While other parts of the selection process are concerned with your specific skills and experience, aptitude tests are designed to help measure more general characteristics. They can assess your potential to learn to do something new, for example, to solve problems quickly, to think laterally, to move quickly and flexibly between one type of problem and another, or to be mentally agile enough to keep up with the thoughts of potential colleagues and customers. The results are usually combined with information from other parts of the process to assess your ability to do the job. For many employers who use them early in the recruitment process, they are a simple way of reducing the number of applications to a manageable level.
