User profiles are profiles of a user’s soft skills and hard skills. Soft skills are interpersonal skills and personal attributes that allow people to effectively perform their work duties. Examples include critical thinking or communication skills. Hard skills on the other hand are technical skills that are task-focused and are very specific to the duties of the job. Examples could be performing a needs analysis for a management consultant or pitching to a client for a sales representative. In the user profiles, each employee/candidate’s skills are measured in the nugget.ai app based on how they behave in real job simulations and their scores from this simulation are compared to industry benchmarks for a specific job. The profiles can help identify a user’s fit to specific jobs and identify career paths that they may fit with that they never even thought about before!

An industry benchmark is the level of a skill that is required in this job to be successful based on reports of others in the industry. This benchmark is based on the job database O*NET, which has scores that correspond with each of our skills based on rankings provided by people in who were working the job.

Challenges are work simulations that involve work-based scenarios specific to the nugget.ai soft skills. The challenges ask a user what they would do or say in the work situation to allow them to demonstrate what decisions they would make and how they would behave on the job.

The nugget score is a contextualized metric that assesses a user’s match to a specific context using on their soft skill scores on our challenges. This can either indicate the fit of a user for a specific job (if your company is undergoing hiring) or a specific company (if your company is trying to identify the current skill levels of their employees – what we call benchmarking).

We have based our judgements of what is a good nugget score on the Canadian grading system. Using the percentage that indicates an A in most Canadian Universities, we judge an 80 and above to be a good nugget score

For now, the nugget score can only be improved by doing more challenges on for the same skill (i.e., if you want to improve your score on leadership, you need to complete another challenge that assesses a facet of leadership). Over time, we’ll be able to have users do multiple versions of challenges per skill facet, and the nugget score can will update with each challenge completed. This will allow users to complete development opportunities for each skill and have the changes in their skills reflected in their nugget score. Additionally, as we add more components to the nugget score (i.e., video/voice analysis, hard skill verification), the nugget score will change as users go through the measurement filters for each component.

nugget.ai provides badges in the app to award users for their progress and engagement. The more badges you achieve, the more you have engaged with the app, and the greater the chances are that your profile in the app is an accurate description of who you are as an employee. Employers who see that users have gained badges in the app are more likely to consider these users for a job.

There are three main elements that sets nugget.ai apart from similar companies. First, nugget.ai challenges are designed to be specific to work contexts, allowing companies and recruiters to see how candidates’ skills play out in situations that are relevant to the workplace and ultimately the job they are hiring for. Often, other assessment companies use the same assessment tool with every client and every project, failing to take into account unique aspects of the job and company. At nugget.ai, we allow the client to select the challenges that are relevant to them, to be assess the soft skills that are most important for their employees/candidates. Second, nugget.ai uses real job simulations to assess demonstrated skills and circumvents the issues of gaming, faking, and bias that more commonly used methods (e.g., self-report questionnaires, interviews) are subject to. Completing an assessment that focuses on demonstrated skills rather than self-reported skills also allows users to proudly show off their strengths to companies and recruiters. Lastly, artificial intelligence-powered algorithms are at the core of nugget.ai’s data models so nugget.ai is constantly updating insights based on new challenges completed by users, new information uploaded by users and companies, and new benchmarks created per job category.

nugget.ai has challenges relevant to nine specific soft skills (Leadership, Collaboration, Interpersonal Sensitivity, Communication, Work Management, Systems Fluency, Self-Management, Improvement Focus and Critical Thinking). Each of these soft skills is broken into multiple challenges, lending to a total a total of 44 nugget.ai challenges. Each challenge allows us to measure the specific aspects of each soft skill that is most relevant to the job and company.

It is important to clarify that challenges cannot on their own predict performance on the job. However, what nugget.ai offers enterprises is an objective and powerful way to correlate data from the challenges to real performance data (e.g., performance ratings, 360 feedback) from the company. By asking existing employees from major performance categories (e.g., top performer, average performer, developing performer) to complete the nugget.ai challenges, nugget.ai can produce predictive models that can accurately predict which candidates are more likely to do well in a given role.

Although the nugget.ai challenges are created in a specific way to make sure they can accurately assess our soft skills, we understand that the more similar the context of an assessment is to that of your company, the better able we are to assess the relevant soft skills of the employees/candidates for that company. Therefore, we do allow clients to adapt our challenges to better fit their context, as long as they are following our specific guidelines. This ensures we can provide them with challenges more relevant to their company context while still providing accurate scores on the soft skills relevant to the job/company.

nugget.ai can help you quantify the skills-based strengths of your team/company. We can pair these insights with company data, including performance groupings and departments, to gain more nuanced insights of what skills are driving success in the company. By providing profiles of each of your employees, nugget.ai can help determine skills gaps of individual employees or teams, as well as areas that team members complement one another.

nugget.ai can provide you unique information about your candidates based on their behaviour in our challenges. Candidate profiles can help determine which candidates have the relevant skills for the job you are hiring for. Instead of basing the assessment of candidate skills on a self-report method, you can be more re-assured that the candidate has these skills because they demonstrated them in a job-relevant activity and not because they simply stated they have the skills. Not only will you be able to see the demonstrated skills of a candidate, nugget.ai can also provide you with a short list of the candidates best suited for the job so you do not have to spend hours of your time sifting through candidate’s resumes. There may even be candidates who you would not naturally consider based on their previous experience but based on their demonstrated skills they would be a perfect fit! nugget.ai can help you identify these candidates. Finally, there may be employees within your organization that are perfect for a position that you are hiring for, but you didn’t know it. By having current employees complete a nugget.ai challenge, we can help you to discover the best internal hires for your job opening.

nugget.ai challenges are different from other traditional hiring methods because they place people in work simulations to make decisions and exhibit how they would behave on the job. These simulations allow people to demonstrate their skills and abilities rather than self-reporting these skills and abilities. These simulations make nugget.ai challenges stand out from other hiring methods that rely on interviews and questionnaires.

Sometimes hiring methods ask the person to report the skills you have. Although this seems like an intuitive method, many people inaccurately report these skills, or outright lie. Candidates may also just not be able to accurately self-assess their skills. If any of these situations occur, then you may hire candidates who do not actually have the skills for the job. This can decrease the performance of your organization and could cause you to have to fire this candidate and start the whole hiring process over again (and who wants that?). Therefore, methods like nugget.ai, that focus on the demonstration of skills, can help you to hire your candidates using a more reliable method, ensuring you are hiring the right candidate right off the bat.

Not at all! All users need to do are to read instructions carefully, review the tutorial as many times as they need to be more comfortable with the interface, and then dive right in. We ask that users respond to each situation as naturally as they can to approximate what they would do in real life, so all we need is for users to be themselves!

That is okay! The timer is there to keep to the process standardized between users, but it is not the case that your responses get thrown out just because you did not feel as if you completed the task within the allotted time frame. We still analyze the responses you were able to come up with and present results based on this data.

No, you are asked to complete each challenge in one sitting, but in between challenges, you can take breaks, close the browser, grab coffee, and come back.