Transcript to come
Transcript
Mark:
Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer. My guest today is Rob Savette, the CEO of Almas Insight. They offer an immersive game-based product that combines contextual video, situational simulations, and cognitive tests to measure high demand human skills. We’re going to talk about how they do it, how it can change discussions about your workforce and how it all happens on this edition of PeopleTech.
Hey Rob, it’s nice to see you. Can you tell me what Almas Insight does?
Rob:
Okay. Almas Insight is a company that was created to create measurement data about human capabilities for employees in a company. It’s not hard skill data like programming skills or accounting skills, and it’s not personality data like sense of humor. It’s skills like collaboration, drive, analytical thinking, things you would use in a business environment. And then we provide a series of dashboards so that you can make better hiring decisions, organizational change, and better understand your attrition.
Mark:
So how does it do that?
Rob:
It does that in a pretty simple and straightforward way. Philosophically, I think we should start with we’re not an inference based tool, we don’t look at a bunch of things and make judgments or decisions. In fact, that’s really against our ethos. We’re not about judgment. We don’t say right or wrong, good or bad, yes or no. What we do is we do corollary work. So we give you the ability to have someone go through the measurement tool, which is a contextual game where you make business decisions and data is collected based on your behaviors, and then you create baselines. You say, here’s my most successful salespeople, this is what they look like from this human behavior data that we’re talking about. And then you’re able to take candidates and have them play the measurement. And then you are able to do comparisons and say, this is a good fit. They’re a little lacking here. They would add more to the organization there and make decisions based on either culture fit, which would be, here’s working, I want more of that. Or culture add, here’s working. I want more of that, but I also want to add in some more drive or some more analytical thinking.
Mark:
Yeah. I’m curious, how does you take the performance in a game and translate that into the kind of data and intelligence that you’re generating?
Rob:
Well, first of all, I’m fortunate. My partner has been living this world for a long time, Brayden Olson and is the co-founder of Almas Insight. And he was as a young person immersed in starting his own gaming companies and in his professional career ended up heading up the Center of Excellence for Human Capabilities for Deloitte. And so he developed a methodology that enabled you to go through situations. You make 61 basic decisions. Your boss comes down and says, I want to know more about this project. The person who’s running the project isn’t there. What do you do? And you make a choice between three options. One of the things we’ve learned over the years is they’re all good options. It isn’t your shake his hand, hit him in the face or knock him down. Many tests it’s pretty easy to see what the test is looking for you to do. So what we do to avoid that is every answer is a really strong answer, whether it’s contacting the person, delaying the meeting, whatever it is, it’s a strong answer. But when you give the answer, you’ve shown a behavior. And we collect each of these behaviors, there’s 42 behaviors that we measure throughout the measurement tool. And then we use those as building blocks to build the scoring mechanisms for the capabilities.
Mark:
Now on your website, you talk about needed paradigm shifts in the business sector’s talent process from hiring to retirement. What do you mean by that? What’s going on out there that makes you say there’s got to be a looks like fairly sizable shift?
Rob:
Well, certainly a lot of that language we could go on in depth. It’s no doubt in particular since the impact of COVID that people need to rethink how their work environments are and rethink how they look at people. We were talking to people, they were saying, you know what? And I think Sherm has some data around this, that the human capabilities impact is probably the single biggest issue they have to deal with. They have to understand who are the people who are flexible, who are the people who can make change, who are the people who can be problem solvers when the workplace shifts dramatically and when the marketplaces shift dramatically and having methodologies being even more specific.
Historically to understand your workforce, you engaged in some 18 to 36 month process, that’s gone, you can’t do that anymore. You don’t have that kind of luxury of time, that things need to be much more immediate now. They need to be much more measured. You can’t measure the top 1% of 1% of your company and think what your workforce is like because you’re not necessarily getting a snapshot of everybody. And so with the technologies that we have available today, we have the ability to measure everybody. We have the ability to put that into dashboards that you can look at real time, month to month, quarter to quarter. That view or that ability has never existed before in the workplace and I think it’s having a massive impact on the way we’re going to manage our organizations.
Companies are firing 10,000 people and hiring 5,000 people. The same companies are repurposing people into other jobs. We were working with a client that had a quality assurance problem that they wanted to solve by repurposing engineers into quality assurance. The engineers were leaving because they weren’t the right type of people for quality assurance. So we were helping them to look at the engineers who would be a good fit within the quality assurance department because it was the difference between success or failure of the project.
So things are definitely changing dramatically. And although I wish I had a crystal ball and I could tell you what the future changes were all going to be, I can definitely say they’re going to continue to change pretty dramatically. We’re still unwinding or we’re still working through the learnings of what happened during the last three years of employment. And I don’t see the workplace becoming less dynamic. I only see it becoming more dynamic in the future.
Mark:
It all sounds really complex, and I’m sure it is under the hood, but do your customers need any special skills to use the product or have you put a welcoming layer over it?
Rob:
Well, yeah, what we call complexity hiding, yeah. No, that’s absolutely true. So as is true about many sort of current generation products, we have a number of data scientists, analysts, people who understand the methodologies behind population analysis, probability. We’ve got a ton of AI in the product, but that’s not what somebody has to deal with, but somebody really deals with is I create a baseline that I want to compare to, and then I take a look at my candidates and it’s no more complicated than that. And then inside the game it comes up and says, these are high level fits. High in the sense of the most amount of overlap. It’s really interesting.
So an example of that is we create what we call a gemstone. A gemstone is a shape, a geometric shape that’s created by the way the person has taken the measurement tool. And then we do the same with, for example, job positions. And then we overlay them and we see where there’s shortages, where people are additive to the group. But you don’t see any of the algorithmic work behind that. You don’t have to do any of the calculations behind that. Like I said, you baseline the group that you’re interested in either augmenting or filling, and then you test the candidates and the candidates are measured and you’re able to see where the fits are immediately. Now, if you want to, we have a full manual as to how we do what we do. There’s lots of learn more buttons where you can click and see heat maps about where the adverse impact is or the positive impact is, and all of that documentation exists. But in terms of a practitioner trying to make what we call a business decision, an actionable business decision, they get baselines, they have candidates, and they’re able to make decisions on the spot.
Mark:
And is this working down to the individual level?
Rob:
It does, it has to. We talk about the measurement, when somebody actually goes through what we call the Almas Index, at the end of that, they get an individual report, and that individual report says things like, here’s your top strongest, three strongest things. Here’s what jobs look like in this organization that you could apply for or jobs in the world. You’d be a good lawyer, you’d be a good doctor. So you get an individual report that tells you about yourself. However, I will be clear, people do use it for individual sort of coaching environments. But the real game changer here is that for the first time, you can have a snapshot of your entire workforce, and that has not existed before. And we all know that on the individual level, people can do all kinds of things people can excel and overcome. And so the product strength is in knowing in an overall workforce environment, if you do these things, then you’ll get benefit across a wide, wider population.
So for example, we have a report that takes a look at somebody’s capabilities profile and compares it to the existing workforce and the amount of time people have been there and can make pretty accurate predictions as to whether they’re a high probability or a low probability to stay less than a year, which is hugely impactful. There’s no doubt about that, that that’s something that costs organizations a ton of time. Money, it’s very disruptive when somebody comes in for six months and then blows out. Now, we don’t say that’s going to be Jane Doe or John Doe, but if in the body of people that you interview for jobs, you apply these kinds of mathematics, it starts at about 20%, it’ll catch at least 20% of those and grows to 40, 50% of that as it learns more and more about your particular environment. And so by applying those kinds of metrics over populations, you see great benefit.
That’s really the strong point of the product as opposed to we don’t say candidate A is good or bad or right or wrong. We just say, here’s what you’ve seen in the past, here’s happening in your company, and here’s where that person lies in that situation. It’s interesting, we all think in terms of we measure 14 different capabilities, and at the start people think, oh, I want somebody who’s great in all 14. When in reality you don’t. In reality it’s about understanding them, not judging them. So for example, if you have a real out-of-the-box thinker who’s super creative and you put them in a role that is processing forms all day, that’s probably not a good move. But if you take that same employee and put them in an engineering innovation job, they’ll rock it. They’ll be amazing. So it’s about fit. It’s not about good, bad, right or wrong.
Mark:
So you’ve obviously got a lot of data in your system, and I’m wondering what do you see, what’s the data telling you right now about the market and companies in general is
Rob:
What’s a really interesting question because I think that HR people are in very, very, very difficult times, but it’s the old building the airplane while you’re flying or fixing the airplane while you’re flying. There’s so much change happening and there’s so many dynamics at work for organizations at all levels, just whether it’s just base business level, our supply chain is redefining itself or it’s we get candidates from colleges and the college scenario is so different. I mean, there’s so many moving pieces in hiring, in employee satisfaction, in job satisfaction. I think that more than ever the employee-employer fit is becoming more and more critical. At one time, I think if you go back 10, 15, 20 years ago, that was not nearly as impactful as it is now. But if it’s not a fit to begin with, then regardless of what the hard skills are and what the other things are, it will probably be a difficult long-term relationship between the employer and the employee. And I think that’s a big change in the marketplace.
I think that the lot of things that we’ve seen where employees are now definitely making decisions in ways they never did before about I’d rather not work than work like that or I’d rather not be in this sector than that sector where it used to be, hey, if I’m getting out of school and it’s a good paying job, I’m done, I’m in. I want that. So that whole relationship is changing a lot. And I think that companies are ill-equipped. They’re very well equipped at lots of things. And in their general business, in the last couple of decades, we’ve seen a huge amount of measurement in the places like online marketing, online sales, different techniques and methodologies to understand things. And we’ve seen that type of measurement lag behind in the people space there. There’s all kinds of great HR tools for trying to measure and understand hard skills for understanding hard data about people, but they’ve really lag behind in providing the kind of data that somebody could use to measure how somebody would fit within a company.
And so I think we see a lot of data that surprises the clients. They have a notion of their mind, you’re an executive management, you’re surrounded by the people that you’re surrounded by. You have a view of your company. Let’s say pick something pretty straightforward, like, oh, our company is super collaborative and then they measure and they’re really surprised. Or, sure, we’ve had lots of turnover, but we’ve kept these skills. And then they measure and they say, sure, you’ve kept these skills, but the measurement of drive in the remaining employees is down significantly and trending down. That’s another thing that’s great about tools like this is besides what the snapshot is, there’s the trend. So if you are sinking a ton of money into collaborative tools and you see collaboration going down in your company, that’s the wake-up call. On the other hand, let’s say collaboration’s low in your company, but you’re trending and you see you’re trending up, that’s a positive thing.
So I think that the way we look at, at the population of a workforce, the way we look at people and how they fit within that population and how it meets the company’s needs, I think it’s an eye-opener for people. And I think that the more any other part of your business, the more armed you are with data, the more you can make better decisions going forward.
Mark:
Rob, thanks very much. It was great to talk with you.
Rob:
Oh, it was great to talk to you, mark. I really appreciate your time.
Mark:
Hope you’ll come back.
Rob:
Thanks.
Mark:
My guest today has been Rob Savette, the CEO of Almas Insight. 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: Almas Insight
