Amazon assessments: Work Style, Work Simulation & SHL tests in 2026

Amazon’s assessment is built around its 16 Leadership Principles. The two most common stages are the Work Style Assessment (a personality questionnaire) and the Work Sample Simulation (a virtual job tryout), and many roles also sit SHL-style numerical and verbal reasoning tests — with a coding assessment for technical roles. The reasoning tests are standard SHL formats, so drilling the real SHL question types is the most direct preparation. Start with our SHL provider hub, or compare other firms in the employer assessment guides.

Source note: forge checks this guide against Amazon’s Leadership Principles and official online assessment guidance. Provider use can still vary by role, country and intake.

Quick summary: Amazon assessments in 2026

• The Work Style Assessment and Work Sample Simulation are the two most common online tests.
• Many roles add SHL-style numerical and verbal reasoning tests.
• Technical roles sit a coding assessment, often via CodeSignal or HackerRank.
• Some roles include a Versant language test for spoken and written communication.
• Every stage, and every interview, is scored against the 16 Leadership Principles.

Who is Amazon?

Amazon is an American multinational founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, spanning e-commerce, cloud computing (AWS), devices, advertising and logistics, with well over 1.5 million employees worldwide. Its culture is codified in 16 Leadership Principles — among them Customer Obsession, Ownership, Dive Deep, Bias for Action, Earn Trust and Deliver Results — that are quoted in job posts and scored at every hiring stage. Treat the principles as the marking scheme: every Work Style answer, simulation decision and interview story should map to one.

The Amazon Work Style Assessment

The Work Style Assessment is a personality questionnaire: you rate how strongly statements describe you, and Amazon maps the pattern against the Leadership Principles its team values. There are no “correct” answers in the cognitive sense, but extreme or inconsistent responses are flagged. Like any personality test, you cannot cram it — read each statement through the lens of the principles your role emphasises, and answer honestly. Our psychometric tests overview explains how these questionnaires are scored.

The Amazon Work Sample Simulation

The Work Sample Simulation — also called the Work Simulation, Job Simulation or Virtual Job Tryout — drops you into realistic tasks for the role. You might interpret a data chart, respond to a customer enquiry, prioritise a busy inbox, or pull relevant facts from several sources at once. It is close to an e-tray / situational judgement exercise and measures prioritisation, multitasking and judgement under the Leadership Principles — not raw maths. Read every prompt carefully and let “Customer Obsession” and “Dive Deep” guide which task you handle first.

What is SHL?

SHL is the world’s most widely used psychometric test publisher — its assessments screen millions of graduate and professional candidates every year. When an employer says you have an “online assessment”, it is very often an SHL test running on the SHL platform. SHL does not set a universal pass mark; each employer licenses the tests and sets its own cut-score, which is why the same SHL numerical test can screen at the 50th percentile for one company and the 80th for another. Our SHL provider hub and which SHL test am I taking? guide decode exactly what you have been sent.

The full SHL test suite (not just numerical and verbal)

Amazon’s reasoning sections use SHL-style numerical and verbal formats, its Work Style Assessment is a personality questionnaire in the same family as SHL’s OPQ, and the Work Sample Simulation behaves like a situational judgement exercise. So even though Amazon builds much of its own testing, the SHL suite below is the closest published match to what you will practise — and for corporate and analyst roles you may sit the SHL reasoning tests directly. Here is the full suite so nothing catches you out.

If your invitation email names a test you are unsure about, match the wording to the right guide with which SHL test am I taking? — the fastest way to stop preparing for the wrong format.

The Amazon SHL reasoning tests

Many Amazon roles also use SHL-style numerical and verbal reasoning tests. The numerical test reads data from tables and charts under a timer; the verbal test is true / false / cannot say. The maths is GCSE-level — the difficulty is speed and the engineered distractors. Our SHL Numerical Reasoning guide covers all five archetypes; here is a representative trap with an Amazon flavour. forge’s SHL question database shows gross-vs-net and wrong-base percentage traps together account for about 60% of wrong answers — fixing those two patterns is the fastest score gain.

Reading the format won't build the speed the timer tests — do timed reps. Practise SHL numerical free on forge

The coding test (technical roles)

For software and technical roles, Amazon adds an online coding assessment — often via CodeSignal or HackerRank — with data-structures and algorithm problems solved under a timer, plus work-style and behavioural questions tied to the Leadership Principles. Treat it like a coding interview: drill arrays, strings, hash maps, trees and complexity analysis. Our tech & product assessments guide covers the format.

The interviews and the bar raiser

Amazon’s interviews are almost entirely behavioural and Leadership-Principle-based. Expect questions like “Tell me about a time you disagreed with a decision” (Have Backbone) or “a time you went deep to solve a problem” (Dive Deep). One interviewer is a bar raiser — a trained assessor from outside the hiring team whose job is to keep the hiring bar high. Prepare 8–10 STAR stories, each tagged to a principle, and make sure the data and your specific actions are front and centre. See our video interviews guide for recorded rounds.

Related guides

• All employer assessment guides
• Goldman Sachs assessments
• JP Morgan assessments
• SHL Numerical Reasoning Test
• SHL Verbal Reasoning Test
• Situational judgement tests

Frequently asked questions

Note on accuracy: the test providers named in this guide reflect candidate reports and publicly available information as of 2026, and are provided for preparation guidance only. Employers do not usually publish which assessment provider they use, and these relationships change over time — Amazon may switch providers, run different tests for different roles, regions or intakes, or use a provider not listed here. Nothing on this page is confirmed or endorsed by Amazon or any test publisher, and it should not be relied on as a definitive statement of Amazon’s current process. Always confirm the exact test and provider from your official invitation email before you prepare.