Technical Aptitude Test for effective pre-hiring screening and finding top talent

The Mercer | Mettl Technical Aptitude Assessment is a test administered to applicants by a potential employer for a technical role. This comprehensive assessment tests the applicant's knowledge, analytical thinking, and problem-solving skills in specific technical domains related to technology and programming, such as basic coding principles and coding skills. The evaluation helps employers gain insights into candidates' practical programming skills and capability to apply conceptual knowledge to practical scenarios.

What is a Technical Aptitude Test?

The Technical Aptitude Test is an online pre-employment test to evaluate candidates' technical and quantitative skills and identify job-fit candidates for technical roles. This aptitude test helps recruiters significantly reduce the technical screening and hiring time by shortlisting only relevant applicants. The Technical Ability Test assists employers in screening candidates interested in technical domains and determines critical technical skills needed to perform or excel in a professional environment. The knowledge candidates must demonstrate in a Technical Aptitude Test is highly specific and complex.

What is inside this Technical Aptitude Test?

This test comprises technical aptitude and quantitative aptitude questions. The aptitude section encompasses profit and loss, percentages, discounts, averages, ratios and proportions, time and work calculations, simple and compound interest, mixture and alligation, and interpretation of tables and graphs. These quantitative aptitude questions assess the test-taker's problem-solving skills relevant to technical domains, underscoring their quantitative reasoning and numerical proficiency.  

The Technical Aptitude Test helps organizations evaluate critical competencies for efficient screening. The assessment questions range from easy to medium and can be used to hire engineering candidates with zero to two years of experience for entry-level roles. In addition, the Technical Aptitude Test includes carefully selected questions that give an overview of the candidate's knowledge and potential, making it a great assessment tool for lateral and campus hiring. The Technical Aptitude Test battery includes two significant skill clusters: technical skills and quantitative aptitude ability. The section on technical skills consists of hands-on coding skills and multiple-choice questions to gauge the breadth of a candidate's knowledge across OOPS concepts and data structures.   

The quantitative aptitude section comprises numerical reasoning, data interpretation, and other topics that test the candidate's problem-solving and arithmetic skills.

What skills does this Technical Aptitude Test cover?

• Technical skills: This section includes questions covering basic data structure, object-oriented programming concepts, sorting and searching, arrays, linked lists, and queues.    
• Hands-on programming: This section assesses the fundamental coding skills of candidates and their ability to apply knowledge and concepts in practical coding scenarios.    
• Quantitative aptitude: This section includes questions about profit and loss, discounts, percentages, averages, ratios and proportions, time and work calculations, SI and CI, and table and graph interpretation.

What roles can you assess when using the Technical Aptitude Test?

• Junior software engineers   
• Engineering graduates/undergraduates  
• Software engineers

Sample questions and answers

1. Find the sum of the first 90 even natural numbers. 

a) 8180 

b) 8190 

c) 8100 

d) 8110 

Answer- b) 8190 

2. What is the length of a bridge in which a train is 130 meters long and travelling at 45 km/h can cross in thirty seconds? 

a) 200 m 

b) 225 m 

c) 245 m 

d) 250 m 

Answer- c) 245 m 

3. The DBMS serves as an interface between which two components of an enterprise-class database system? 

a) Database application and the database 

b) Data and the database 

c) The user and the database application 

d) Database application and SQL 

Answer- a) Database application and the database 

4. Find the sum of two numbers whose product is 200 and the difference is minimum. 

a) 30 

b) 39 

c) 27 

d) 33 

Answer- a) 30 

5. A man travelled 30% of his trip at a speed of 85 km/h and 70% of his trip at a speed of 33 km/h. Find his average speed throughout the journey. 

a) 46.6 km/h 

b) 48.6 km/h 

c) 42.6 km/h 

d) 44.6 km/h 

Answer- b) 48.6 km/h