Can You Retake the Kenexa Test?

SEO title: Can You Retake the Kenexa Test?

Meta description: Whether you can retake a Kenexa assessment, why retakes are per section, what to do after a technical fault, and how reapplication rules work.

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Quick answer

Retakes are an employer decision rather than a feature of the assessment, and with Kenexa there is an extra wrinkle: because the assessments are separate, individually timed sections, a "retake" can mean two quite different things. It can mean re-sitting one section — the numerical reasoning, say, while your verbal result stands — or re-sitting the whole assigned battery. Which one is on offer, if either, is set by the employer.

Inside a section there is no retake mechanic at all. Once a section's timer has run and you submit, that section is complete. There is no facility to restart it yourself, and in many administrations you cannot even revisit earlier questions within the section once you have moved past them — the instruction screen tells you whether navigation back is permitted, which is worth reading before you start rather than discovering at question twelve.

So the realistic routes to another attempt are three: the employer offers a retest, usually for a specific reason of their own; something goes wrong technically and the employer reissues the assessment; or you apply again in a future cycle under whatever reapplication policy that employer publishes. Each is covered below, along with the practical steps that make a reissue more likely when a session genuinely fails.

Why retakes are usually handled per section

The modular structure is the reason retake conversations with Kenexa sound different from those about single-sitting tests.

Because each assessment is administered and reported separately, an employer reissuing a test does not have to reissue everything. If your numerical reasoning result was affected by a fault but the verbal section completed cleanly, a recruiter can in principle reissue only the affected assessment. That is a genuinely useful thing to know when you are writing to them: asking for "the numerical section to be reissued because it disconnected at question nine" is a much more actionable request than asking to redo the whole thing.

It also means a partial completion is not necessarily a disaster. If your invitation assigned three assessments and you completed two before a problem, say exactly that, and identify which one is outstanding.

The flip side is that employers can also require only part of a battery to be re-sat for their own reasons — for instance, asking a shortlisted candidate to repeat a reasoning section under supervision after an unsupervised first sitting. That is standard practice rather than an accusation about you specifically.

When an employer offers a retest

Where retests happen, they are usually driven by the employer's process rather than granted on request.

Supervised confirmation is the most common reason. An employer who screens with unsupervised online assessments may ask shortlisted candidates to re-sit a reasoning section under proctored conditions, to confirm the original result. If you are invited to this, prepare exactly as you did the first time and expect equivalent but different questions rather than the same items.

A different role is another route. Because employers set expectations per role and assign different section combinations, a result that did not clear the bar for one position may be adequate for another, and some organisations will consider you elsewhere without any retest.

A new hiring cycle is the third. Employers running annual or seasonal intakes commonly retest returning applicants, since a result from a previous year is stale.

What is far rarer is a retest granted simply because a candidate was disappointed. Requests of that kind are frequent and mostly declined, because giving one candidate a second attempt while others had one undermines the comparability the assessment exists to provide. Asking once is not unreasonable; expect a no.

What to do when a session fails technically

This is the situation where employers are most willing to act, so make acting easy for them.

Move quickly. Note the exact time, the assessment name, and the question number you had reached, and screenshot any error message. Detail is what turns "it broke" into a request a recruiter can process.

Contact the recruitment contact named on your invitation the same day rather than after the deadline, with a short factual account: the role and reference, which assessment failed, what happened, when, and a request to have that specific assessment reissued. If your invitation includes an assessment support link, use it as well, because it creates an independent record of the fault.

Do not reopen the link repeatedly or try a different device unless you have been told to. Multiple attempts on one invitation look like circumvention even when they are not, and they complicate the case you are making.

Prevention costs less than remedy. Use a wired connection or sit close to the router, close other applications, silence notifications on computer and phone, and — most importantly — start the assessments a day or two before the deadline rather than in the final hours, so a fault leaves time to resolve it.

If the completion window closed before you finished

A close relative of the retake question is the expired invitation, and it is more common with Kenexa than with single-sitting tests, because a battery of several assessments is easier to start and not finish.

Employers set a completion window and state it in the invitation. Where multiple assessments are assigned, that deadline usually covers all of them, so completing two and leaving the third until the last evening is a real risk rather than a theoretical one.

If the window has closed, contact the recruitment team quickly and plainly: name the role and reference, say which assessments you completed and which you did not, give the reason in one line if there was a genuine one, and ask whether the outstanding assessment can be reissued. Recruiters do reissue links, particularly early in a cycle and particularly where the reason is real — illness, an emergency, or an invitation filtered into a spam folder. Because the assessments are modular, asking for just the outstanding one is a smaller and more grantable request than asking to start again.

What does not work is a long explanation, a request that reads as an entitlement, contact several weeks later, or starting a fresh application to reset the process — most applicant tracking systems will match it to your existing record.

Two habits prevent this altogether. Check your spam folder throughout any live application. And when the invitation arrives, schedule every assigned assessment with a couple of days of margin before the deadline rather than leaving the last one to chance.

Platform changes are not a reason for a retake

Candidates sometimes encounter inconsistent branding across a Kenexa-based process and wonder whether something has gone wrong. It usually has not, and it is not grounds for a retake request.

The background: Kenexa was acquired by IBM in 2012. In January 2020 and IBM announced a partnership under which SHL provides IBM Kenexa Assessment content through SHL's platform, giving continuity to existing Kenexa assessment customers. Separately, IBM's talent acquisition suite, including the BrassRing applicant tracking system that many employers ran alongside these assessments, was sold to Infinite Computer Solutions under an agreement announced in 2021.

The practical consequence is that emails, login pages and interfaces in a process an employer calls "Kenexa" may carry different brands at different steps. That is a reflection of how the products have moved between owners, not a sign of a fault.

What does warrant contacting the employer is a link that does not work, an assessment that will not load, or an invitation that appears to be for a different candidate. Those are real problems. Unfamiliar branding on a working link is not, and raising it as one tends to slow down a response to anything genuine.

Reapplying in a future round

If you were rejected after a Kenexa stage, whether you can apply again is employer policy rather than anything to do with the assessment. Many organisations publish a waiting period on their careers pages — often measured in months for the same role — while others allow reapplication at the next cycle and some place no restriction at all. Check the specific employer rather than assuming a standard, because practice varies widely.

Where a waiting period applies, use it rather than simply waiting. These assessments respond well to targeted work, and the section structure makes targeting easy: if the numerical section was the problem, that is a specific, trainable skill involving data-exhibit reading and quick percentage and ratio work, not a general verdict on you. A candidate who spends a few weeks on the weak section is a materially different applicant.

Finally, a result at one employer does not follow you to another. Assessment records belong to the organisation that commissioned them, so applications elsewhere start fresh — including at other employers using the same assessment content.

How TestSolve can help

TestSolve lets candidates practise realistic question types, see worked explanations, and review their mistakes before a real online assessment. Since there is no retake inside a section, the sensible place for repeated attempts is beforehand, where they cost nothing: drilling Kenexa-style numerical, verbal and logical sections separately under time pressure and reading the worked explanation for each item rather than only the answer.

That matters most to anyone facing a second attempt after a disappointing first. Because results and practice are both section-level, the mistake review points at a specific fixable thing — data-reading errors in the numerical section, over-inferring in the verbal section, no systematic method in the logical section — rather than at a vague sense that the test went badly. Working that out on practice material is what makes a retest a genuinely different attempt.

Frequently asked questions

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