About Bryq
What is Bryq?
Bryq is a talent assessment platform built on I/O psychology research that measures cognitive ability, behavioral traits, hard skills, and AI proficiency in one integrated assessment. Over 140 companies use Bryq to replace resume screening and gut-feel interviews with science-backed hiring data. Instead of filtering candidates by keywords and pedigree, Bryq builds an Ideal Candidate Profile for every role and scores each person against it. The result is a clear Fit Score that tells you who will actually perform in the job, not just who looks good on paper. Teams using Bryq have cut screening time by 80%, improved quality of hire by 3x, and reduced early turnover by 40%.
What does Bryq measure?
Bryq measures four dimensions of candidate fit in one assessment. Cognitive ability covers numerical reasoning, verbal reasoning, logical reasoning, and attention to detail. Personality and behavioral traits are assessed using the 16 Personality Factors framework, closely related to the Five Factor Model (O.C.E.A.N.). Hard skills assessments test role-specific knowledge. And the AI Proficiency Assessment measures how candidates actually work with AI tools in realistic workplace scenarios. Every dimension combines into a single candidate profile scored on Bryq’s standardized Fit Score (1-10 STEN scale), benchmarked against local and global comparison groups.
What is the science behind Bryq?
Bryq’s assessments are grounded in decades of I/O psychology research. The personality assessment draws on Cattell’s 16 Personality Factor theory (Cattell & Schuerger, 2003) and the Five Factor Model (McCrae & Costa, 1999). Research consistently shows that the combination of cognitive and personality assessments is the strongest predictor of job performance. In validation studies, Bryq predicts future job performance with 70%+ accuracy. For the full scientific methodology, see the Science page.
How is Bryq different from other assessment platforms?
Bryq combines cognitive ability, personality traits, hard skills, and AI proficiency into a single assessment scored on a validated STEN scale. No additional tools required. Most alternatives either test knowledge in isolation (TestGorilla offers seven separate AI assessments with no published research foundation) or focus on a single dimension like video interviews (HireVue does not measure AI proficiency at all). Criteria Corp has strong psychometrics but no AI proficiency measurement. CodeSignal is built for developer hiring, not the other 95% of your workforce. Bryq gives you one integrated, science-backed candidate profile. You don’t stitch together results from separate tests or separate vendors.
Who is Bryq built for?
Bryq serves mid-market and enterprise hiring teams, typically companies with 200 to 2,000+ employees. It’s used by talent acquisition leaders who want to screen faster without sacrificing quality, CHROs who need repeatable, bias-reduced hiring across teams, and HR operations managers who need an assessment that integrates with their existing ATS and goes live in under a week. Bryq works across industries including healthcare, financial services, retail, technology, telecommunications, manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals.
Assessments & How They Work
How does a Bryq assessment work?
You create a Job Assessment in Bryq and select the role. Bryq’s AI matching engine builds an Ideal Candidate Profile based on the cognitive, behavioral, and hard-skills requirements for that job, drawing on validated profiles for over 700 job titles. You invite candidates to take the assessment. After they complete it, Bryq scores each candidate against the profile and ranks them by Fit Score. You see a clear, data-backed breakdown before deciding who to interview.
What is the Ideal Candidate Profile?
The Ideal Candidate Profile is a data model that defines what success looks like for a specific role. It specifies the cognitive abilities, personality traits, and hard skills that predict strong on-the-job performance, based on validated psychometric research across more than 700 job titles. When a candidate completes the assessment, their results are scored against this profile to produce a Fit Score: an objective, standardized measure of candidate-role match.
What is a Fit Score?
A Fit Score is Bryq’s standardized 1-10 measure (STEN scale) of how well a candidate matches the cognitive, behavioral, and hard-skills profile of success for a specific role. It’s benchmarked against both local and global comparison groups. Beyond the overall Fit Score, hiring teams see dimension-level breakdowns: cognitive ability sub-scores (numerical, verbal, logical reasoning, attention to detail), personality trait profiles, hard-skills results, and AI proficiency scores across five dimensions. There’s no single pass/fail threshold. Bryq provides the data to make an informed hiring decision, not a binary gate.
How long does the assessment take for candidates?
The core cognitive and personality assessment takes approximately 25 to 35 minutes, depending on the role’s configuration. The AI Proficiency Assessment adds about 15 minutes. The experience is scenario-based and designed to be engaging rather than a grind through abstract multiple-choice questions. Candidates can complete it on any device with a modern browser.
Does Bryq prevent cheating on assessments?
Yes. Bryq uses multiple anti-cheating mechanisms to protect assessment integrity. Time limits prevent candidates from looking up answers. Randomized question sequences mean no two candidates see the same test in the same order. Browser lockdown features prevent tab-switching and copy-pasting. And AI-powered anomaly detection flags unusual patterns, like unusually fast response times or identical answer sequences across candidates, for human review. The scenario-based format also makes questions resistant to simple search-and-copy approaches.
AI Proficiency Assessment
What is Bryq’s AI Proficiency Assessment?
Bryq’s AI Proficiency Assessment is a scenario-based evaluation that measures how candidates actually work with AI tools in realistic workplace tasks. It’s tool-agnostic, takes approximately 15 minutes, and produces a five-dimension proficiency profile scored 0 to 100, not a pass/fail result. The assessment is built on six peer-reviewed research frameworks: the UNESCO AI Competency Framework, SFIA (Skills Framework for the Information Age), OECD AI Principles, and three additional academic competency models spanning workforce research and policy-grade standards. It measures practical AI capability across any role, any industry. Not what someone knows about AI. What they can actually do with it.
Why should companies assess AI proficiency in hiring?
75% of knowledge workers now use AI at work (Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2024). But most organizations have no way to distinguish between someone who uses AI as a force multiplier and someone who pastes everything into a chatbot without checking the output. Self-reported AI skills on resumes are unreliable. LinkedIn reported a 142x increase in members adding AI skills to their profiles (LinkedIn Workforce Report, 2024), with no way to verify what any of it means in practice. Meanwhile, 63% of employers say skills gaps are their primary barrier to workforce transformation (World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report, 2025). A validated, scenario-based assessment closes that gap. You learn who can actually work with AI before you hire them, not six months later.
When should I start assessing AI proficiency in candidates?
Now. Three forces are converging. First, AI adoption among knowledge workers has reached 75% (Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2024), meaning the vast majority of new hires will be expected to work with AI tools from day one. Second, regulators are moving: Article 4 of the EU AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689) requires organizations to ensure adequate AI literacy among staff who develop, deploy, or use AI systems. Third, uncritical AI users produce worse results than non-AI users, meaning a bad AI hire is costlier than a no-AI hire. Waiting another year to measure this skill is a risk, not a strategy.
What five dimensions does the AI Proficiency Assessment measure?
The assessment scores candidates across five research-validated dimensions: AI Task Strategy measures whether someone can decide what to delegate to AI versus retain for human judgment. Poor delegation wastes time or creates dangerous automation. Prompting and Interaction Quality measures how effectively they communicate with AI tools and iterate when results miss the mark. Prompt quality is the number-one determinant of AI output quality. Critical Evaluation tests whether they spot errors, hallucinations, and gaps in AI output. Uncritical AI users produce worse work than non-AI users. Ethical and Responsible Use evaluates understanding of privacy, bias, intellectual property, and regulatory risks. Adaptive Learning measures how quickly they pick up new AI tools without hand-holding. Each dimension is scored 0 to 100 across three proficiency levels: Foundational, Functional, and Advanced.
What proficiency levels does the assessment support?
Three levels, matched to different role requirements. Foundational covers entry-level and support roles: basic AI awareness, simple task completion, avoiding common pitfalls. Functional is designed for marketing, finance, operations, and HR roles: effective prompting, critical evaluation of output, and workflow integration. Advanced targets strategy, leadership, and AI-adjacent roles: complex multi-step workflows, governance considerations, and the ability to guide others in responsible AI adoption. You select the level that matches the role when configuring the assessment.
Is the AI Proficiency Assessment included in my Bryq plan?
Yes. It’s included in all Bryq plans at no additional cost. You activate it from your dashboard and add it to any role in two clicks. No IT project, no new vendor meetings, no separate pricing conversation.
Does the AI Proficiency Assessment test specific tools like ChatGPT or Copilot?
No. The assessment is deliberately tool-agnostic. It measures transferable skills that apply regardless of which AI tools a candidate has used. Testing for a specific tool creates a narrow, perishable result. Testing for proficiency across task strategy, prompting, critical evaluation, ethics, and adaptive learning gives you a durable picture of how someone works with AI today and how quickly they’ll adapt as tools evolve.
How is Bryq’s AI Proficiency Assessment different from self-reported AI skills?
Self-reported AI skills are unverifiable claims. LinkedIn reported a 142x increase in AI-related skill listings (LinkedIn Workforce Report, 2024), but there’s no way to distinguish real capability from keyword padding. Asking about AI in interviews measures how well someone talks about AI, not how well they work with it. It’s the difference between describing how to swim and actually swimming. Bryq’s assessment puts candidates in realistic scenarios that test real-world capability: task delegation, prompt quality, critical evaluation of AI output, ethical judgment, and workflow integration. The result is a five-dimension proficiency profile based on what candidates do, not what they claim.
Does the EU AI Act require companies to assess AI proficiency?
Article 4 of the EU AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689) requires organizations that develop, deploy, or use AI systems to ensure adequate AI literacy among their staff. The regulation doesn’t mandate a specific test. But a validated, scored assessment is the most defensible way to demonstrate compliance. Without documented measurement, proving “adequate literacy” becomes an opinion exercise with regulatory risk. Bryq’s AI Proficiency Assessment provides auditable, dimension-level evidence of candidate evaluation: exactly the kind of documentation regulators expect.
