went through EY's online assessment twice (different roles, 8 months apart) and want to document what stayed consistent and what changed.
Format. HackerRank platform both times. Two coding problems. 90 minutes total. You also get a separate window for the situational judgment section, which is not timed together with the coding. SJT was roughly 20-25 questions both times.
Coding difficulty. Both times: one easy-medium problem and one medium problem. The first attempt had a string manipulation problem and a sliding window/frequency count problem. Second attempt had a recursion problem (felt like a simplified tree traversal) and something involving finding duplicates in a list with constraints. No dynamic programming, no graph theory requiring advanced algorithms, no bit manipulation. Think LC easy-medium range and you are in the right neighborhood.
What they actually care about. Edge cases matter. Both times there were hidden test cases that caught off-by-one errors and empty input scenarios. I passed more test cases on my second attempt specifically because I took 3 minutes at the end to handle nulls and empty arrays. Writing clean, readable code also seems to factor in somehow because the first assessment I rushed and scored lower on the code quality metric than the second.
The SJT section. Underestimated by most candidates. EY publishes their values (integrity, teaming, building a better working world) and the SJT questions test whether your instincts match those values. The 'best and worst' format punishes you if you're off on either end. Prep by reading EY's published competency framework, it's freely available and the SJT is not subtle about what it's testing.
Timeline. OA invite came about a week after the recruiter screen both times. Results communicated within 5 business days.
not the hardest technical bar you'll face this cycle, but don't sleepwalk through it either.