FULL TRANSCRIPT
Chris Russell:
As you said, Dan Sines is the CEO at Traitify, a visual-based personality assessment platform that identifies best fit candidates, especially in high volume and high turnover environments, like the retail industry, an entrepreneur to the core. Dan has an extensive background in user experience and graphic design. In the past he's managed design firms, and previously started a social media marketing and production firm. Dan, welcome to RecTech. It's great to have you.
Dan Sines:
Thanks so much. I appreciate it.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. Looking forward to chatting with you today. I guess, explain for the audience, what is a visual-based personality assessment? I wonder if you can kind of describe the tool to the audience for us.
Dan Sines:
Sure. At the core of what we've created at Traitify is this visual-based personality assessment. We show people a series of images. They simply say, "Me or not me," to them, and it builds a personality profile in about 90 seconds. Basically, we're taking that phrase, "A picture's worth a thousand words," and trying to measure the thousand words behind each of those images.
Chris Russell:
Okay. Why is the visual aspect of your product so important? If you can explain a little of the science around that and why it was created that way?
Dan Sines:
Sure. My background is in design, and my co founders background is in visual production. We are both kind of very visual people. We kind of re approached the method for measuring personality from a different point of view. People process pictures about 60,000 times faster than words. It's kind of just innate in our DNA of what we are and how we operate. By showing a picture, we're able to get a faster, more gut visceral reaction from a person. That allows us to ask more questions, in a shorter period of time, increasing the validity of that, and also decreasing the kind of cheating that comes with that typically.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. Interesting. Where does your product typically fit in the recruiting workflow? Is integrated with the ATS? Is it standalone? Talk to me about how it all works from the recruiter's point of view.
Dan Sines:
Traditionally, we're integrated into the applicant tracking system as part of the apply process. What really makes us unique is that about 96% of people who've taken our test complete it. In most cases, everyone is going through the assessment, and completing it, and giving those results into the applicant tracking system. We also do work pre-apply, because the test is fun and interesting. We have another product line called The Track, where people take the test to figure out what jobs might match them as a good fit. We do work on both sides of the apply button.
Chris Russell:
Okay, I read too that, let me see here, it says, "Candidates also have the ability to share results socially, accruing goodwill back to the company." Talk to me about that. That's interesting.
Dan Sines:
Yeah. That happens in all of our cases for the attract side, and for some of our customers on the select side. Basically, the candidate can then view their results. We have a candidate friendly profile, where it's giving kind of the more high level information, the more positive information, ways to be constructive in the interview. We find that people like to share those results out with their friends, which helps to promote the job and push more people back to apply.
Chris Russell:
What might that actual a piece of content look like? Could you describe it for me?
Dan Sines:
Sure. The candidate will see kind of their overall kind of personality type, which is the constellation of their five dimensions. We're measuring what's called the big five. It's a personality inventory that's been around for about 50 years, consider the gold standard of measuring personality for turnover reduction and workplace performance. We show those five dimensions, where you fell on each one of them, and some of the strengths and weaknesses associated with that.
Chris Russell:
Cool. We'll talk more about the product later. I want to kind of talk about the current environment we're in, Dan, hiring freezes, layoffs, furloughs. These are kind of terms that have hit the industry all of a sudden. A lot of your fellow HR tech companies are laying off. LinkedIn just Laid off 6% of their staff. How are you dealing with this at Traitify with your company? I know you guys just raised some money back in May, but talk to me about the challenges, or what you're seeing with this, and how it's affected your business overall.
Dan Sines:
Sure. I mean, it is a tough climate, and challenging for our customer base all over. We predominantly work with high volume hiring companies, which often are restaurant, retail, hospitality. Some of these verticals have been hit really, really in tough ways from COVID. Others are really thriving in it as well. We have kind of a mixture of clients with very different problems today.
Dan Sines:
The consistent thing that we're seeing right now is that people are becoming more interested in quality of candidate than quantity. That shift over the last couple of months is pretty profound relative to where we were for the last couple of years. People were struggling to get candidates in the door, now there's a surplus. Something that's assessing with candidates and finding better fit for the positions, we're finding a lot more interest in the market due to the impacts of the virus.
Chris Russell:
Are you seeing a lot of your clients just getting a general more greater influx of candidates, whether they're qualified or not? Are they seeing increases in the amount of applies?
Dan Sines:
Absolutely. We've just seen this kind of wave of candidates coming in, different employers and different times. Early in the virus, I think this was around March, we worked with a grocery store chain in Australia. They saw overnight over 140,000 applications come through, literally overnight. One night-
Chris Russell:
How many?
Dan Sines:
140,000.
Chris Russell:
Oh my God.
Dan Sines:
Just a massive, massive wave in. Fortunately, they were able to use our tool to really prioritize those candidates. They ended up hiring about 10,000 people out of it. This challenge is now happening across all of our customers that are open right now. They're seeing waves of the unemployed looking for new job opportunities.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. How big is the company, Dan? How many employees do you have?
Dan Sines:
We're just about at 30 right now. We are growing.
Chris Russell:
Yep. It looks like you are hiring too, I was on your site today, at least for a few positions. Do you want to talk about those or?
Dan Sines:
Sure. To be honest, I don't know what all is on the site at the moment. We're definitely looking for an engineer, at the moment, to grow on the engineering side. We have a number of kind of other initiatives around the sales front that we're looking at as well.
Chris Russell:
Yep. Have you had to pull back at all on some of the hiring front? Have you laid off anybody, or has it been pretty steady for you guys?
Dan Sines:
We went through kind of an initial wave right when COVID started, where I think it was very unclear where things were going. We kind of pulled back. Now we're starting to kind of readjust that strategy a little as we're kind of all sinking in to what the new normal looks like.
Chris Russell:
What are your sales people telling you as far as... Are your demos that's pretty steady? Have they decrease over time? Are your sales reps able to get through to the HR person? [inaudible 00:08:50]?
Dan Sines:
We've never seen a decrease. We've probably seen an increase in the number of demos. I think the quality of those has always been a question as you're going through. There's a lot more people that are bored, and home, and want to kind of review tech now, but it might be a year out. That's maybe been some of the increase, but it's been pretty steady throughout this.
Chris Russell:
Gotcha. You guys raised about 12 million bucks back in May. Was that already in the works before COVID, or was it kind of in response to what's been happening?
Dan Sines:
It was a bit of both, to be honest. We were in the works through it, and then kind of wrapping it up at the end of it. We were seeing this kind of acceleration of interest in the need for quality candidates. That definitely helped to fuel some of that.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. Before COVID we were sort of in this golden age of HR tech. There's never been more HR tech than there is right now. It seems like it was only getting more and more each day, but this year has really set the whole industry its on his heels. It's definitely something that I don't think I've... I've never seen in 20 years, at least. All right. What are you projecting for the rest of the year from a sales perspective? Do you expect things to get better in the last quarter?
Dan Sines:
We are. I mean, I think things were probably real tough through March and April, and then middle of May you start to see a little change. June was a great change, I think. This last month has also been good. I think we're just kind of steadily seeing things pick up. I do think that the world's a quarter or two off of normal. The habits and behaviors you normally saw in Q2 are now happening in Q3, and so on.
Dan Sines:
We're expecting to see things continue to kind of climb, I think, with a lot of the customer base. We have shifted some of our verticals. We've expanded into a little more with healthcare, and logistics, manufacturing, where we were a little more focused in maybe hospitality, which is a lot more in trouble at the moment.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. Okay. I used to be a corporate recruiter. I remember back in the day my CEO had me use, I think it was called Predictive Index, to give the candidates. As a recruiter, when I used that tool, it spit back basically a sort of templated summary report as to, "Here are the personality traits of this candidate." I never found it that useful from a higher perspective. I don't think my CEO actually gave it much credence either. Why should a company use Traitify over other tools like that? I mean, what's your value proposition of the tool itself? Pitch me, if you would.
Dan Sines:
Yep, absolutely. I mean, it's all about experience. We think about that candidate experience first, and how do we build something that's really enjoyable that's going push quality candidates to you? Good people are looking for a good experience to start with, but it shouldn't stop there. You have to put that same experience in front of the recruiter and the hiring manager. I think often HR tech has fallen short on that side. We've focused in on how to really build that. We did a really novel thing.
Dan Sines:
We talked to hiring managers, which I think is sad that that's novel, but often we're only talking to the HR leaders, the talent acquisition leaders, and we don't go out there to the field and ask them what they're looking for. What we found is that they wanted a faster, easier way to quickly sort and prioritize candidates. We pushed that score back to the [ATS 00:12:32] in a way that lets them quickly sort, and then source up just key points of information about their personality that is relevant, and then interview questions that are relevant at the time it's relevant. That's really a big piece of our value prop here, is we're trying to build something that's built for the end user and not just a universal fit for everyone.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. Got any success stories from some of your clients out there who's using it, how they're using it, and...
Dan Sines:
Sure. Yeah. We're predominantly solving a couple of things. Those things are time to hire, and turnover reduction, and increase in performance. I mean, those are typically the kind of three areas we're looking at. Right prior to COVID we did a lot with Hilton, and really helped them with reducing that time to hire by about half. Basically, changing that process to allow for the prioritization of candidates was a real windfall for them, and helping to increase the flow and make it easier on the end recruiter. As far as turnover reduction, that's predominantly what we're doing across all clients.
Dan Sines:
A success story I'm particularly proud of, what we talk about as a Lowe's foods, they're a grocery store chain in the Carolinas we work with. They came to us with a pretty dramatic turnover situation, and not a lot of performance data. We were able to reduce turnover by about six and a half percent in the first year, but through kind of our dynamics validation and our ability to kind of tweak that we're able to reduce it by another 25% in the second year, and really continue to get smarter and smarter with that hiring. That's really what we're looking to do. We were not designed to just drop in today and be done. We constantly are evolving with your hiring needs to get more intelligent.
Chris Russell:
Is your whole team working remote at this point?
Dan Sines:
We are. Yeah, we're all remote. We're headquartered in Baltimore. About half the team is here, but the other half was already remote. It's been a fairly easy transition, but we have been able to have small team outdoor gathering for the Baltimore crew occasionally.
Chris Russell:
What's the plan going forward here? Do you plan on going back to the office this year or next year? I know a lot of companies are waiting until 2021. What's your plan?
Dan Sines:
I think we're not likely to go back this year, to be honest. I think we'll be waiting until we're in a vaccine mode before we do that. We just don't need to be, so no need to take the risk. We want to be extra cautious with what we're doing and look out for our employees.
Chris Russell:
Have you learned anything about just working remotely like this fully? Has anything come to mind as far as takeaways?
Dan Sines:
It's certainly been interesting, especially since, like I said, we had half the team remote. I don't think we all, who weren't remote, appreciated how isolating that is for the rest of them. We've now got a weekly thing we do. That's kind of a happy hour, that's virtual. It includes everyone on the team. We're trying to do more things like that, where you're kind of seeing each other's faces, at least digitally, to kind of keep the engagement going.
Chris Russell:
Yep. Gotcha. Well, appreciate the info, Dan. Any last words of advice out there? I mean, give me some hope for the HR tech industry as we go into the final quarter of next year.
Dan Sines:
Sure. Actually, I am very hopeful and optimistic. I think it is a bit of a challenging time around hiring, but this is such an artificial hit on that hiring trend that we were all on. I think when we get to the other side of this we'll start to see us all climb. From the HR tech perspective in particular, I think it's an exciting time. That technology that was kind of moving along and getting interest in the market, things that we're automating, AI, ML, things like that, they're now pushing to the top because you have teams on the TA side that are just smaller and cut from where they were before, and they need to fill the gaps and technology can help fill that. I think it's a pretty exciting time to be an HR tech, and we can really kind of push a new vision for what hiring can look like in the future.
Chris Russell:
Very cool. Dan Sines, CEO at Traitify. Tell everyone where to go to learn more.
Dan Sines:
You can go to traitify.com to learn more about us. Thanks so much.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. No problem, Dan. That's T-R-A-I-T-I-F-Y, right? Awesome. Well, thanks again, Dan. That will do for this episode of the RecTech podcast. Be sure to follow us on the socials, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, via the @RecTech media handle. Thanks for listening, and remember everyone, always be recruiting.
Speaker 2:
Another episode of RecTech is in the books. Follow Chris on twitter @chrisrussell, or visit rectechmedia.com, where you can find the audio and links for this show on our blog. RecTech media helps keep employers and recruiters up to date through our podcasts, webinars, and articles. Be sure to check out our other sites, recruiting headlines, and HR podcasters to stay on top of recruiting industry trends. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon on the next episode of RecTech, the recruiting technology podcast.
