Amberjack Assessment: What to Expect From the Blended Test
How the Amberjack blended assessment works: most and least situational judgement, email inbox reasoning items, video questions and the feedback report.
Most candidates who sit an Amberjack assessment never see the name Amberjack, except in the link. The invitation calls it an immersive assessment, an online blended assessment or a future potential assessment, and it runs at assessment.weareamberjack.com. Here is what it actually asks, and the one design decision that changes how you should sit it.
Who Amberjack is
Amberjack is a UK early-careers recruitment company, trading as Gradweb until 2016, that runs graduate, apprentice and placement campaigns for employers. Its assessment has carried several names: the Future Potential Assessment, the Future Potential Immersive Assessment, the High Potential Assessment, and now the Future Potential Blended Assessment. They are the same product line built on one model.
Employers that evidently use it include Stephenson Harwood, which names it on its own training contract pages and links a practice test on Amberjack's platform, and HS2, AtkinsRéalis, Morrisons and Virgin Atlantic, which appear in Amberjack's own case studies. It usually sits straight after the application form and before an assessment centre.
No clock, but every answer is timed
Employers tell candidates there is no time limit, and there is no countdown on the scored items. Amberjack's own phrase is that responses are “time recorded rather than time limited”. Nothing ends your sitting early, but the time you take on each item is logged.
Whether that time feeds your score is not published. Some prep sites say it does; Amberjack says only that it is recorded. The safe reading is the one that works either way: answer at a steady, deliberate pace, never rush, and never stall. Employers quote 30 to 45 minutes for the whole sitting, occasionally up to an hour, and most give you about a week to complete it.
What the sitting contains
The emails arrive in an inbox, in runs of three or four, between the scenarios. You cannot go back to an earlier item, and every item must be answered before Continue works. Accounts of real sittings vary because employers configure them, but the most common description is around 12 scenarios and 10 emails in three sections.
The scenarios are marked against effectiveness
They can feel like a personality questionnaire, but they are keyed: the instruction is to choose the most and least effective response. Two habits separate the keyed answers from their near misses. First, read who you are. The scenarios are written for someone in their first weeks or months, and the most effective response is one a new starter can take, dealing with the problem early and inside their own role and telling the person who owns it. Second, the least effective response is usually not the rudest one. It is the one that hides a problem, lets a deadline pass without a word, or goes around someone.
Each scenario maps to one of Amberjack's four pillars of potential: Grit, Creative Force, Applied Intellect and Digital Mindset. Your feedback report is written in those terms.
The emails are applied reading, not True, False or Cannot Say
On a verbal email, the three replies usually differ by one condition. One misses an exception buried in the last paragraph, one treats “may” as “must”, one gets the deadline wrong by a working day. List the conditions before you read the replies, and cross out each reply that breaks one. On a numerical email, the wrong answers are the ones you get by skipping a line of the table: a delivery charge, a mileage allowance, a contingency. Write each step on paper, then check which answer you would get if you had skipped one.
The video questions
Most sittings end with two to four recorded questions about your motivation for the role and why you would be a good fit. You can think for as long as you like, but once you press Record you have two minutes and one take, with no pause and no retake. An assessor watches them, or, with your consent, an AI scores the transcript, often only for candidates who clear the employer's cut-off on the scored items. Some newer deployments move them to a later stage.
How the result is used
The employer sees one overall score mapped to the four pillars, plus a breakdown, and sets its own cut-off. There is no published pass mark and no public norm, so nobody can honestly tell you what score you need. Every candidate who completes it usually gets an automated feedback report with hints and tips, whatever the outcome.
Five things that help
One trap: Ambertrack is not the test
Amberjack also runs Ambertrack, the application portal many employers use, usually at an address ending ambertrack.global. Tests launched from it can be other vendors': Network Rail's Ambertrack portal has sent candidates to Aon, Arctic Shores and Saville tests. If your test link starts assessment.weareamberjack.com, it is Amberjack's own assessment.
You can sit the full blended assessment, or the scenarios and the emails on their own, with no clock and your time recorded as Amberjack records it, on our Amberjack practice page.