Transcript
Mark Feffer:
Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer. My guest today is Scott Landers, the CEO of Harver. He’s led the company since January 2022, and recently pulled off a notable move with the acquisition of Pymetrics. We’re going to talk about the merger, how speed and quality factor into recruiting, and take a look back at his first eight months leading the company, all on this edition of PeopleTech. And Scott, welcome. So you recently acquired Pymetrics. And I’m curious, what was the thinking behind that?
Scott Landers:
Yeah, thanks. Great question. And thanks for having me today. We’re super excited about the Pymetrics acquisition. But before I talk about that, I’ll kind of back up a few months and talk about my entry here into Harver. I’ve been here with the company for about eight months. And one of the things the executive team and I decided to tackle early on is, really, where do we want to take the company and what do we really want to lean into? And we know there’s this looming decision out there for HR professionals on, should they lean on the side of speed or should they focus on quality?
So one of the things we did is ask our customers and did surveys out there in the industry. And we know that quality candidates, getting them into their organization, was critical. And so here at Harver, for us, we want to enable folks to make high quality talent decisions faster. So we’re not going to compromise on speed, but we’re really going to lean in and we’re going to own that quality stake, if you will. And that brought us to Pymetrics. We had a strong heritage here. We’re from an assessment perspective on identifying high quality candidates for our customers. And Pymetrics really extended that capability for us, and we’re thrilled to welcome them into our team.
Mark Feffer:
Harver’s known as a high volume recruiting solution. And Pymetrics doesn’t really play in that space. So could you tell me how you think the two products are going to sit together?
Scott Landers:
Yeah, so I think Harver is actually a little bit misunderstood at the time. So one of the things we do is we help people optimize their hiring process. And oftentimes our customers may be using us today in high volume situations, but we do much more than that. So again, here at Harver, you’re going to hear us talk more and more about how we enable our customers to make better talent decisions, enable to do it faster. And what’s great about the solutions that we provide is we’re able to meet our customers where they are. So if they want to automate their entire hiring process, our Harver platform can do that for them. We can automate those manual steps that would’ve been done by recruiters. We’ve got great assessment technology to go in and help them find the right candidate, match them to the right role. We’ve got great analytics to let them know how they’re doing and the impact that’s having on their business.
And then finally, we can wrap all of those smarts into a really super engaging candidate experience, which really matters, because the more steps you add, the candidate better be engaged so they can complete that process. And we’re really proud of what we do there. But there’s a huge portion of our business where we also have ingress points for our customers. Maybe they’re just interested in assessment technology, maybe they’re interested just in interview technology or perhaps just in reference checking. So what the Harver acquisition did for us, and we ended up taking their name a little over a year ago, is it accelerated our product development to bring all of those things together for our customers seamlessly in one platform. But we really do a bunch of other things for our customers in isolation as well.
So when we look at Pymetrics, going back to what I said earlier, really staking our claim on the quality side for helping make a better decision. Pymetrics brought us the ability to broaden our suite of assessments. Where we traditionally were very strong in hourly roles, Pymetrics is super strong in professional roles. When we look at that acquisition from a customer representation, we had concentration in a few vertical markets. They had concentration in actually the opposite vertical markets. So now as a company, pretty much we’re proud to call top shelf customers in just about every industry you can imagine. Whether it’s BPO, restaurant, retail, hospitality, financial services, TMT, et cetera. We have great representation in all of those. And then certainly, if you’re going to state your claim in science, people really matter. And we’ve got a bunch of great talent here from the Pymetrics side.
And then lastly, if we think about the tomorrow of Harver, we’d love to have people not only think about what we can do for them today from a talent acquisition perspective, but that quality doesn’t stop once you hire them. How you develop those candidates over time, how you identify internal mobility, how you internally source candidates over time, is going to be critically important. So I know that was a long answer to your question, Mark, but the takeaway is here, we at Harver can meet our customers where they are and do lots of things. And Pymetrics really strengthens the piece that we are going to own and defend forever, which is quality.
Mark Feffer:
Okay. So how do you think that the two companies are going to work together? And I mean operationally. Well first, do you have a plan to combine the staff? But if you don’t, how do you see them supporting each other, supporting each other’s product development and operations and all that?
Scott Landers:
Yeah, it’s interesting, being this is my first time in the HR industry. One of the things that drew me to it was its focus on people. I’ve always been a people-centered leader. And so what’s interesting is one of my very first conversations with Frida regarding this acquisition, we talked about the values of both companies. And what became clear really quickly is our overall mission. For us, it’s to put purpose to work, and I’ll come back to that, and the core values kind of how we operated and who we wanted to be. Those subtle things on how we want it to behave internally, were very much aligned.
So it’s our intent to bring the companies together. Now we don’t make that decision based on soft stuff. We’re looking at who are our customers, how can we best serve them? So our plan is to integrate these companies because they are so similar, but we think we’re going to have, I won’t call it an easy time because integrations are never easy. But because the missions of the company were so similar, and we share those same values, we think our customers are going to get real value from this combination really quickly.
Mark Feffer:
And have you gotten feedback from customers about it?
Scott Landers:
We’ve gotten feedback actually very quickly. So both of us had some really great customers where maybe we were only serving the professional needs, the professional roles within the organization. Or perhaps, on the Harver side, we were only serving those high volume hourly roles. And we have had several customers come out of the woodwork here just in the first few days, post acquisition, asking to learn more. Because those challenges that HR professionals need to solve as they’re recruiting, hiring, or developing hourly employees and professional employees, they’re the same. Companies want great people that have some innate skill sets and characteristics that match with their company values, and they want them to be able to add value as quickly as they can, and then develop them over time. And so we’re seeing a lot of early traction here.
Mark Feffer:
And what about the notion of combining, behind the scenes, your technology efforts and sales efforts and all that? Do you think you’ll do that eventually or are you going to just let them each operate on its own?
Scott Landers:
No, we’ll absolutely bring those things together here at the right timeframe. Some things are easier than others, you can start to combine in the first few weeks. Other things we’ll do over a several month period. And I have about 25 years experience in enterprise software. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned is that your plans have to be prepared with the customer’s voice and the employee’s voice in mind. So any decisions we do make, to do it faster or to wait a little bit, will be to make sure that whatever that decision is, is in the best interest of serving our joint customers and our employees so they can get up to speed and do the combined job to the best of their ability as well.
Mark Feffer:
And do you anticipate developing new products, the two companies working together, or new approaches to the market, based on the different approaches they have now and differing expertise?
Scott Landers:
I mean the approaches are fairly similar. I think where our customers are going to see a ton of benefit longer term is our Harver platform. The end to end hiring solution is pretty robust, and the more we’re able to get the out of the box functionality of, let’s say, Pymetrics Assessment into that Harver platform so that it’s available right at the fingertips of our customers, that’s going to be a really significant benefit. Now really, I’ve always enjoyed working with growth companies. There’s a little bit of extra work upfront from an architecture perspective. But once that work is done, our ability to not only bring Pymetrics quickly to our customers, but also other value over time is really unlocked.
One of the things we’re looking to solve for with our customers is give them the reason why we’re the right long term partner for them. Their needs are going to change over time, but having the right science and the right experts on the ground that could advise our clients on the best way to hire, develop within their organization, but also have a technology platform that can expand and meet their needs over time, we think is critical. And so for us, that’s really what we’ll be focusing in on. One of the other exciting things for us, and for me having the honor of leading this company, this is a trillion dollar space, as you well know, Mark, between acquisition, development and mobility. And what we’re seeing is those same concerns that customers had around getting the right person coming in the door. Those same concerns and opportunities exist when you think about developing them and then also tackling those internal mobility issues.
So when you ask what’s coming next or what comes down the road, I would not be surprised to see our platform do more and more in that development and mobility area. And that was another great benefit of the Pymetrics acquisition, because they were actually a little further ahead from that regard. And we’ll be counting on them to accelerate that activity here at Harver.
Mark Feffer:
Let me shift gears for a little bit. The labor market has been pretty unsettled lately in a whole lot of ways, I think. Has that impacted Harver and Pymetrics, the great resignation, the competition for labor, all of those things?
Scott Landers:
Yeah, I don’t envy the job of HR professionals right now. I mean there is a lot going on. I think the one benefit of all of these things, I think it’s elevating the role of HR within the organization and just how important it is when you think about the challenges the HR departments are helping companies overcome, whether it is the great resignation, this whole move to hybrid work, potentially now you have an economic cycle where people could be looking at layoffs after years of boom hiring. I think for us, we don’t see an across the board impact. Some of the things that we focus on are certain industries impacted more than others. We haven’t seen anything that is impacting our business across all industries. In some industries, it’s really difficult to get anyone, from a labor shortage perspective. And so customers there would use us and maybe rely just more on that speed element. We think that’s somewhat short term because if you don’t bring quality into the equation, you just have a bigger problem down the road, if you’re not getting those right folks as they come in.
But as far as an impact on our business, I think what it gives us the opportunity to do, given the fact that we have over a thousand customers in all of these representative industries, we’re going to be doing a lot more about bringing thought leadership to our customers, because we are learning with our customers. I think we’ve processed over a hundred million candidates throughout our history. There’s a lot of value and data that we can bring so that they can learn from each other, obviously, in an anonymized way. But there are insights that we’ll have that we’ll be able to bring to them through webinars and other customer activities, to give them ideas on what may help their business, given some of the challenges they may face.
Mark Feffer:
Well, Scott, thank you very much. It was really nice to meet you and I appreciate your coming on the show today.
Scott Landers:
Well, terrific. Really enjoyed it. And love to come back anytime you want. Appreciate the time.
Mark Feffer:
My guest today has been Scott Landers, the CEO of Harver. And this has been PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report, we’re a publication of Recruiting Daily. We’re also a part of Evergreen Podcasts. To see all of their programs, visit www.evergreenpodcasts.com. And to keep up with HR technology, visit the HCM Technology Report every day. We’re the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry. Find us at www.hcmtechnologyreport.com. I’m Mark Feffer.
Image: Harver
