for a given context — giving hiring teams a richer, more predictive picture than a CV or interview alone.
Yes. SHL offers two interviewing products designed to bring the same scientific rigor as our assessments into every hiring conversation. Smart Interview on Demand is an asynchronous video solution where candidates record responses to structured questions in their own time - ideal for high-volume screening and rated excellent by 89% of candidates. Smart Interview Professional supports structured live interviews - virtual or in-person - with science-backed guides across 800+ roles, real-time interviewer prompts, and post-interview analytics that give talent leaders visibility into how interviews are being conducted across the business. Together they cover the full spectrum of interviewing needs, from first-stage screening to final-round selection.
This is one of SHL's most distinctive advantages. When a candidate completes a Job Focused Assessment (JFA) during hiring, the assessment is scoring them on the specific skills relevant to that role — but it is simultaneously collecting data across all 96 skills in SHL's UCF taxonomy. That means the Global Skills Development Report can be generated from the same hiring assessment data and used immediately for onboarding and development planning, without requiring a separate assessment. Managers receive a practical, evidence-based picture of a new hire's strengths, development priorities, and working style before their first day — enabling more personalized onboarding, faster time to productivity, and a head start on the development conversation.
SHL's development solutions help organizations understand where their people are today against the skills they'll need tomorrow. Using validated behavioral assessments, skills gap analysis, and development reports aligned to the UCF, SHL gives individuals and their managers a clear, actionable picture of what to work on and why - supporting both individual growth and broader workforce capability planning.
Internal mobility is one of the most underutilized levers in talent strategy - and one of the areas where SHL's skills-based approach creates immediate value. Because SHL captures a consistent, validated picture of each individual's capabilities across all 96 UCF skills, organizations can match internal talent to open roles based on genuine fit rather than job title or tenure. This helps HR leaders identify who is ready to move laterally, step up, or transition into an adjacent function - reducing reliance on external hiring, improving retention, and building a culture where growth opportunities are visible and objective.
Regrettable attrition is often a development problem masquerading as a retention problem. When employees don't see a clear path forward, they leave. SHL's development solutions give individuals genuine insight into their strengths and growth areas, and give managers the tools to have meaningful, evidence-based development conversations. Combined with internal mobility capabilities that surface real opportunities, SHL helps organizations create the conditions where high performers want to stay and grow.
SHL helps organizations build stronger leadership pipelines by identifying high-potential talent early, developing leaders in role, and aligning succession decisions to consistent, evidence-based criteria.
SHL’s leadership solutions are built as a connected suite spanning high potential identification, enterprise leader development, and succession planning. These solutions are designed to work together on a shared dataset, so organizations can measure leadership capability once and apply that insight across multiple leadership decisions.
Many organizations begin with the challenge they feel most acutely, identifying who is ready to step up, strengthening leaders already in role, or reducing succession risk, and expand from there. What distinguishes SHL’s approach is both the depth of the science, combining personality, cognitive ability, behavioral data, experience, and performance indicators, with the practicality of what leaders receive in return: clear insights, personalized development reports, coaching guidance, and recommendations that are actionable for leaders and managers, not just HR.
Most succession planning focuses solely on competencies or finding someone who looks like the current role holder. SHL’s research shows that’s not enough: leaders who have both the right competencies and experience relevant to the specific business context they will face are 3x more likely to be strong performers in role.
SHL builds this context directly into the process, helping organizations evaluate successor fit against the specific environment a leader will inherit, not just a competency profile. The result is succession decisions that are significantly more accurate, with successors who are more engaged and perform better than those identified through conventional approaches.
Yes. SHL's workforce intelligence capabilities allow organizations to understand the skills landscape across their entire workforce - not just individual roles. This supports strategic decisions around restructuring, reskilling, and workforce planning by giving leaders a clear, evidence-based picture of where capability exists today and where investment is needed for tomorrow. The Workforce Skills Maturity Calculator is a useful free starting point for organizations beginning this journey.
In talent acquisition, SHL assessment solutions are used for volume and technology hiring across role levels (apprentice, graduate, professional, manager) and interviewing to enable objective, skills‑based selection and faster, fairer hiring decisions.
In talent management, they support onboarding, development, talent review, high‑potential identification, succession planning, and targeted programs such as managerial development and sales transformation to align and mobilize talent for business impact.
FAQs on SHL Assessments
SHL offers talent assessments that measure cognitive ability, personality, motivation, workplace behaviors, technical skills, job-specific competencies, and leadership potential. . These tools are grounded in psychometric research and are designed to predict job performance and development readiness. SHL assessments are use across HR processes including hiring, onboarding, development, internal mobility, succession planning, and workforce planning. Explore SHL assessments.
SHL offers a comprehensive portfolio of talent assessments including cognitive ability tests, personality and behavioral questionnaires, job-focused assessments, situational judgment tests, technical/coding simulations, and skills tests. SHL’s current product catalog includes over 150 distinct, validated assessments covering a broad array of roles, industries, and skill levels, including flagship tools like OPQ, Verify, Motivation Questionnaire, and Global Skills Assessment.
The SHL Occupational Personality Questionnaire (OPQ) is one of the most established psychometric tools used for assessing workplace behavioral preferences. It evaluates 32 personality dimensions and is used to predict job performance, leadership style, and team fit. The OPQ is widely used for selection, leadership identification, and development programs.
The SHL Global Skills Assessment (GSA) is a 15-minute behavioral assessment that measures 96 workplace skills aligned to SHL’s Universal Competency Framework (UCF). It provides organizations with a comprehensive skills profile that can be used for hiring, talent development, internal mobility, and workforce planning. Because it evaluates all 96 skills at once, it offers a scalable and flexible way to compare individuals consistently across roles.
The SHL Universal Competency Framework (UCF), is a research-based model created to define and measure the competencies and behaviors associated with effective job performance. It organizes workplace skills into structed domains that apply across job families,, industries, and career levels. The UCF provides a common language and standardized set of competencies for HR processes such as hiring, development, performance management, succession planning, and workforce planning. . By offering empirically validated domains and clear behavioral indicators, the UCF helps organizations align assessments, job profiles, and reports to the same competency framework so they can apply consistent criteria across the talent lifecycle. The framework underpins many SHL assessments and reporting tools and is designed to support objective, defensible talent decisions.
SHL Online is a self-service assessment purchase portal, designed for smaller-scale requirements. SHL Online has complete global coverage and assessments are available in multiple languages.
Job-Focused Assessments - JFAs - combine predictive content specific to a role such acknowledge, cognitive personality, skills, and role-specific content into a single assessment aligned to a specific job profile. Reports provide an overall score, competency‑level insights, and a job‑match indicator to stack‑rank candidates against the competencies that matter most rank candidates against the competencies that matter most.
Read more: Job-Focused Assessments
SHL Verify is SHL's cognitive ability assessment suite measuring numerical, verbal, and inductive reasoning. Cognitive measures are often used alongside behavioral or job-focused assessments to provide a more complete view of candidate fit and improve decision quality.
Read more: SHL Cognitive Assessments
The SHL SVAR assessment is an evaluation tool used to measure a candidate’s spoken English communication skills, particularly for roles where verbal interaction is crucial. It assesses key language components such as grammar, pronunciation, fluency, and listening comprehension, typically through online or telephone-based responses to prompts. This helps organizations objectively and efficiently identify candidates with strong English communication abilities, ensuring a consistent and fair selection process.
The SHL 360 is a multi-rater feedback assessment tool that collects structured performance input from managers, peers, and direct reports. It provides a comprehensive, 360-degree view of leadership behaviors and development needs.
Explore: SHL 360
SHL Situational Judgement Tests (SJTs) are psychometric, simulation-based assessments that measure a candidate's judgement in realistic work situations and their behavioral fit to a role and organizational culture. SJT's are designed for large applicant pools and preliminary selection stages, providing a realistic preview of the role, reinforcing employer brand while maintaining scientific rigor.
Find out more: SHL Situational Judgement Tests
SHL Smart Interview Professional (SIP) is a structured solution for live virtual or face-to-face interviews that uses validated, skills-based questions and standardized scoring to reduce bias, improve fairness, and reliably predict job performance. SIP streamlines delivery with interview guides, real-time prompts, automated scheduling, and integrated analytics and feedback to ensure process adherence, interviewer engagement, scoring consistency, and a seamless candidate experience.
Explore: SHL Smart Interview Professional
SHL offers job simulations spanning coding, customer service, office/admin productivity, trust and safety content review, and banking/teller scenarios. SHL also provides a large library of multimedia situational judgement tests presenting workplace scenarios and actions across competencies such as retail sales/service, customer care, integrity, influence, and adaptability. Simulations are designed to replicate real job tasks and measure applied skills.
Explore: SHL Skills and Simulations
Organizations often combine measures such as cognitive ability, behavioral skills, and personality because each adds different information about performance in role. Using multiple, role-relevant measures can improve decision accuracy and reduce reliance on any single data point.
SHL assessments are translated into up to 39 languages, depending on the specific product. The Occupational Personality Questionnaire (OPQ) has the broadest coverage, with 38 languages supported by TC+. Other assessments, such as the Global Skills Assessment (GSA) and Verify Deductive Reasoning, are available in 29 to 31 languages.
SHL Platforms and Integrations
SHL TalentCentral Plus (TC+) is a proprietary assessment platform for delivering and managing a wide range of talent assessments, simulations, interviews, and job‑focused assessments across job levels and functions. It hosts broad product coverage such as the Global Skills Assessment, Motivation Questionnaire MQM5, OPQ32r, Verify cognitive series, simulations, and situational judgment tests, with detailed decision and development reports available in multiple languages. TalentCentral Plus supports efficient identification, assessment, and development using validated tools, offering flexibility and accessible reporting; licensed users interpret results professionally, with manager‑friendly outputs to facilitate practical application.
SHL can integrate with over 80 leading ATS platforms, including Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle, Cornerstone, iCIMS, ADP, SmartRecruiters, Simplify.hr and Jobvite.
SHL Science, Validity and Inclusion
Yes. All SHL assessments are developed according to rigorous psychometric and scientific standards, including guidelines from the American Psychological Association (APA), the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), and the British Psychological Society (BPS). SHL publishes technical manuals that document reliability, validity, and adverse impact data for its assessments. Our team of 300+ people scientists continually reviews and updates the science underpinning our tools.
SHL's solutions are developed by industrial-organizational psychologists and data scientists using globally recognized scientific standards. Each assessment is designed to measure job-relevant skills, behaviors, or abilities and is evaluated for reliability, validity, and fairness using real-world data. These same standards apply to our AI-enabled solutions - AI enhances delivery and scale, but every assessment must still be job-related, reliable, valid, and fair. This evidence-based approach helps organizations make confident, defensible talent decisions.
SHL's assessments are designed to be objective, standardized, and role-relevant - reducing the reliance on subjective factors like CV-screening or unstructured interviews, which are known to introduce unconscious bias. Our assessments are validated for use across demographic groups, and SHL conducts ongoing adverse impact analyses to monitor and minimize differential performance by gender, ethnicity, and other protected characteristics. We also run dedicated research programs to improve fairness for neurodivergent candidates and underrepresented groups.
Adverse impact occurs when a selection tool produces meaningfully different pass rates for different demographic groups, even if unintentionally. SHL addresses this through careful test design, continuous monitoring of group-level score distributions, and the use of multiple assessment types that together reduce the overall adverse impact of any selection process. Our technical manuals include adverse impact data, and SHL consultants can advise on assessment combinations that optimize both predictive validity and fairness.
AI and Innovation
SHL uses AI to enhance different parts of the assessment process to improve efficiency, scalability, and the overall experience, while maintaining a strong foundation in established assessment science.
AI may be applied in the design of assessments, helping to generate and refine content more efficiently. It can also support the delivery of assessments, enabling more dynamic, engaging, and responsive candidate experiences. In addition, AI is used in certain contexts to support scoring and analysis, helping to process complex responses (such as written or spoken communication) in a consistent and scalable way.
Importantly, AI is not a replacement for the science behind our assessments - it operates within it. Every AI-enabled component is subject to the same rigorous standards for reliability, validity, fairness, and job relevance as any other part of an SHL solution.
We are also committed to transparent and responsible AI. This means our clients can understand how AI is being used, how decisions are made, and how outcomes are monitored. All AI-enabled elements are designed to be explainable, auditable, and aligned with regulatory and professional standards.
We do not rely on opaque, black-box AI for high-stakes talent decisions - our approach ensures that organizations can use AI confidently and defensibly.
At SHL, we view AI as a powerful enabler of better hiring decisions when it is applied responsibly and grounded in science.
Our position is centered on three priorities:
First, improving decision quality.
AI allows organizations to process richer data, identify patterns more consistently, and scale insights across the hiring process. When combined with robust assessment methods, this leads to more accurate and evidence-based decisions.
Second, maintaining scientific rigor.
AI does not change the standard, it raises the expectation. Any AI-enabled component must demonstrate that it is reliable, valid, job-relevant, and fair. We anchor our approach in objective assessment data and decades of validation research to ensure that innovation does not come at the expense of defensibility.
Third, ensuring responsible use.
AI should support human judgment, not replace it. Organizations must be able to understand how AI is used, monitor outcomes, and maintain appropriate oversight. That includes clear documentation, explainable processes, and alignment with evolving regulatory expectations.
Ultimately, we believe the value of AI in hiring is not just efficiency, it is the ability to make more consistent, fair, and evidence-based talent decisions at scale, without compromising transparency or trust.
Security and Compliance
SHL assessments are designed with strong security measures to protect the integrity of the testing process, the privacy of candidates, and the confidentiality of assessment data. SHL employs industry-standard data protection protocols, including secure data transmission, encrypted storage, and strict access controls. The platform regularly undergoes security audits and compliance checks to align with international data privacy regulations such as GDPR.
Additionally, SHL has built-in mechanisms to prevent and detect cheating, such as randomizing question order, using timed conditions, and in some cases, employing remote proctoring or browser monitoring options. These measures help ensure fair, reliable results for both organizations and candidates.
Training and Services
Anyone responsible for administering, scoring, or interpreting SHL results typically requires training. SHL offers structured training programs and certification for practitioners, which cover test administration, ethical guidelines, interpreting results, and delivering feedback. Training may include online modules, live workshops, or accreditation (e.g., OPQ Practitioner Training) for more advanced tools like personality assessments or leadership inventories. This ensures the integrity and effectiveness of the assessment process.
SHL assessments are interpreted using standardized scoring systems and detailed reports that compare candidate results to relevant benchmarks or norm groups, highlighting strengths, development areas, and job fit. Cognitive and skills test scores are typically presented as percentiles or ratings, while personality and behavioral assessments summarize trait patterns and implications for workplace behavior. Trained professionals use these insights to support fair and effective hiring, development, and succession planning decisions.
Login and Candidate Support
When a candidate has been scheduled an assessment, an invite with unique URL will be sent to them directly. For any access issues, the SHL technical support portal can provide candidate assistance.
Extensive candidate support is available through our dedicated support portal.
Your initial password will have been created when you registered as a new user on the SHL assessment platform. To set a new password, please click on the link from your invitation email to go to the login page, then click on the 'Forgot password?' link.You can then enter your email address and will receive an email to set up a new password on the platform. If you don't receive the email within 30 minutes, first check your junk folder, and if still not located you can contact the SHL support team who will be happy to assist you.
SHL provides a range of practice tests and example questions to help candidates prepare for a scheduled assessment.
Most SHL assessments are mobile compatible, but not every assessment is supported on all mobile devices. Mobile availability depends on the specific assessment and delivery configuration.
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