Recently, Inc. came out with its Female Founders 100 list, which highlights 100 women who are on fire in the business world this year. Of special interest to people on both sides of the hiring equation, HR and job seekers, is Angela Antony, and her business, Scoutible. It may well be a game changer for hiring.
As every HR pro will tell you, bad hires are extremely costly for the company. According to research by Gallup, hires that aren’t a good fit, can’t do the job, or are otherwise unhappy in their new gig cost our economy as much as $550 billion in lost productivity each year. Why is that? Replacing a full-time employee can cost upwards of twice that employee’s yearly salary. The downtime during the search for qualified candidates saps productivity and puts unnecessary strain on the rest of the department. Then there’s the time spent sifting through resumes, interviewing candidates, conducting background checks. The list goes on.
Antony was researching the matter when she worked on the National Economic Council at the White House. During a policy event, she met Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and also of “Shark Tank” fame. She talked to him about how 46% of all hires leave their jobs within the first 18 months, and what a drain it was on the economy. He urged her to find a solution, and he would help fund it.
Scoutible was born. It’s basically a video game used in hiring that is designed to use artificial intelligence to prevent bad hires. Job candidates spend 20 minutes playing a video game in which a character tackles situations like surviving on a desert island or thwarting an assassination attempt. AI tracks the candidate’s choices during the game and assesses those choices for traits like leadership ability, creativity, risk aversion, and problem solving.
That’s great, but what it does next is really the game changer. The AI compares those choices and traits with those of the top talent in the company. It’s a way to take the bias out of hiring. Candidates say what they think their prospective employer wants to hear in an interview. Hirers can go on gut feeling. But with a baseline of traits shared by proven top performers in the specific job, you’ve got an AI blueprint to hiring the next great person.
