Visma Interview & Assessment Preparation
Technical Interviews, Case Tasks, Ability Tests & the Visma Traineeship
Guide country context: Norway · Software & IT Services
Hiring processes can vary by country, role, business unit, and year.
Visma is the Nordic region's largest software group — around 14,000 people across more than 170 companies, headquartered in Oslo. That structure is the single most important thing to understand as a candidate: you are not applying to one employer with one process, you are applying to an autonomous product company that happens to be owned by Visma. Expect a recruiter conversation, one or more interviews with the actual team, and for many roles a practical task or case. Norwegian employers commonly add an ability test and a work-personality questionnaire, and Norwegian practice is to give you feedback on your own results.
Hiring Process
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1Application officialApply through the Visma careers site or the recruitment system of the specific Visma company. Visma also runs a 'Connect' talent network for candidates who want to be notified about openings rather than apply to a named role today.→ Name the specific Visma company and product in your application — a generic 'Visma' application reads as unresearched
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2Recruiter or hiring-manager screen commonly reportedAn initial conversation covering your background, motivation, working language, location and salary expectations. In Norwegian companies this call is unusually candid: expect to be asked directly what you want to earn and when you can start.→ Have a salary range in NOK ready and ask which Visma company and product team the role sits in
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3Technical or professional interview commonly reportedA conversation with the people you would work with, focused on how you actually work rather than on trivia. For engineering roles this covers your real projects, technical choices you made and why. Visma builds cloud business software, so data handling, integrations and reliability come up often.→ Prepare two projects you can discuss at architecture level, including what you would now do differently
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4Practical task or case role-dependentRole-dependent: a coding exercise or take-home task for developers, a design portfolio walkthrough for UX, a commercial case for sales and business roles, a data exercise for analytics. Usually discussed live afterwards rather than scored in isolation.→ Optimise for readable, explainable work — you will be asked to defend every choice
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5Ability and personality assessment role-dependentCommon in Norwegian recruitment for professional and graduate roles: a timed ability test (often matrix or logic based) plus a work-personality questionnaire. Norwegian practice is that you receive a feedback conversation on your own results, and the personality profile is normally used to structure the next interview rather than to screen you out.→ Practise timed abstract and logical reasoning; answer the personality questionnaire consistently and honestly
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6Second interview and team fit commonly reportedA further conversation, often with a wider group, exploring collaboration, autonomy and how you handle disagreement. Norwegian teams are flat and consensus-driven, so 'how do you work with people who outrank you' is a real question here, not a soft one.→ Prepare examples of disagreeing with a senior colleague and reaching a good outcome
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7References, background check and offer commonly reportedNorwegian employers weight references heavily and usually call them before making an offer. A consent-based background check is standard for finance-adjacent and public-sector-facing roles. The offer then covers salary, pension, holiday entitlement and notice period.→ Line up two referees who can speak to recent work and warn them in advance
Assessments
The most common Visma assessment for engineering roles: a realistic exercise you complete in your own time, or a live session with an engineer. Reviewers care about whether another developer could pick your code up in six months — Visma maintains long-lived business systems, and that context shapes what 'good' means here.
Measures: Practical engineering judgement, code readability, testing instinct, ability to explain trade-offs
- Write the README. State your assumptions, what you left out and why — it is often the highest-signal file you submit
- Include tests even when the brief does not ask for them; in business software, untested code reads as a risk signal
- Choose boring, obvious solutions and be ready to explain why boring was correct here
- Respect the stated time budget and say what you would do with more time rather than silently overrunning it
Common mistakes
- Over-engineering a small brief into a framework
- Submitting with no tests and no README
- Ignoring edge cases and data validation
- Spending three days on a four-hour task, which reads as poor prioritisation
- Being unable to explain a decision made by a library or a code assistant
Norwegian employers commonly use a short, strictly timed ability test for professional and graduate hiring. The most common format is matrix-style abstract reasoning — you infer the rule governing a sequence of figures — sometimes with numerical or verbal sections alongside. Visma does not publish which provider it uses, so prepare the format rather than a brand.
Measures: Abstract and logical reasoning, speed with accuracy, ability to infer rules from limited information
- Drill matrix and figure-series questions specifically — abstract reasoning is the format most people never practise and it is the one most likely to appear
- Work to a per-question time budget and move on deliberately; these tests are usually designed so that nobody finishes
- Sit it somewhere quiet on a proper screen, because small figures on a phone cost real marks
- Ask the recruiter whether feedback is provided — in Norway it usually is, and you are entitled to ask for it
Common mistakes
- Practising only numerical reasoning and being surprised by matrices
- Getting stuck on one hard item and losing four easy ones
- Taking the test on a phone or in a noisy room
- Assuming a specific branded test and drilling the wrong question style
- Treating a mid-range result as the end of the process — in Norwegian practice it is normally one input among several, discussed with you rather than used as a silent cut-off
An untimed questionnaire describing how you prefer to work: pace, structure, sociability, tolerance for ambiguity, response to conflict. In Norwegian recruitment this is normally used to structure the next interview — the interviewer explores the areas your profile raises — rather than to screen you out automatically.
Measures: Working style, collaboration preferences, structure versus flexibility, resilience, motivation drivers
- Answer as you actually are at work, not as you imagine a software company wants; the follow-up interview will test the profile against your examples
- Stay consistent — these instruments repeat similar items in different wording specifically to detect a constructed persona
- Answer at a steady pace; long deliberation over each item tends to produce a flatter, less useful profile
- Expect to be asked about anything unusual in the profile, and treat that as a conversation rather than a challenge
Common mistakes
- Answering as an idealised candidate and then contradicting the profile in interview
- Choosing the neutral midpoint everywhere, which produces an uninformative result
- Assuming there are correct answers
- Being defensive when the interviewer explores a trait
Used for traineeship, product, commercial and consulting-flavoured roles. You are given a realistic situation — a customer losing value from a product, a market to enter, a prioritisation conflict — and asked to reason to a recommendation, usually presenting it back.
Measures: Structured thinking, commercial judgement, prioritisation, clarity under questioning
- State your structure before diving in, then follow it visibly — the structure is most of the mark
- Make your assumptions explicit and quantify them, even roughly; unstated assumptions are the usual failure
- Land on an actual recommendation with a first step, not a balanced survey of options
- Name the risk in your own recommendation before the interviewer does
Common mistakes
- Analysing at length and never recommending anything
- Producing a generic framework with no numbers in it
- Ignoring implementation cost and change management
- Defending the first idea instead of updating on new information
Interviews
The core Visma interview. It is a conversation rather than an interrogation, and it is usually run by people who will work alongside you. Depth is probed by follow-up questions on your own projects rather than by puzzle questions.
Format: Conversation with the hiring manager and prospective colleagues, typically 45–60 minutes
What interviewers look for
- Real ownership of the work you describe, with the messy parts included
- Judgement about maintainability and the customer's actual workflow
- Ability to disagree constructively in a flat structure
- Curiosity about the product domain — accounting, payroll, HR, public sector
- Honesty about what you have not done
Focus areas to practise
- A technical decision you now regret and what you learned
- How you handled a production issue affecting real customers
- Working with legacy code or a migration you could not stop
- A time you disagreed with a more senior colleague
- How you decide what is good enough to ship
- Choose projects you can go three questions deep on; breadth impresses nobody here and depth is exactly what gets tested
- Say 'I do not know' early and cleanly when it is true — Norwegian interviewers read overclaiming as a serious negative
- Ask what the team's biggest current pain is, and follow up on the answer
- Show you understand who uses the software and what breaks in their day when it fails
Norwegian workplaces are flat, consensus-oriented and unusually protective of work-life balance. This round tests whether you will work well in that: autonomy without supervision, disagreement without escalation, and comfort with a manager who is a colleague rather than a commander.
Format: Interview with the manager and often a wider group, 30–60 minutes
What interviewers look for
- Genuine autonomy — deciding and acting without waiting to be told
- Collaboration and willingness to share credit
- Directness delivered without aggression
- Respect for other people's time and boundaries
- A reason for wanting this company rather than any software job
Focus areas to practise
- How you work when nobody is checking on you
- A conflict inside a team and what you did
- How you prefer to receive feedback
- Why Visma and why this particular product
- What you would want to change in your last team
- Talk about 'we' when describing team results and 'I' when describing your own decisions; getting this backwards is noticed
- Bring an example of raising a problem early rather than covering it up
- Do not perform hustle culture — long hours as a virtue signal reads badly in a Norwegian interview
- Ask about how decisions actually get made in the team
How this differs by role
The process is not the same for every role. Find the closest match to the job you applied for — the assessments and interviews below are the ones reported for that role family.
Software development & engineering
Assessments
- Take-home or live coding exercise
- System and data-model discussion
- Occasional ability test on graduate routes
Interviews
- Technical interview with engineers
- Architecture or code-review conversation
- Team-fit interview
Visma's products are accounting, payroll, HR and public-sector systems — domains where correctness and auditability beat cleverness. Candidates who talk about data integrity, migrations, backwards compatibility and not breaking a customer's payroll run land far better than candidates who optimise for algorithmic flair.
Management traineeship
Assessments
- Ability and personality assessment
- Case or business exercise
- Presentation
Interviews
- Recruiter screen
- Case interview
- Interviews with senior leaders
Visma describes its management traineeship as a one-year programme in which you lead five projects across different companies, business areas and countries. Selection therefore weights adaptability and speed of context-switching very heavily. Prepare evidence of walking into an unfamiliar domain and being useful inside a fortnight.
Summer internship & students
Assessments
- Practical task or coding exercise
- Possible ability test
Interviews
- Interview with the team
- Motivation and learning-orientation interview
Norwegian summer internships are recruited early — typically in the autumn for the following summer — and they are the main graduate pipeline. Applying in April is applying a season late.
Product, UX & design
Assessments
- Portfolio review
- Design or product case
- Take-home exercise
Interviews
- Portfolio walkthrough
- Product-thinking interview
- Cross-functional collaboration interview
Show the reasoning and the discarded options, not just the finished screens. Business software has hard constraints — regulation, accessibility, legacy data — and Visma teams look for designers who treat those as the interesting part.
Sales, customer success & business roles
Assessments
- Commercial case or role-play
- Ability and personality assessment
- Presentation
Interviews
- Competency interview
- Customer-scenario role-play
- Manager interview
Selling business software in the Nordics is consultative and low-pressure by international standards. Hard-closing role-play behaviour reads badly here; understanding the customer's accounting or payroll problem reads well.
Values & Framework
Visma describes a diverse and inclusive culture built around Scandinavian working norms — flexibility, individuality and a stated ambition for all of its roughly 14,000 colleagues to feel valued at work. Practically, that culture shows up in interviews as a preference for autonomy over supervision, directness over deference, and steady delivery over heroics. Because Visma is a federation of more than 170 companies, the specific team's own working style matters at least as much as anything corporate.
- Autonomy: describe something you decided and delivered without being told to
- Directness: describe disagreeing with someone senior and how you kept it constructive
- Domain: show that you understand who uses the product and what their day looks like
- Sustainable pace: describe fixing a process so the crisis stopped recurring, rather than a heroic all-nighter
- Inclusion: describe making space for a colleague's contribution
- Maintainability: describe choosing the simpler solution and why it was right
Recommended Practice Modules
Preparation Plans
- Find out which Visma company the role belongs to and what its product actually does — this is the highest-value hour you will spend
- Prepare two projects you can discuss for ten minutes each, including what went wrong
- Run one timed abstract-reasoning set to reactivate the format
- Decide your salary range in NOK; Norwegian recruiters ask early and directly
- Write down three questions about the team, the product and how decisions get made
- Daily timed abstract and logical reasoning practice, tracking accuracy not score
- If a take-home is coming: do one practice exercise end to end, README and tests included
- Prepare five STAR stories, including one disagreement with a senior colleague and one failure
- Read up on the product domain — accounting, payroll, HR or public sector — enough to ask an informed question
- Practise saying 'I do not know, here is how I would find out' until it sounds natural
- Daily reasoning practice alternating abstract, logical and numerical
- Complete a full mock take-home under the real time budget and have someone review it
- Build a story bank of seven examples covering autonomy, conflict, failure, delivery and learning
- Run a mock technical interview where the interviewer keeps asking 'why' three levels deep
- Research Visma's structure — the acquired-company model and what autonomy means inside it
- If a case is coming: practise two cases with a spoken recommendation and a named risk
- Reach consistent timed accuracy across abstract, logical and numerical reasoning
- Two full mock technical interviews with real code review afterwards
- Story bank of ten, rehearsed aloud rather than memorised
- Deepen domain knowledge: how payroll, accounting or public-sector procurement actually works
- Practise the Norwegian interview register — direct, plain, unboastful, comfortable with silence
- Prepare and rehearse a five-minute case presentation with a recommendation and a first step
- Line up and brief two referees
- Practise salary conversation in NOK, including the pension and holiday questions
Frequently Asked Questions
Sources & verification status
4 sources · 4 from the employer or another primary publisher
See each source and how far it goes
- Employer site Visma Careers — Join us Primary source, published by the employer — supports the group scale, the 170+ company structure and the stated culture
- Employer site Visma Careers — Our programs Primary source, published by the employer — supports the summer internship and the one-year management traineeship with five projects
- Employer site Visma Careers — Areas of work: Software Development Primary source, published by the employer — supports the engineering role families described here
- Employer site Visma Careers — Open positions Primary source, published by the employer — the live vacancy list; the authority on what is actually open
Confidence is calculated from each source, not assigned to the page. A source that cannot be opened, or that does not describe what we cited it for, cannot support a claim here regardless of how it was previously labelled.
How this guide was put together
Published by Job Tests Portal. It is compiled from the public sources listed above and has not been independently reviewed by a recruitment or assessment specialist. We are not affiliated with Visma and this guide is not endorsed by them.
We label where each statement comes from, and we would rather say “we could not verify this” than state something we cannot show you the source for. Hiring processes change often and vary by role, country and year, so treat everything here as a starting point and let your invitation be the final word.