Saville Assessment tests 2026: the complete guide

Updated April 2026 · 12 min read · Wave personality suite, Swift aptitude tests, and Work Strengths

Saville Assessment is a UK-based psychometric test publisher known for its Wave personality questionnaire suite and the Swift family of aptitude tests. Founded by Peter Saville (one of the original creators of SHL's OPQ), Saville Assessment competes directly with Kenexa, and Talogy. Its assessments are used by law firms, financial services, FMCG companies, and engineering organisations globally.

Swift aptitude tests

Swift tests are Saville's family of timed cognitive ability assessments. They are shorter and faster than SHL Verify, making them popular as initial screening tools. Three key tests:

The Swift Executive Aptitude is the most commonly encountered Saville test in graduate recruitment. 30 questions in 15 minutes — approximately 30 seconds per question — is significantly faster than SHL or Kenexa. Questions are shorter but the speed pressure is higher. Verbal questions in Swift are word analogies, sentence completion, and short passage comprehension (1–3 sentences, not long passages). Numerical questions are simpler arithmetic (no multi-step ratio calculations) but timed very tightly.

Wave personality suite

Wave Focus: A shorter personality assessment (~25 minutes) commonly used as an initial personality screen at the application stage. 72 statements rated on a 1–9 scale. Measures 9 personality facets relevant to professional roles.

Wave Professional: The full personality questionnaire (~40 minutes). Assesses 36 dimensions grouped under 12 sections and 4 broad clusters (Thought, Influence, Adaptability, Delivery). Highly validated and commonly used as a development tool as well as selection. If you're taking a Wave Professional for a senior or managerial role, be aware that the detailed report is often used in a feedback discussion — your profile will be discussed with you, not just used to filter you.

Wave Leadership: Senior-level personality assessment specifically designed for C-suite and executive selection. Same format as Wave Professional but calibrated against leadership norm groups.

Work Strengths assessment

Saville's Work Strengths assessment identifies which of 72 different workplace strengths a candidate naturally excels at and enjoys. Rather than measuring personality traits, it identifies concrete behavioural strengths — "Numerate", "Persuasive", "Methodical", "Creative", "Empathetic". Used by employers in conjunction with strengths-based interviewing. If you receive a Work Strengths assessment, reflect genuinely on your natural tendencies — the system is validated against job performance data and designed to detect over-claiming.

Which Saville product will you actually face?

Saville's product range spans three genuinely different assessment types — timed cognitive tests (Swift), personality questionnaires (Wave), and a strengths inventory (Work Strengths) — and it's common for candidates to receive more than one as part of the same application, so knowing which is which before you start matters more than it might seem. The clearest signal is your invitation email: Saville and the employer will typically name the specific product (e.g. "Swift Executive Aptitude" or "Wave Focus Styles"), so read it carefully before assuming which format you're about to face. If the invitation is vague, role type is the next-best signal — graduate and early-career screening most often uses Swift alongside Wave Focus; senior and managerial hiring more often adds Wave Professional or Wave Leadership; strengths-based employers (a growing but still smaller group) use Work Strengths specifically, usually alongside a structured strengths-based interview rather than a traditional competency interview.

A practical distinction worth internalising: Swift is the only one of the three with objectively correct answers and a meaningful time pressure — treat it like any other timed cognitive test. Wave and Work Strengths are both self-report instruments with no correct answers in the traditional sense, but they differ in what they're measuring — Wave asks about your general behavioural and motivational tendencies across the whole personality spectrum, while Work Strengths asks specifically about strengths you enjoy using and perform well at, a narrower, more strengths-focused lens. Confusing the two mid-assessment — answering Work Strengths questions as if they were general personality items, for instance — can produce a profile that reads as less coherent than an honest, strengths-focused response would.

Preparing for each product type

For Swift: preparation follows the same principles as any timed cognitive test — build genuine speed on the specific question formats (word analogies and short comprehension for verbal-heavy variants, chart and table interpretation for numerical-heavy variants) through repeated timed practice, since the defining challenge is the tight per-question time budget rather than raw difficulty.

For Wave: there's no content to study, since it's a self-report instrument with no correct answers. The most useful preparation is honest self-reflection beforehand — thinking through genuine examples of how you behave at work across the areas Wave covers (thought style, influence, adaptability, delivery) — so you're not composing your first honest answer to a question in real time under whatever time pressure the format applies, and so your responses stay internally consistent across the many related items Wave asks about the same underlying traits.

For Work Strengths: similarly no content to study, but it's worth preparing concrete examples of moments you've used each strength you plan to claim, since strengths-based interviews that follow this assessment typically probe exactly this — a strength claimed on the assessment but with no example ready to discuss in interview reads as a weaker signal than a strength backed by a specific, genuine story.