Entrance exams for junior high, high school, college, postgraduate studies... After countless exams, fresh graduates are finally ready to knock on the door of their ideal careers, only to find an endless array of assessments still waiting for them.
Relevant data shows that over 60% of large and medium-sized enterprises incorporate online written tests into their campus recruitment processes. Furthermore, with the widespread adoption of AI, most of these assessments no longer require HR personnel to grade them personally; AI directly screens the results, and even interviews can be conducted by AI.
Academic qualifications and internship experience are no longer the ticket to an interview; whether you can pass the aptitude tests, personality tests, and AI video interviews now determines if you have the qualification to be seen.
To cope with these assessments, many job seekers jokingly call themselves suffering from 'assessment anxiety' on social media. The prevailing belief is that most online tests are unrelated to the actual work of the position and are merely tools for companies to screen candidates en masse. But no one can avoid them.
For countless young people, the daily routine of job hunting has ultimately become an endless cycle of mass applications, practicing test questions, being a mere participant, getting eliminated, and applying again.
This issue of 'Micro-Story' will delve into the job seekers trapped by these assessments.
Here are their real stories:
Trapped in Endless Tests
Since submitting her graduation thesis in April, 25-year-old Yangliu has spent several hours every day practicing test questions, listening to lectures, reviewing answer strategies, and sometimes even recording videos of herself on her phone to check the effect.
Don't get it wrong—she is not preparing for civil service or graduate school entrance exams. Every set of questions she practices is for one thing only: dealing with the massive wave of online assessments for the upcoming autumn recruitment.
Every July and August is the core window period for autumn campus recruitment, also the time when job-seeking activity is most concentrated throughout the year.
Data shows that in 2025 alone, 12.22 million college graduates entered the job market. Over 31% of fresh graduates submitted more than 20 resumes in the initial stage of their job search, and 42% of previous-year graduates reported being invited by companies to take assessments after submitting their resumes.
Facing a massive influx of resumes, simple academic screening and initial resume filtering are no longer sufficient to meet companies' recruitment pace. Nowadays, not only state-owned enterprises, central enterprises, and leading internet giants but almost all large-scale enterprises have made online application (resume submission) and participating in written tests or assessments mandatory steps before interviews. Some companies have even started using AI interviews.
Image | Some companies explicitly mention a written test phase in related online autumn recruitment information
"AI interviews use algorithms to observe the candidate's body language and emotional changes, analyze their verbal logic, and finally, AI screens whether they proceed to the next stage," Yangliu explained. Some AI interviews are very strict; uncoordinated body movements or wandering eyes might be flagged as 'cheating.'
Besides AI interviews, written tests have also become more difficult than before. Some sections have time limits, and they might even suddenly ask you about specific details of certain company projects.
To improve her answer accuracy and efficiency, Yangliu had to prepare on multiple fronts—even though she graduated from a 211 university, her degree is not a significant advantage in the job market. "Without hardcore professional barriers, I can only rely on mass applications, taking many assessments, and trying widely, using quantity to exchange for probability."
Yangliu's senior used a similar strategy, applying to over 100 positions, taking more than 20 written tests, and finally finding a job. "This year, there are even more graduates, so the situation might be more severe," Yangliu said.
Currently, company written tests are mainly divided into three categories: position-specific professional ability tests, general aptitude tests similar to civil service exams, and personality tests used to screen for specific traits.
Image | Introduction to online assessments by a certain career service agency
These three question types are randomly combined with varying difficulty levels, so one can only rely on advance preparation as a safety net.
Her senior summarized a preparation formula: Professional questions are closely related to the business and are the most difficult; you can only accumulate problem-solving ideas by analyzing industry cases. Aptitude test questions have no shortcuts; only massive practice makes perfect. For personality tests, you cannot answer freely; you must simulate repeatedly to align with the workplace's core expectations for employee resilience, ambition, and stability.
In a way, this is also the job-seeking path for all current graduates: To not miss any opportunity, the vast majority of graduates choose to apply in bulk. The cost of mass applications is being swept along by countless online assessments.
Xu Wang, who just secured a summer internship offer, feels similarly. "Nowadays, even finding a summer internship requires participating in multiple assessments."
In the past two years, the number of internship positions in the market has shrunk by over 15%, while the number of applications has surged dramatically. The competition of 'many monks, little gruel' is intensifying.
To gain an advantage, starting in February this year, Xu Wang threw himself wholeheartedly into assessment preparation. By June, he had submitted over 120 applications, triggering 32 written test invitations.
After screening out some positions, Xu Wang took on 21 tests and ultimately secured 7 internship offers.
In contrast, Li Xin, an international student from the UK, was less fortunate. In the same timeframe, she submitted 15 internship applications, 12 triggered written assessments, and only 1 progressed to the interview stage.
"The written tests contain many obscure professional terms and comprehensive assessments that require long periods of thought," Li Xin said. The most mentally exhausting one required her to use a designated AI tool to answer continuously for three hours and independently complete a logically sound, data-rich, and comprehensive industry research report.
In the past, such tasks might only be undertaken independently by professionals with 3-5 years of experience. Now, they have become written test questions for newcomers.
Thinking they could escape over a decade of exam-driven competition after leaving school, they never expected that the first step into the workplace would be entering an even denser, harsher, and more inescapable cage of exams.
"Our generation seems to be born to be exam-taking tools," Li Xin often jokes.
"You Could Also See It as a Compliance Test"
Compared to school exams, pre-employment tests are more like a never-ending, answerless 'compliance test' that consumes you endlessly.
In one written test, Li Xin spent over two hours answering professional questions related to data maintenance and merchant operation optimization for a Key Account position at an internet company. However, the system wouldn't reveal her score or accuracy; she could only wait to see if anyone would notify her within two days.
After entering the interview, Li Xin was surprised to find that the interviewer didn't ask any business-related questions at all. All the questions revolved around her personal experience: "Your undergraduate internship experience isn't vertical enough. Why? Didn't you know what you wanted to do back then? How can I be sure you're passionate about this position?"
Towards the end of the interview, the HR representative was even more direct: "Aside from you being a local, I don't see any traits in your experience that fit this position."
Ultimately, Li Xin 'failed' the interview. The reason given was 'not a good match.'
This left Li Xin puzzled: "If they could tell I wasn't a good match for this position during the resume screening phase, why set up so many steps, keep me until the interview, and then tell me I'm not suitable?"
However, from the perspective of companies and HR, setting up these complex hurdles to challenge applicants is also a helpless move under the imbalance of market supply and demand.
Chen Chen, an HR professional with years of experience at a major internet company, explained that hiring fresh graduates carries higher risks than experienced hires. Most people's resumes are relatively simple and don't reveal their logical ability, learning ability, or resilience when facing actual work problems. Therefore, they can only screen through complex question design.
At the same time, the逐年暴涨 skyrocketing number of fresh graduates each year has infinitely lowered companies' tolerance for hiring mistakes. The number of graduates in 2026 is approximately 12.7 million, with graduates from top-tier 985 and 211 universities alone reaching the hundreds of thousands. In stark contrast, all the leading internet companies in China combined offer only about 25,000 summer internship positions per year.
Image | Scene from the 2026 Heilongjiang Talent Week
"This means that even if only one-third of the students from 985 and 211 schools intend to apply for internet summer internships, at least 300,000 people will be competing. Assuming each person applies for an average of 10 positions, that's 3 million resumes to process."
Chen Chen stated that without these assessment stages, companies simply wouldn't have a way to screen candidates in bulk.
Furthermore, with rising labor costs and the widespread adoption of AI, many companies themselves have entered an era of improving efficiency and tightening budgets. Even experienced employees face constant optimization and layoff risks, so companies are even more cautious about hiring new employees.
"We still hire fresh graduates now, but the graduates we bring in all have at least 2-3 internship experiences lasting around 3 months each, equivalent to the level of newcomers with 1-2 years of experience in the past," Chen Chen said.
This also means that pure newcomers are no longer welcome in the industry.
"Once we hire a newcomer who cannot quickly adapt or perform in the role, our recruitment department gets complaints from the business units and faces warnings or performance deductions," Chen Chen explained. To avoid recruitment risks and improve efficiency, companies can only continuously raise the hiring bar, increase the difficulty of written tests, and use high-intensity assessments to select the best from the best.
Therefore, Chen Chen doesn't deny the term 'compliance test.' "If you can't withstand these pre-employment tests during the job search, it will be very difficult to establish yourself in the future workplace. The written test itself is also a low-cost way to screen out potential hires who are more emotionally stable and compliant."
Moreover, for companies, compared to headhunting, written tests are relatively inexpensive.
"Having 200 people take a written test for one position costs less than half of what a headhunter charges. For the company, the written test is almost a zero-cost, zero-risk, high-return screening solution for newcomers."
As newcomers increase, positions decrease, and patience for training newcomers diminishes, the vicious cycle of assessment competition has become an unsolvable industry norm.
Struggling with All Their Might to 'Land' a Job
As pre-employment assessments become increasingly competitive, gray-market demands have also emerged. A commercialized gray industry chain, attached to job-seeking assessments and specifically serving fresh graduates' exam needs, has begun to permeate the entire graduation-season job market.
In major job-seeking communities and social media platforms, some people specifically compile and aggregate 'positions without written tests' lists. Such compilation posts are always traffic goldmines, instantly being saved, forwarded, and bookmarked by graduates upon release.
Image | In reality, the number of companies explicitly stating 'no written test' is extremely scarce in recruitment.
"Some people openly sell access to related positions at fixed prices," Chen Chen said, having seen people openly claim in their social media circles that they could secure state-owned enterprise jobs for a fee of 150,000 RMB. "But as things get stricter now, such things are mostly scams or only lead to outsourcing jobs."
Since the vast majority of job seekers can't avoid the written test stage, corresponding businesses have emerged: from test question banks and AI-powered answering services to guaranteed pass packages and full-process job-seeking guidance, each layer feeding on graduates' anxiety.
Li Xin tried buying a question bank.
When summer internship positions opened, she learned from friends that most companies' assessments rely on mainstream third-party platforms like Beisen, Zhiding, Niuke, and Saima—these platforms have fixed question banks, and the system randomly draws questions to form tests. Even though question types vary, the core test points and answering strategies are traceable.
"Taking the Beisen question bank as an example, I saw online that some say if you score below 50, your resume might be automatically filtered out and not reach the interview selection stage," Li Xin said. After learning this 'unspoken rule,' she felt particularly anxious and ultimately bought a set of Beisen assessment questions online for a low price of 4.9 RMB, claiming to be the 'most comprehensive on the entire internet.'
Image | Beisen question bank sold online
The question bank content is all-encompassing, covering past years' real questions, answering技巧 skills, standard answers for personality tests, and quick-solving思路 for aptitude tests. The purchase page showed that this document had already sold over 2,000 copies, meaning at least two thousand anxious graduates like her had clicked 'pay.'
Given mass applications, practicing questions is ultimately a笨办法消耗极大的体力消耗笨办法 that requires significant stamina. The autumn and spring recruitment windows are highly concentrated. A single student often submits hundreds of resumes and faces twenty or thirty assessments in succession. Aptitude tests, situational questions, and personality tests come one after another. No one has the energy to practice all the questions.
Many start taking risks, using AI to search for answers and cheat to提高通过率抬高通过率.
Image | The interviewer's system may display which candidates are suspected of cheating; in Chen Chen's words, he would directly screen out such candidates.
Fresh graduate Xu Wang is very familiar with these tactics—during summer internship recruitment, many of his classmates employed such methods.
"Each company's requirements are different," Xu Wang explained. Many中小企业的线上笔试中小企业的线上笔试 do not require enabling the camera or microphone; the entire test is done on a webpage, with supervision几乎形同虚设几乎形同虚设. Job seekers simply open AI tools, search for answers while answering, and can submit a logically complete答卷答卷 within a few dozen minutes.
Even when facing strict assessments with single-camera or dual-camera全程录像全程录像, the圈子圈子 had long prepared countermeasures: virtual machines, private browsers, device isolation—using technology to bypass system风控风控 and search for answers悄无声息悄无声息.
"There is a cost, though. If detected cheating, it might affect subsequent recruitment," Xu Wang said. Many of his competitors 'went under' this way.
Nevertheless, Chen Chen stated that every year, many job seekers still take the risk and cheat, betting on their luck.
"Even though there's a chance of being flagged for cheating, 'fortune favors the bold,'" some总结道总结道.
Practicing questions and自助作弊自助作弊 are just small-scale actions. To secure a stable and decent job, many middle-class families are willing to spend tens of thousands of RMB to sign up for '全程陪跑全程陪跑' services offered by career agencies.
"Every autumn and spring recruitment peak season, our business immediately booms," said Wang Weijia, who once worked at a career training institution, revealing the industry's引流套路引流套路. During recruitment seasons, a large number of accounts渲染就业焦虑渲染就业焦虑 appear online in batches, most of which are水军账号水军账号 operated by同行同行.
Online题库售卖帖题库售卖帖 and晒单帖晒单帖 are随处可见随处可见,帖子帖子 constantly渲染渲染 'successful上岸上岸 with coaching,' deliberately放大放大 graduates' job-seeking恐慌恐慌, all ultimately paving the way for引流引流 to高价付费业务高价付费业务.
Agencies charge based on company tiers. Guaranteed pass packages for written tests at internet giants, state-owned enterprises, and central enterprises are priced动不动上万动不动上万, "the highest can reach 36,800 RMB." Services bundled include内部内推内部内推, one-on-one远程协助答题远程协助答题, pre-exam真题梳理真题梳理, and even承诺承诺 'full refund if not passed' to打消打消 students' and parents'顾虑顾虑.
Image | A case shared by a career agency, claiming a student landed a Product Manager position at a major internet company through a 43,800 RMB全程陪跑全程陪跑 service.
Wang Weijia observed that the profile of those willing to pay a hefty price is very clear: middle-class families with decent financial means but no industry connections to help their children find jobs. "These parents lack the ability to pull strings for their children. Watching their children fail repeatedly at the written test stage, filled with anxiety, they would rather place a heavy bet just to secure a job entry ticket for their child."
Such衍生服务衍生服务 sell very well. The most popular 'background enhancement' costs around 10,000 RMB. "Simply put, it's paying to have your name listed on project rosters or purchasing short-term paid internships to包装包装 an impressive履历履历 and提高面试通过率提高面试通过率," Wang Weijia explained. Additionally,配套配套面试辅导面试辅导, career choice consultation are generally priced at 500 RMB per hour per subject, and many families are willing to pay this fee.
Image | Service pricing of a certain career agency
"Earlier, I found it hard to understand the concept of 'paying to work,' but after seeing more in recent years, I realized such businesses are booming year by year. Even requiring a deposit of several thousand RMB first, customers still keep coming," Wang Weijia感慨感慨.
On one side, companies continuously升级测评难度升级测评难度,抬高筛选门槛抬高筛选门槛, using rigorous assessments to筛选优质人才筛选优质人才,测试新人抗压能力测试新人抗压能力与服从性与服从性. On the other side, fresh graduates疯狂刷题疯狂刷题,付费买题付费买题,借助AI作弊借助AI作弊,购买保过服务购买保过服务, using every means to突破考核壁垒突破考核壁垒 to successfully 'land' a job.
No one wants to陷入无休止的应试内卷陷入无休止的应试内卷, and no one wants to依赖灰色手段求职依赖灰色手段求职. But in a job market with岗位稀缺岗位稀缺,竞争白热化竞争白热化, and淘汰无底线淘汰无底线, everyone is被大势裹挟被大势裹挟,只能被动挣扎只能被动挣扎,全力突围全力突围.
Changed Lives
The白热化白热化的求职考核与招聘节奏,一点一点地掰正了年轻人原本清晰的人生规划.
Yangliu originally had plans to pursue a Ph.D. Her teachers and seniors劝她冷静劝她冷静 time and again: nowadays, the threshold for academic positions in universities is越来越高越来越高, job prospects for humanities Ph.D. holders are狭窄狭窄, and emerging into the job market as a fresh graduate at thirty, with no work履历履历, would only make就业就业 even more被动被动.
After weighing her options several times, she temporarily搁置搁置 her academic理想理想 and plunged into the求职人海求职人海,开始了开始了 one笔试拉锯战笔试拉锯战 after another.
Li Xin originally planned to go to the United States for a one-year master's degree. But she carefully calculated the job-seeking节奏节奏: the one-year U.S. program is short, with graduation in June the following year. The graduation year刚好撞上刚好撞上 autumn recruitment. According to the current recruitment rule where companies lock in candidates a year in advance, she would have to仓促开启仓促开启 job search备战备战 even before setting foot on campus.
To争取喘息的余地争取喘息的余地, she临时改换赛道临时改换赛道, switching her target institutions to the UK. The UK system issues graduation certificates in December each year. Enrolling in 2025 would顺延划为顺延划为 the 2027 graduating class, finally giving herself an额外多出额外多出一整年的缓冲期缓冲期.
Li Xin has a friend who once满怀憧憬满怀憧憬,立志成为一名立志成为一名 free travel blogger. Faced with the现实现实 of连续多月投递无果连续多月投递无果, they最终妥协最终妥协, accepting an internet sales position. In the industry's求职履历求职履历, such positions are not considered优质经历优质经历 and might even become短板短板 for future job changes.
But they had no more挑选余地挑选余地, only hoping to尽快拿到尽快拿到 offer顺利上岸顺利上岸 and早日结束早日结束 the遥遥无期的等待遥遥无期的等待.
To this day, Li Xin still has零 offer零 offer and can only重整心态重整心态,备战备战 the even more竞争激烈的竞争激烈的 autumn recruitment.
She occasionally jokes about the闭环闭环 that has formed: "It's good. Graduates use AI to write theses, companies use AI for assessments, we use AI to search for answers, and then use AI to work after getting in. Everyone is魔法对轰魔法对轰."
This article is from the WeChat public account 'Micro-Story' (ID: xianweigushi), author: Micro-Story Editorial Department
