Read How Big Data is Influencing Hiring

If I think about different verticals, we do a lot of work in restaurants, retail, and hospitality. The first one that comes to mind within retail is a non-traditional retail. It’s an organization called Aspen Dental. Aspen Dental is one of the largest chains of dental offices in the United States. They have hundreds of locations all over the US.

The problems that we solve for organizations can really vary. Some organizations would come to us to focus around reducing turnover in key positions. Other companies would come to us who might have turnover under control, but want to see better performance out of the people they’re hiring and have them ramped up faster. Other companies would come to us to drive efficiency in the hiring process and help them screen through large amounts of candidates faster.

If you look at an organization like Aspen Dental, it was really about reducing turnover. By using our technology, they saw dramatic reductions in turnover. What we realized is it was a much better hiring process for candidates. Not only was the output reducing turnover, but we are able to actually help them select candidates faster. It had a dual outcome.

(via: Sramana Mitra in One Million by One Million Blog)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Greg Moran: Thanks for having me. I’m the CEO of Outmatch. We are a company that provides data analytics around the hiring and development of talent within large organisations primarily in retail, hospitality, and restaurant chains. We basically help organisations identify the patterns associated with great hires and what makes somebody uniquely successful for them. Then, we help them understand how they can screen and develop that person once they’re part of your team.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a little bit about the company. Where are you located? What scale of a company are you? Is it a venture-funded company?

Greg Moran: We are headquartered in Dallas, Texas. We have locations in other parts of the US. We are a venture-backed company. Our primary backers are Trident Capital out of Palo Alto and Candid Partners out of Baltimore, as well as Grand Capital and Buffalo New York. The company today was actually formed by a merger of my previous company chequed.com and a Dallas-based company called Assess Systems. Backed by Trident, we brought the two organisations together and we’re now one of the largest talent selection technology in United States, if not the world.

Sramana Mitra: What does that mean? What revenue scale are you at? The only information that we have based on the screening process that we put people through is that you’re a $5 million plus revenue company. Would you like to add more colour to that?

Greg Moran: Today, we service a hundred customers around the globe. We are doing north of $10 million.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take three of your customers in three different segments, if it makes sense. Talk to me about the use cases of how you solve their problems.

Greg Moran: If I think about different verticals, we do a lot of work in restaurants, retail, and hospitality. The first one that comes to mind within retail is a non-traditional retail. It’s an organisation called Aspen Dental. Aspen Dental is one of the largest chains of dental offices in the United States. They have hundreds of locations all over the US.

The problems that we solve for organisations can really vary. Some organisations would come to us to focus around reducing turnover in key positions. Other companies would come to us who might have turnover under control, but want to see better performance out of the people they’re hiring and have them ramped up faster. Other companies would come to us to drive efficiency in the hiring process and help them screen through large amounts of candidates faster.

If you look at an organisation like Aspen Dental, it was really about reducing turnover. By using our technology, they saw dramatic reductions in turnover. What we realised is it was a much better hiring process for candidates. Not only was the output reducing turnover, but we are able to actually help them select candidates faster. It had a dual outcome.

Sramana Mitra: You described the outcome but you haven’t described how you do it.

Greg Moran: The way that we would work with organisations like that is, we would go in and basically collect data around job and culture fit, and to help determine why somebody is successful in a given role in an organisation. What is it about the personality? What is it about the skills? What is it about their cultural match to the organisation? Once we have that profile built, we can then install that at a very early stage of the screening process and work with candidates applying against that profile by having them fill out a very simple questionnaire.

We are able to provide the hiring manager a score, way past the point of application. That score basically represents that candidate’s fit to the job and the culture of the organisation. You’re matching that candidate against that profile, and that’s how you really predict the performance of that hire. It also accelerates the hiring process as well. It really makes the job of the manager much easier. That’s a typical use case for us.

Sramana Mitra: I’d like to double-click on that. When you parametrise culture of an organisation, what kinds of things are you modelling?

Greg Moran: What we’re looking for are things like the tempo of the organisation—how fast-moving it is, the relative stability of the organisation—is it a rapidly changing organisation or one that has their business process down and executing on a very known playbook? We are also looking at the collaborative nature of the organisation. Is it a team-driven environment, or is it an individual-performer environment? It’s factors like that that help us to engage how the candidate will mesh with their colleagues.

Sramana Mitra: When you’re determining the parameters of the candidate, what kinds of things are you modelling?

Greg Moran: Candidates are actually completing situational type of questions that they would encounter on the job. That provides us that background information that we need. They’re basically answering a series of structured questions around specific situations that they would encounter on the job. That’s actually what we use to match against that underlying profile that we had built.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like it’s a pretty horizontal process. It really doesn’t have much difference from one vertical to another.

Greg Moran: From one vertical to another, no. What really is very calibrated to the company are those underlying profiles. What makes someone successful at Aspen Dental is very different from what makes somebody successful at Subway restaurants. That’s really what we’re looking at, it’s not so much about the vertical differences.

Sramana Mitra: If you were to synthesize that, what makes people successful in a dental office?

Greg Moran: This is for one company. I think there is a universality to this. What makes somebody successful in a fast-paced retail environment is nothing that isn’t intuitive. It’s really about the customer service focus. It’s about their judgement under stress. When they have irate customers, how are they going to deal with that? It’s obviously about their trustworthiness.

We’re really looking at a very rounded picture of an individual there to get a sense of, not only how they will interact with customers, but also how they’re going to interact with their co-workers. A lot of the work that we do is focused on very high-volume hiring. In companies like Subway, Aspen Dental, or Disney, thousands of people are getting hired for the same jobs over and over again. It’s really about understanding those characteristics.

To a larger extent, we’re looking across retailers, restaurants, hospitality organisations—those characteristics have a lot of commonality. What starts to vary a little bit is the culture. We’re really measuring both parts. It’s not only the job fit but also the culture fit.

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the high-volume hiring industry in general, what are some areas where there are open problems and opportunities to do more and different stuff with essentially applying technology?

Greg Moran: If I were starting a business today loosely focused around the kind of work we are doing, I think that there is still enormous opportunity in helping organizations to market to talent. Hiring has changed significantly over the past decade in that organizations today really need to view hiring as a sales process in many ways. That means getting beyond running ads and all the traditional things that organisations would do to recruit talent. It needs to be viewed as a core competency.

I think there’s an awful lot of opportunity today as you look at the market. We’re able to help a company understand what type of person is going to be successful in their environment and then market to those people as opposed to waiting for them to come find you. I think there are tremendous opportunities to apply a lot of the principles of digital marketing and marketing automation into the recruitment process. If I were starting over today, that’s probably where I’ll be focusing much of my attention.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

Read the original blog post in One Million by One Million Blog.