1Huddle is Leveling Up Corporate Training

Newark-based company uses competition to “skill up” employees.

By Jim Pytell, Assistant Editor On Aug 3, 2020

According to Sam Caucci, founder and CEO of Newark-based 1Huddle, 91% of companies’ training dollars are spent on dry online courses, or live classroom-like training sessions – neither of which are very effective in accomplishing their goals of getting employees motivated to learn and to retain the information they are being taught. 

In fact, according to a study by Xerox, 87% of content learned in live training with a sales trainer is lost within 30 days. 

In 2015, Caucci began working on a concept called Sales Huddle. The idea was to create a game that managers can use to train their sales reps, so they didn’t have to keep hiring trainers for one-day training sessions. 

“I started reading about gamification and had the idea of taking everything an employee needs to know, including training, communication, onboarding, etc., and turning it into a game,” Caucci explains. “I was looking for a vehicle that you could use as an employee that you actually looked forward to using. … If employees feel like they are training, then we missed.” 

In 2017, after securing office space in Newark, 1Huddle was born. Over the past three years, the company has closed two rounds of financing and has grown from three employees to 19 full-time today. 

Caucci describes 1Huddle’s game experience as mobile quick-burst trivia, stating that he wanted a product that touched every corner of the workforce. 

“Not everybody understands Candy Crush, for example,” Caucci says. “We wanted a game that crossed over every generation.” 

Caucci says that managers can pick different topics to train on and give employees a chance to earn points based on how well they do. Some companies often give rewards, such as gift cards, to employees who finish at the top of a leaderboard for a given time period. 

“Every day, there are new challenges that can level you up in the workforce,” Caucci says, adding that anyone in the organization can make a game on the platform. 

Approximately 100 companies worldwide use 1Huddle, including the City of Newark, which uses the platform to help “skill up” residents who are looking for work. 

“When we moved to Newark, we realized that job training is a lot more than just training sales people,” Caucci says. “Today, our product is used in almost every type of job.” 

When building the platform, he adds that it was important to find an engineer that had no background in human resources. 

“I [didn’t] want them to know anything about how to build a technology for an enterprise,” Caucci says. “I [wanted] them to be an expert in consumer games. … I bought the industry knowledge about how training works, and [our engineer] brought the knowledge on how to build a cool game that people would keep coming back to.” 

Caucci credits much of the company’s success to coming at the market from this unique perspective, which also separated 1Huddle from other e-learning platforms. 

“With the rate at which jobs are changing now, you don’t have time to create a 100-slide e-learning module,” Caucci says, adding that clients can build training in the form of a game in less than one minute.

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