How Do I Prepare for a HireVue Game Assessment in 24 Hours?

Deadline tomorrow, games never seen, mild panic — this is the single most common situation candidates land in, and the good news is that 24 hours is genuinely enough to move your score. Not because you will get smarter overnight, but because most of the applicant pool walks in cold, and familiarity is worth more than any other variable you can change today. Here is the plan, hour by hour.

Today, as soon as you can: one familiarisation session (60–90 minutes)

Play every game type once or twice — all of them, not just the fun ones. All 13 are free here, they run exactly like the assessment versions, and the goal of this pass is not a score: it is that no mechanic surprises you tomorrow. Rule-decoding during the real test is the most expensive way to spend your first thirty seconds.

As you go, note your percentile after each game. You are looking for your two weakest categories — that is where tomorrow's points are cheapest.

If you only have time to cover the most common types, prioritise one from each family: a memory game (digit span), a numerical game (Numerosity), an attention game (flanker or Stroop), and a spatial game (mental rotation).

Early evening: one targeted session (30–45 minutes)

Go back to your two weakest games only. Read their strategy guides first — two minutes of technique beats twenty minutes of blind repetition:

• Memory games → chunking, and what a good span is
• Numerosity / arithmetic → endings-first scanning and left-to-right mental math
• Stroop / flanker → beating interference and ignoring the outer arrows

Then play three or four rounds applying the one technique. Stop while you are improving — the point of today is encoding, not exhaustion.

Tonight: sleep is the highest-scoring item on this list

Working memory and reaction speed are both sleep-sensitive — one short night measurably drags down exactly the abilities these games score. A full night of sleep will do more for tomorrow's percentile than three more hours of practice tonight. The all-nighter "cramming" instinct is precisely backwards for a cognitive test: there are no facts to cram, only a brain to rest.

Tomorrow: pick your window and set the stage

• Take it when you are sharp. Invites give you a window — use it. For most people that means late morning, after breakfast, not 1 a.m. before the deadline alongside the rest of the panicked pool.
• Caffeine, timed. Your usual dose, ~30–45 minutes before you start, so it peaks during the games. No heroic double espresso if you do not normally drink it.
• Fix the environment (5 minutes): quiet room, laptop on power, stable connection, notifications and browser tabs closed, a real mouse if you have one. Milliseconds are points in half these games.

10 minutes before: warm up

Play two or three quick rounds of the games you found easiest — not the hard ones, you are warming up your hands and attention, not testing yourself. A cold start reliably eats the first rounds of the real assessment; a warm-up hands you those points back. Then start.

What NOT to do in the last 24 hours

• Do not make the real assessment your first look at the games. You usually get one attempt, and retakes are employer-controlled.
• Do not sacrifice sleep for practice. Wrong trade, every time.
• Do not spiral over one bad practice score. The games are adaptive — everyone ends at their limit, feeling stretched is the design, not a verdict.
• Do not learn new "systems" the night before. One technique per weak game, practised until it feels natural. Tomorrow is execution day.

If you have more than 24 hours

Lucky you — the same plan stretched over a week beats any cram. Short daily sessions, weakest games first, one technique at a time. The complete guide to game-based assessments maps the whole battery, and the 10 proven tips cover the in-game technique in depth. Start with a free baseline run — it tells you in five minutes where your points are hiding.