What is the Aon assessment? Inside Aon's talent assessment suite
An Aon assessment is the set of online tests Aon runs for an employer: timed ability tests, gamified challenges, job simulations and the ADEPT-15 survey.
Dr. Russell T. WarneChief Scientist
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An "Aon assessment" is any of the online tests that Aon administers on an employer's behalf during hiring or internal development. There is no single Aon test. The name covers a modular catalogue of short timed ability tests, gamified reasoning challenges, coding exercises, situational judgment simulations, video interviews and a personality questionnaire called ADEPT-15. An employer picks a handful of these and assembles them into one assessment link. According to Aon, the company administers more than 30 million assessments each year in over 40 languages across 90 countries. This article covers what is in the current suite, where it came from, and how much a score from it can reasonably tell anyone.
What an Aon assessment is
Aon's assessment business sits inside the company's talent and rewards practice, and its tests are built to be completed without a supervisor present. Aon's own candidate guidance says most processes involve no more than five tests, that individual tests usually last less than fifteen minutes, and that candidates normally have several days to finish everything. The total elapsed time is not monitored, though the invitation email carries a deadline.
Two scoring conventions are worth knowing before you start. On the performance tests, Aon states that points are usually added for each correct answer and deducted for each incorrect one, so blind guessing carries a cost. On the personality questionnaire there is no time limit and no right answer.
An Aon assessment does not produce an IQ score. Several components measure reasoning abilities that overlap with what intelligence tests measure, but the output is a job-fit report scaled against a comparison group the employer chose.
• It is assembled, not fixed. Two candidates applying to different employers can both say they sat "the Aon assessment" and have taken no test in common.
• It is branded to the employer. Aon says its assessments are customizable to a client's brand, which is why many candidates never see Aon's name on screen.
The tests inside the current Aon suite
Aon publishes a candidate-facing page listing each test by name, by what it measures and by how long it takes. That page is the authoritative source for product names, and worth checking against, because test-preparation sites still circulate older marketing labels Aon itself no longer uses.
Ability and logic tests
The older family of ability tests carries the "scales" prefix, a naming convention inherited from cut-e. Aon lists Verbal Reasoning (scales verbal) at 12 minutes for 49 tasks, Numerical Reasoning (scales numerical) at 12 minutes for 37 tasks, Understanding of Basic Instructions (scales verbal instruct) at 8 minutes for 24 tasks, and Mechanical Reasoning (scales mtu) at 15 minutes for 24 tasks. On the logic side sit Inductive Logical Reasoning (scales clx) at 6 minutes and Inductive-logical Thinking (scales cls) at 12 minutes for 12 tasks. The common thread is speed. Most of these are "speeded" tests, meaning the item count deliberately exceeds what almost anyone can finish in the time allowed.
The gamified challenges
The tests whose names end in "Challenge" are the interactive, game-styled part of the suite.
• gridChallenge: working memory. Nine tasks of varying difficulty in 9 minutes, measuring the ability to hold something in mind while processing other information.
• switchChallenge: deductive reasoning. Six minutes, in which the candidate identifies the correct four-digit number sequences that produce a given result.
• gapChallenge: deductive-logical thinking. Six minutes of working out the pattern in a graphic and filling the empty cell.
• motionChallenge: complex planning capability. Six minutes of planning ahead and overcoming barriers between a given state and a desired state.
• digitChallenge: numeracy. Six minutes of mental arithmetic, finishing as many tasks as possible.
A sixth interactive product, chatAssess, is a gamified situational judgment test that runs about 20 minutes and asks the candidate to reply to work messages as they arrive. Aon offers downloadable practice-task PDFs for switchChallenge, gapChallenge and digitChallenge, the only official practice material in circulation. Readers comparing vendors may want to look at the Pymetrics test, which builds its profile from neuroscience-derived games, and at the Harver assessment, which leans more heavily on volume-hiring workflow.
Personality, simulations and interviews
Aon describes ADEPT-15 as its award-winning behavioural assessment, built on 15 behavioural dimensions, and says it forms the basis of the company's whole personality suite. Candidates are told to expect roughly 30 minutes to read and rate 100 statements about workstyle preferences, choosing which of each pair they agree with more. Aon's product documentation explains that ten of the 15 aspects come directly from the five factor model of personality and five from research on leadership effectiveness and learning orientation, that items are delivered through "computerized adaptive testing" where the next pair depends on previous answers, and that the item pool runs to more than 200,000 unique pairs. The "forced-choice" pairing is a deliberate design decision intended to make socially desirable answering harder. The British Psychological Society published a test review of the Adaptive Employee Personality Test in February 2024.
The rest of the catalogue is less visible to candidates: coding simulations across more than 30 programming languages, tailored job simulations built around situational judgment, remote proctoring, virtual assessment centres, and a video interview tool called vidAssess-AI that scores transcribed speech against competencies drawn from the ADEPT-15 model.
How the cut-e acquisition shaped the suite
Much of what candidates meet today came from a single acquisition. Aon announced on 4 May 2017 that it had acquired cut-e, an online talent assessment firm based in Hamburg that assessed more than 12 million candidates a year across more than 70 countries. Aon's own candidate page still describes the business as "Aon's Assessment Solutions (formerly cut-e)".
That history explains the split naming inside the suite. The "scales" tests are the cut-e instruments, while the Challenge games and ADEPT-15 came from Aon's side or were built afterwards. If you have been invited specifically to cut-e branded tests, our guide to the cut-e test covers that legacy line properly and this article will not duplicate it.
What an Aon assessment can and cannot tell an employer
Aon does not publish validity coefficients for individual products, so any specific claim about how well gridChallenge or ADEPT-15 predicts performance should be treated as unverified until an employer sees the technical documentation. What can be said is what the research literature reports about the categories these tests belong to.
The most careful recent estimates come from a 2022 re-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology by Paul Sackett and colleagues, who argued that decades of meta-analyses had systematically overcorrected for "range restriction", the artefact that arises when a validity study only includes people who were already hired. Their revised figures are noticeably lower than the numbers that circulated for twenty years. Cognitive ability tests came out at an operational validity of about .31 for predicting job performance, down from the .51 widely quoted from the 1998 Schmidt and Hunter review. Structured interviews came out highest at about .42, work sample tests at .33, and situational judgment tests at about .26. The same paper reports a standardized Black-White score difference of about .79 for cognitive ability tests, which is why adverse impact analysis remains a live issue in any selection system leaning on them.
Gamified formats raise a further question: do they measure what the traditional test measured? A 2025 review in the Journal of Intelligence by Anne Kato and colleagues reports a meta-analytic corrected correlation of about .45 between game-related assessments and traditional cognitive ability tests. The authors caution that game-related assessments may also tap engagement, persistence and familiarity with games, characteristics traditional cognitive tests do not set out to measure. A correlation of that size means substantial overlap alongside substantial independent variance, and the independent part is not automatically job-relevant.
Two honest limitations follow. A single unsupervised online score carries measurement error and should be read as a range. And a battery assembled from a vendor catalogue is only as good as the validation study behind that combination for that job.
How to approach an Aon assessment as a candidate
Aon's guidance is refreshingly plain. No prior knowledge is required, the recommended preparation is watching the official screencast videos to get used to the interface, and practising a format reduces nervousness more than cramming content does. Aon also tells candidates to request adjustments where they need them, giving extra time for dyslexia and screen magnification as examples. Among other employer-facing publishers, the Talent Q Elements test uses adaptive item selection in a similar way to ADEPT-15, while the Matrigma test is a single matrix-reasoning measure rather than a modular suite.
Getting a calibrated sense of your own reasoning before you meet an employer's battery is a different exercise from test preparation. The Reasoning and Intelligence Online Test was developed by RIOT IQ with psychometrician Dr. Russell T. Warne for adults aged 18 and over. It runs 15 subtests across six cognitive indices covering verbal reasoning, fluid reasoning, spatial ability, working memory, processing speed and reaction time, takes about 52 minutes, and reports scores on the mean-100, standard-deviation-15 scale. It does not replace an individually administered diagnostic evaluation. You can take the RIOT IQ test if a properly normed picture of your reasoning profile is what you are after.
Frequently asked questions
How long does an Aon assessment take?
It depends on which tests the employer selected. Aon says most processes involve no more than five tests and that individual tests usually run under fifteen minutes. A battery of ability tests plus ADEPT-15 therefore lands around an hour of actual testing.
Is there a pass mark for an Aon assessment?
Aon does not publish one. Cut scores are set by the hiring employer against its own comparison group and role requirements, so the same raw performance can pass for one job and not another.
What is the difference between an Aon assessment and a cut-e test?
Aon acquired cut-e in May 2017 and now describes the business as Aon's Assessment Solutions, formerly cut-e. The "scales" tests in the current catalogue are the cut-e instruments, and the Challenge games and ADEPT-15 sit alongside them under the Aon name.
Can you practise for the gridChallenge or switchChallenge?
Aon publishes official practice-task PDFs for switchChallenge, gapChallenge and digitChallenge, plus screencast videos for the rest. Familiarity with the interface helps. Practice does not meaningfully raise the underlying ability the test is trying to measure.
Should I guess on an Aon ability test?
Aon states that points are usually added for correct answers and deducted for incorrect ones on its performance tests, so random guessing is likely to hurt. Working quickly but carefully is Aon's own advice.
Does an Aon assessment give me an IQ score?
No. Some components measure reasoning abilities that overlap with those on intelligence tests, but the report an employer receives is a job-fit profile against a chosen comparison group, not a score on the mean-100 IQ scale.
References
1. Aon. (2026). Prepare for your online assessment. aon.com
2. Aon. (2026). Talent assessment products and tools. aon.com
6. Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., & Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection: Addressing systematic overcorrection for restriction of range. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11), 2040-2068. doi.org
7. Kato, A. E., Cheban-Gore, Y. M., Scherbaum, C. A., & Goldstein, H. W. (2025). Cognitive ability testing in the workplace: Modern approaches and methods. Journal of Intelligence, 13(6), 68. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Hero photo by Amtec Photos, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; cropped to 16:9.
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