Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by  the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Hello, welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host max. And today on the show I've got Heather Myers from Tratify. A company which gets inside the head of candidates and finds out what their psychology is made of. And Heather will tell us all about that and more welcome to the show, Heather.

Heather: Thanks, max. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Dr. Myers, should I call you doctor? You can call me. Heather is fine. I am doctor Heather Myers, but Heather's good. 

Max: Okay. I'll stick to Heather. But for the audience out there Dr. Myers has got a PhD in psychology and statistics, so you've got the perfect background for this company. Tell us about your life pre Tratify. Where do you come from? How did you put this PhD to good use?

Heather: Sure. Well, I actually grew up in Pennsylvania. And when I was a kid, my friends used to call me the marriage counselor.

So I kinda knew from an early age that I wanted to go into psychology. Immediately I thought that was going to be therapy. It turns out though, when I actually got to College at Carnegie Mellon, went to university. I realized that I actually really liked research psychology and understanding kind of what makes people tick.

And then I went to Stanford for my graduate work and within a personality psychology program there, which I found really fascinating. And I actually got along with the PhD. I got the master's degree in statistics, so I have a master's degree in statistics. And so there, I found that the combination of psychology and statistics was amazing because a lot of people are afraid of statistics, but when you're not afraid of statistics and you really like it, you're so much better at evaluating the research that people put out and that you can see. So that's always been a passion of mine merging the two. And I did a lot of consulting.

A lot of helping people actually do. Figure out how to do research and analyze that that and understand it and define what variables they were looking for. So I did a lot of that. I have a couple of kids, I mostly stayed home with them and did consulting. And then I heard about Tratify through actually one of my professors from Carnegie Mellon who was, you know, knew some people who work there and she called me and said, Hey, they really are looking for someone to kind of up there statistics kind of prove their validity, reliability, those kinds of things. And that's how I got connected to Tratify. And for me, it's my dream job because it's the perfect combination of my psychology, the personality piece, statistics, all of it together. 

So that's how I ended up here.

Max: Amazing. Yeah, I yeah, your, your resume looks. Yeah. It's just like the perfect match. Like  actually we don't need to do a psychological assessment in your case, we just read your resume and match you directly to that company. 

Heather: It's true. It is kind of dreamlike. I mean, and I think initially, you know, when I first started talking to them, it was really more around the statistics.

So you know, once I started doing some consulting for them, then it was like, also, I have a PhD in personality psychology, so it was like, wait, what? So when we kind of expanded and I started working full time, then I was able to put really my full skill set to use. Yeah. 

Max: That's the beauty of a startup life. People are quite an opportunistic. They take advantage of who happens to accidentally come into their employment. 

Heather: Absolutely. For sure. 

Max: But from the little you've said, I can sort of glean that you were able to earn your living on the masters of statistics more than on the PhD of psychology.

Heather: I would say that's true. I mean, the PhD part helped when it came to teaching people how to do the research because that I didn't get through the statistics when teaching them how to better design studies. But the statistics is the piece that most people know that they don't have. They don't know, they don't understand research.

That's just kind of, they just don't know. They don't know, but they do know that they don't know statistics. So that was certainly a much easier in, when I was consulting for sure. 

Max: All right. Well, tell us a little bit more about Tratify was my intro accurate when I said you helped to get inside the head of the candidates?

I don't think that's your official tagline.

Heather: It's not our official tagline now, but what we do is help understand personality. Right. So it's all about understanding the candidates better the way they see the world. So I think of personality as the lenses, through which we see the world and it doesn't equate to behavior, but it is linked to behavior, right?

So it's understanding more the way a person views the world, the kinds of environments they tend to like to work in, the types of people they tend to like to engage with, the way they communicate. So, all of those things are sort of something that you can have access to, if you really understand the personality. And it's really just helping to understand candidates better to help candidates understand themselves better and really you know, providing this, I think that the key to Tratify’s success has been doing all of this.

Personality, obviously isn't new and understanding it. And it's been used to kind of help make good fits, but where Tratify really stands out is the experience. So it's a fun engaging candidate experience, you know, really that mobile first, but it's also steeped in the science. And so we help both employers and candidates understand the candidate better and understand where there will be a good match.

Max: The exercise of assessing someone's personality is as old as recruitment is.

Heather: it is 

Max: Pretty much based on first impressions. Well, face-to-face interviews, phone interview sometimes. This is the part that Tratify wants to replace, is to have a more scientific approach to that first impression.

Heather: That's right. And I wouldn't say necessarily mean replaced, so we don't want to replace all interviews. Right. But it is to get to replace that first impression. And it's true that if you think about a job and you think about having an interview, right. Who tends to do well in interviews?

Well, very clearly people who are extroverted. Right. Yeah, exactly. We do fine in interviews. But depending on the job that we're looking to fill, that may not be a plus when it comes to actually doing the job, but when we make a great first impression and so part of what this is allowing companies to do is to have a person fill out this assessment, have a sense of what their personality is, where they fall on various dimensions. So we use the model called the big five or the five factor model helping, which is really the most predictive model of performance in the wo...