Updated April 2026 · 14 min read · Investment Banking · 300,000+ employees worldwide
| Company | JPMorgan Chase & Co. |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | New York, USA |
| Divisions | Investment Banking, Corporate Banking, Asset Management, Commercial Banking, Technology |
| Assessment providers | Pymetrics (game-based) (cognitive), HireVue (video interview) |
| Unique feature | Pymetrics games — 12 neuroscience-based games measuring cognitive and personality traits |
| Process | Application → Pymetrics → SHL aptitude → HireVue → Superday |
JP Morgan is the world's largest bank by revenue and one of the most competitive graduate employers globally. The recruitment process has multiple assessment stages, starting with Pymetrics game-based evaluations that are unique among major banks.
Stage 1: Online application. CV, education, and motivation. JP Morgan allows applications to up to three programmes simultaneously. If unsure which programme suits you, the Pymetrics Program Navigator can assess your cognitive, behavioural, and social characteristics to suggest suitable programmes.
Stage 2: Pymetrics game-based assessment. JP Morgan's signature screening tool. You play 12 interactive neuroscience-based games that assess cognitive and personality traits including risk tolerance, decision-making, learning, memory, empathy, attention, and problem-solving. Each game takes 1-3 minutes. Total time: 20-30 minutes. There are no "right or wrong" answers — instead, your trait profile is compared against JP Morgan's top performer benchmark for each specific role. This is critical: a profile that scores well for Investment Banking may not score well for Asset Management. Research the traits valued in your target division.
Important: Pymetrics results are valid for 330 days. If you've completed Pymetrics for another employer within the past year, JP Morgan can reuse those results — you won't need to play again.
Stage 3: SHL aptitude tests. After Pymetrics, candidates face the full SHL battery: numerical reasoning (data interpretation, percentages, financial calculations), verbal reasoning (True/False/Cannot Say), logical reasoning (pattern recognition), and situational judgement (workplace scenarios). The tests total 45-60 minutes. See our numerical reasoning guide for detailed preparation.
Stage 4: HireVue video interview. On-demand recorded video interview via HireVue. 3-5 competency-based questions with 30 seconds to prepare and 90-120 seconds to respond per question. One retry is allowed per question. The interview typically takes 10-15 minutes total. Questions focus on motivation ("Why JP Morgan?"), teamwork, problem-solving, and for some divisions, market knowledge ("Discuss a major world event and how it could affect financial markets").
Stage 5: Final interview / Superday. Face-to-face or virtual meeting with the JP Morgan team. Multiple rounds of behavioural, technical, and situational questions. For investment banking, expect DCF and valuation questions. For technology roles, expect coding questions alongside behavioural assessment.
Because Pymetrics benchmarks your trait profile against existing top performers in the specific division you're applying to, understanding roughly what each division's benchmark tends to emphasise is more useful preparation than trying to "solve" the games generically. Investment Banking benchmarks typically skew toward higher risk tolerance, sustained attention under pressure, and quick decision-making under time constraints — reflecting the pace and stakes of deal work. Asset Management benchmarks tend to weight patience, methodical decision-making, and lower impulsivity more heavily, consistent with longer-horizon investment thinking. Technology roles typically benchmark toward strong working memory, sustained attention, and systematic problem-solving over raw risk appetite. None of this means you should try to fake a profile that doesn't reflect how you genuinely respond under the games' time pressure — Pymetrics' games are specifically designed to surface consistent, hard-to-fake behavioural patterns rather than a single deliberate answer choice, so the most reliable approach is simply playing them focused and rested rather than trying to strategise in the moment or second-guess each individual game as you go.
JP Morgan's SHL numerical section leans into finance-specific contexts — interest rates, FX conversions, and leverage ratios — rather than generic retail or sales data:
Q. An investment of $250,000 earns 4.8% simple annual interest. What is the interest earned after 9 months?
A) $8,000 B) $9,000 C) $10,000 D) $12,000
A. $250,000 × 4.8% × (9/12) = $9,000. Answer: B.
The core skill being tested — converting a partial-year period into a fraction correctly before applying an annual rate — recurs constantly across JP Morgan's numerical section in different disguises (bond yields, prorated fees, partial-year returns). Missing the time-fraction step, not the multiplication itself, is the single most common source of wrong answers under the tight ~50-second-per-question pace.
Investment banking at JP Morgan has the most competitive process in the market — analyst class sizes of 100–300 pulled from 10,000+ applications, so every stage is a hard cut.
Compared to Big 4, JP Morgan's aptitude-test bar is higher:
"Superday" is JP Morgan's name for the final on-site (or virtual) interview stage, and it's structured differently from every earlier stage in the process — where Pymetrics, SHL, and HireVue are all standardised and platform-scored, Superday is entirely human-driven, typically 4-6 back-to-back interviews with different bankers across a single day. Each interviewer usually has a different focus: some purely technical (DCF mechanics, valuation multiples, accretion/dilution logic for M&A-adjacent roles), some purely behavioural (motivation, teamwork, handling pressure), and some a genuine mix of both. Because you don't control which interviewer you get in which slot, preparing narrow — only technical or only behavioural — leaves you exposed regardless of which specific combination of interviewers you actually happen to draw on the day itself.
The technical bar scales meaningfully with seniority and division: entry-level analyst interviews typically expect solid command of core valuation concepts (DCF assumptions, how a change in WACC affects valuation, basic comps methodology) rather than advanced modelling, while associate-level and lateral-hire interviews expect noticeably deeper technical fluency built from genuine prior work experience rather than classroom theory alone. For behavioural questions, JP Morgan interviewers consistently probe for genuine, specific stories rather than rehearsed-sounding generalities — "tell me about a time you failed" is asked often enough that arriving without a real, honestly-examined example ready in advance (one that clearly shows what you actually learned, not just what went wrong) is a common and entirely avoidable weak point worth fixing well before interview day. Across a full day of back-to-back interviews, maintaining consistent energy and composure into the final one or two slots — after several hours of sustained technical and behavioural questioning — is itself part of what's being evaluated, even though it's rarely stated explicitly by the interviewers running each individual session that day. Bringing a genuinely rested, well-fed, and mentally sharp version of yourself into the later afternoon slots matters more, in practice, than most candidates walking in that morning actually anticipate.
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