In this year's fall recruitingBarclays Online Assessment is one of the most highly discussed assessments among business line students. The overall difficulty is not really outrageous, but because it is a combination of SHL + Coding + Personality Test, the time is pressed rather tightly.Barclays Online Assessment is actually not difficult, but the pace is very fast and the number of questions is intensive. I've consolidated the real-life experiences of a few recent students to give you an idea of what to expect.
Overall process overview
Barclays OA (barclays online assessment) is split into two sets depending on the job path:
- Business / Ops / Finance Track → SHL (Numerical + Verbal + Logical) + personality test
- Technology Track → Coding (data processing class) + personality test
Whichever line you take, you'll end up doing a Values-Based Assessment, which is a values-based questionnaire designed to see if you meet Barclays' "Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence, Stewardship" five values. The purpose of the Values-Based Assessment is to see if you meet Barclays' "Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence, Stewardship" values.
Barclays Online Assessment Practice Questions
The following two questions are the type of original questions that students have recently encountered in the barclays online assessment, and they are perfectly suited to help you master the test.
Question 1: Numerical Reasoning
Question:
An investor buys 1,500 shares at $50 per share.
Shares then rose 15%.
He decided to sell 40% of them.
Q: What is the total value of the portion of stock sold?A. $30,000
B. $34,500
C. $45,000
D. $51,750
Parsing:
This question is very typical SHL Multi-Step Proportionality Calculation Problems, the test is whether you can break down the steps quickly:
- Shares rise 15% → IPO = 50 × 1.15 = $57.5
- Sell 40% shares → Number of shares sold = 1500 × 0.4 = 600 shares
- total value → 600 × 57.5 = $34,500
📌 Correct Answer: B
This type of numerical is like this: it's easy to compute, but it's very time-consuming. Hand speed + mindset is the key.
Question 2: Verbal Reasoning
Given short text:
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a business model that helps companies to be proactively socially responsible. Although there is no uniform legal definition of CSR, it is generally recognized that it requires companies to focus not only on economic results, but also on social and environmental impacts. "Triple bottom line" refers to people, plan and profit.
Question:
According to the original article, which of the following options is correct?
A. The main goal of CSR is to increase company profits
B. "Triple bottom line" refers to economic, social and governmental responsibilities
C. CSR signifies the need for companies to be accountable to a wide range of parties, including the public.
D. CSR has a globally harmonized and accepted legal definition
Parsing:
Corresponding to the original text on an item-by-item basis:
- A ❌ Wrong, the sentence clearly says that CSR is not only concerned with profits
- B ❌ wrong, triple bottom line is people / planet / profit, not government
- C ✔️ Correct and fully consistent with the original text
- D ❌ Wrong, the original text says there is no agreed-upon legal definition
📌 Correct Answer: C
Barclays verbal is like this: you pick whatever the original text gives you. You can't add your own interpretation.
Tech Direction Coding Experience
Tech OA is completely different from Business, it is a set of independent coding questions (usually about 1 question), the difficulty is moderate to low, most of the students encountered are data processing + combined statistics.
For example, a recent typical question (from several students' feedback, which has been structurally rewritten):
You're given a bunch of user purchase logs and asked to identify the "most frequently purchased combinations of items".
Similar to frequent itemset analysis, but with only 2-item or k-item counts.
Conventional Thoughts:
- First, put the items in the same order into a list
- expense or outlay
itertools.combinationsAll combinations - dictionary Statistical frequency
- Return to the highest frequency combinations
Python is very clean to write, not one of those violent structural questions.
Barclays is more important:
- clarity of thought
- Input and output formats are stable
- Don't write magic code that's too showy
Part 3: Personality Test (Values-Based Assessment)
Whether you go Business or Tech, this section is a must.
Barclays' values are clear:
- Respect: Respect for everyone
- Integrity: Integrity
- Service: Thinking of the customer
- Excellence: In Pursuit of Excellence
- Stewardship: long-termism, accountability
The title is usually:
- "Which of the following is most like you/least like you?"
- "What do you usually do in team conflicts?"
- "When you're under pressure, you're more inclined to ......"
As long as there are no contradictions, extremes, or utilitarianism, and consistency (back and forth) is maintained, there will be no problems.
Barclays OA is a fast-paced but ready-to-go assessment.
If I had to summarize it in one sentence barclays online assessment:
The content is not difficult but runs fast.Numerical to break down the steps, Verbal to catch the keywords, Coding to write cleanly.
The assessment mainly screens out people who are "mentally disorganized, slow to read, and prone to messing up their calculations" rather than algorithmic gurus or financial experts.
So the direction of preparation is very clear:
- SHL → time management + familiarization with question types
- Coding → Write more data cleaning and combinatorial statistics type questions
- Personality Test → Aligning with Barclays' values is sufficient.
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