The Real Cost of Hiring on Gut Instinct | HireScore CEO Spencer Stang Explains

[00:00:04] Hey, this is William Tincup and Ryan Leary, and you are listening, hopefully watching, the Use Case Podcast. We've got Spencer on today, so we're going to learn all about what he's doing, and I can't wait, actually. Ryan and I both can't wait. Ryan, how are you doing? I am wonderful. I'm ready to learn today. All right. Okay. You're not always that way. I like that. All right. Spencer, please introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about you before we get into all the other stuff.

[00:00:31] Sure. I'm Spencer Stang. I'm the CEO of Stang Decision Systems slash HireScore. So think of Stang Decision Systems as our parent company. HireScore is really our technology, and more and more we kind of become known as HireScore.

[00:00:53] I am an industrial psychologist by training. I live in Marquette, Michigan. I have two adult sons, one at University of Michigan, one at Michigan State. Oh, wow. That's a house divided right there. A house divided. Yeah. That's legit, Ryan. I don't know if you know that area. I don't know the rivalry too good other than some of the Eagles sit on it. They come from both ends, and they always get them on sports.

[00:01:21] Dude, there's signs in the yards. So like it's state, because Michigan State doesn't say Michigan State. It just says state. Yeah. And then University of Michigan. And they know. Oh, yes. Yeah. It's legit a thing. Yeah. We don't have that in Philly area. We have no colleges for football. We have Temple go outs. Like, you're one in 50 in their last. Basketball used to be a thing at Temple, though.

[00:01:51] It was in the 80s and 90s, though. Yeah. But it was a thing. I think you guys would also appreciate it in terms of being a house divided. I'm a Green Bay Packers fan. Oh, yeah. And I know that you two are not quite on the same page when it comes to football. No, not at all. No, no, not at all. He's in the winning column, and I'm in the we have not been relevant in 30 years column. So I actually like when Green Bay comes to Dallas. Odd thing.

[00:02:19] When Green Bay pays at Dallas, there's so many cheeseheads here that come out. They almost have half the stadium. Yeah. It's great. Like it's a thing. It's literally a thing. I've lived all over the country, and it's amazing. Everywhere we go, there's a Packer bar. There are Packer fans. I mean, in Hawaii, we'd be going to the games at 8 o'clock in the morning. Yeah. Yeah. It's legit a thing.

[00:02:47] So tell us a little bit about the product. Tell us. Tell us. Give us a what's the problem we're trying to solve. Well, if you think of hiring, at least the way we think of hiring, you kind of have to get a few things right. You have to get, first of all, the science, the science of industrial and organizational psychology. When I went to school, you know, the science is actually pretty good.

[00:03:16] There's a hundred years of research, and one of the things that I really noticed is a lot of the research simply wasn't being applied. I mean, where you would have just hundreds of studies on a certain topic, and you couldn't find anybody using that research. So initially, I wanted to go into research and become a professor and all that.

[00:03:41] I realized, you know, why add to the stacks of research when the current research isn't even being utilized? And a big reason why the research isn't utilized is it's complicated. It's hard to administer. It's, you know, you can only do so much with applicants. You can't put probes on them and watch them for three months, unless you're an intern, which then maybe you can.

[00:04:06] But for the most part, we needed a way to take all of that research and make it easy to apply. And the best way to do that is really through technology. So basically, we take the research of industrial psychology. We build it into the platform of higher score. And then along with the science, if you will, we have to make sure that we're compliant, that

[00:04:33] we're legally following the rules. And we want to make that easy as well, because most, even fairly high-level HR people aren't experts when it comes to hiring law, especially if you go state by state, city by city, and there's weird little rules. And the best thing to do is just kind of build that into the technology and make it work for you.

[00:04:57] So if you get the technology or the science right, the technology right, the legal side right, then kind of the fourth leg of that stool would be simply the human part of interacting with the candidate. That's where the recruiters come into play. I know you guys both have a background in recruiting, if I understand correctly.

[00:05:22] So you can really appreciate the human element to how the candidate gets treated and how they get persuaded sometimes to actually give the job a shot. So what we're trying to do is make all four elements work together and make it as easy as possible for the human side of it to do what they do without having to deal with the trivial. Yeah.

[00:05:51] Spencer, what are you seeing in the market in terms of hiring challenges? So the clients that you work with, customers that you are working with, what's the big hiring trend challenge that they're running up against these days? Yep. Well, first of all, it varies dramatically in role by role, company by company.

[00:06:16] If I had to say the one thing people say is we're just not getting the candidates or we're not getting the qualified candidates. So that's usually the first problem we're trying to solve is simply how can we help you get more candidates, either through posting more places, better postings, understanding, you know, somebody will take the job title straight out of their ATS and they'll stick it on a

[00:06:45] posting and the job title doesn't make any sense to the applicant. You know, simple stuff like that. Um, but then for other, um, other jobs, it has to do with, uh, somebody looks good on paper. They seem like they're the right fit, but they come in and they, they have a high washout rate. So, so they're not accounting for personality attributes. They're just kind of looking, they have the right degree.

[00:07:11] They talk a good game in the interview, but then they, they don't show up or they don't do what they say they're going to do. Um, so that's really where the assessments come into play. Got it. So, uh, Spencer, I hate software categories. Like I despise them because I think most of the software in our industry defies a, a single category of all blurred lines. However, uh, HR and recruiting budgets are built in Excel.

[00:07:41] So it's, it's a, it's a row. It's a, you know, it's a row, it's a column. So what do, what do your customers and even your prospects, how do they identify you? Category wise. Yep. That is actually a great question. And it's a question I've, I've been trying to answer for us for, for a long time.

[00:08:04] Uh, because we really don't, um, if everything from posting to offer our technology plays a role in. Um, so in that sense, it, it is an applicant tracking system, but it's also an assessment system. It's also does scheduling. Um, and importantly, it is an aggregator of assessment scores.

[00:08:32] Uh, and that's part of why we call it higher score because literally we're taking every data point that you have on an applicant from their background, uh, their education, their personality fit. Um, their math skills, their mechanical aptitude, how they do in the interview, how they do in a work demo, whether they can carry a fire extinguisher. We're taking all of these individual data points. We're rolling them all up into a single number.

[00:08:59] And that number is your best indicator of whether that person's going to be successful. Um, for our larger clients, we're usually an add on to work work day or their existing applicant tracking system. So we're not trying to replace what they, their, uh, document of record, you know, in terms of, uh, those systems for our smaller clients. They use us as a full applicant tracking system.

[00:09:28] And that's probably how they think of us. Got it. The assessment. Go ahead, Ryan. No, no, go ahead. Finish up. The assessment parts. You know, we can assess a lot of different things, right? Because you're an IO psychologist, you, you know, what can and, and probably can't be. So what type of assessments behavioral personality?

[00:09:50] Like I've, I've actually working with a play that's doing character assessments, which is, which can be a little bit tricky, um, uh, for a lot of reasons. So what, when we say assessments, do we go into skills testing assessments? Like what are the parameters that you'd like to kind of box in for the audience? Uh, it's, it's really all of the above. So, so we, first of all, we're always thinking of, um, the whole person.

[00:10:18] Um, so it's not whether the person has the right background or the right personality or whether they can type 80 words a minute or, you know, it's, it's the whole person. Um, so we're trying to measure everything. Um, so we're trying to measure everything that's relevant and predictive for that job, which can be super different if you're hiring an attorney versus a welder or what, what happened.

[00:10:46] Um, but we do have built into that, um, whole person measurement. We, we focus a lot on, uh, background fit. So think of bio data, uh, personality assessment, situational judgment.

[00:11:03] Um, then when we go into what we call phase two testing, we, we really focus on general problem solving, math, verbal, uh, logical reasoning, mechanical aptitude, spatial aptitude for jobs that are suited to that. Um, and then my favorite testing, um, in which we mainly do for larger clients is work demo testing where it's actual hands-on simulations.

[00:11:32] You know, electricians are troubleshooting a circuit and welders are welding. Um, those are, they're fun to build and they're fun to administer. And you could do those in VR, uh, down the road if needed. You can do them in metaverse. You can do them in VR, but it's great for the candidate. Cause they can then see the job. And so they can filter themselves in or out and also great for the recruiter to then see that they can do the job, filter in and filter out. So I love that.

[00:12:01] In fact, we, we have an assessment called the fuel assessment, which is, um, if you're, let's say you're working on a pipeline. It was originally developed for pipeline operators, like board operator. So think of a board operators and it's kind of like an air traffic controller, but for where everything is going from tank to tank.

[00:12:25] You're turning on pumps, opening valves and you're, you're moving liquid through a system. So we essentially copied the client's software. And made it look and feel like their software. But then we dumbed it down enough where a person off the street could come in and 10 minute training session. Uh, we could teach anybody to utilize the program. And then they go through, which it's about a 45 minute long assessment.

[00:12:55] It starts out super easy. It gets progressively harder. All hell breaks loose. And you kind of see how they handle the stress. Do they follow the direction? That's what's going to happen on the job. So, yeah. I want to get into, into your ideal customer. So that people that are listening know, okay, this is for them. It's not for them. So a couple of things here. One is how does someone know they need to talk to you? Right.

[00:13:23] What's the problem that they're experiencing that they're just like, man, I need help. So I want to start there. And then I also want to get into size of company. So you mentioned, you mentioned that, you know, smaller, smaller companies, larger companies. Let's define that, uh, for the audience. Let's start, let's start with how does someone know they actually need to talk to you?

[00:13:43] Um, unfortunately that number one reason somebody picks up the phone and calls us is because they've just had to let somebody go. I mean, that, that's kind of the biggest situation. And probably a hundred times I've heard somebody say, you know, I thought it was really good at this. I thought I could size somebody up and then they hire somebody and, you know, six weeks later, it's like, well, what have I done?

[00:14:11] Like, how, how did I not know this? Um, that tracks, right? Yeah. I mean, I hired William and look at this. I'm kidding. Like, but it makes sense. I mean, for years we all hired with our gut, right? Like, I mean, as many people as I interviewed throughout the years, I thought, I don't need someone to teach me. I'm good. I can figure my own intuition. Science. Yeah. I don't need science bias.

[00:14:40] And forget bias is all full of stupidity. Yeah. I mean, I've, I've, I've had to have hired awful people and I probably didn't hire a lot of great people because honestly, they, I like the shirt. Like it just turned me off. Biases. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Um, I was lucky enough that the very first person that I helped to hire was a disaster. And, and even worse, we knew we had the test results.

[00:15:11] So he, he was a CEO candidate for an engineering firm, you know, fairly high level, midsize firm. And he comes in and he was just amazing. I mean, his interview, he was funny. He was entertaining. He had the right background. Um, but on his phase two problem solving, which we actually had the test results. He was terrible at math. He was terrible. Um, at logical reasoning.

[00:15:38] He was really strong verbally, which is actually a strange, like statistically, that's not a likely combination. Yeah. So between, you know, the client saying, we love this person. I loved them in the interview. We just said, like, what, let's just make an exception. These results aren't, aren't that predictive.

[00:15:59] Um, which is stupid because I, I knew that statistically they were, but I, I was sold and he made it three months. He was just terrible. He was just, and, and his test results were absolutely predictable. Well, the, the math you can, especially business math, the math can be taught or you can find a way around the math. If logical reasoning, I, again, you can teach it, but some of it's innate. It's tough. Yeah.

[00:16:29] And it's, it's more difficult to do that on the job with somebody at that ilk or that level. I mean, and oh, by the way, that's what CEOs, that's what they use in most of the decisions. It's gotta be logical. They're not making emotional or irrational decisions. They're making logical decisions. Oh, and at that point, the CEO should be the one that people are looking to as a mentor to get that guidance, not the opposite way. Yeah.

[00:16:58] But you can fall in love with that candidate. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm literally going through the, the catalog of people that I've fallen in love with because they were verbally strong. Like, okay. All right. I got it. Okay. And then the skills weren't there or other things I've, I've seen this happen, Stuart, where we get the science and then we, we find a way to not adhere to the science. Rationalize.

[00:17:27] We come up, you know, have a, come up with a reason around it. It's like, eh, let's, the science isn't always right. It's like, technically. Yeah. Science is going to be more right than you are. What's the cost to a bad hire like that? I mean, nobody knows what costs a bad hire, but like in your case, Spencer, when you, when you made that hire because you're like, you know what? I'm sold. I actually like, what's the cost of that?

[00:17:54] Maybe not so much only in dollars, but how does that really, how have you seen that affect clients that make hires that way? Well, in that case, we lost that client. That was a, that was a real cost. He can actually put a dollar amount to that. I can tell you exactly how much that was. That's the cost of credibility too. Yeah, it's definitely.

[00:18:23] And we know that there's been a lot of studies done on this where the numbers honestly range from, you know, 25% of first year's pay to four times first year pay. Right. Right. For a lot of our clients, the costs could literally be life or death because we deal with a lot of safety sensitive roles.

[00:18:47] And, and those are the ones like, those are the ones that keep me up at night. Like if we do this wrong, somebody. There's consequences. Eventually. That. When we were doing job analyses, we worked for a lot of petrochemical companies and the subject matter experts would say, you know, we'd be looking for things that had gotten wrong in the past. And it'd be like, oh, guy was power washing and he turned around and he cut the guts out of three guys.

[00:19:16] They just dropped it. Again, guy goes down in a pit and collapses. Somebody goes down to get them. He collapses third person and just boom, boom, boom, just body, body, body. Yeah. And, you know, they're working on basically a giant bomb. This is why we podcast. Oh, yeah. Because we can't fuck shit up. I mean, the worst thing can happen is we have to edit. That's right. No one dies with the conversation. Yeah.

[00:19:45] He's dealing with live ammo, especially a lot of clients. When we're setting cut scores for jobs like that, you know, we're always pushing for higher, higher, higher. I mean, like you have to. Yeah. Well, and I think that the life and death part of that definitely motivates you. But even for the people that are in the life and death, those recruiters, those hiring managers, they want the best quality.

[00:20:12] So, you know, it's like it's not like we can take shortcuts there. They want the best candidate as well. Well, I'd like to ask you about some of the science because, you know, sometimes when you – because I've – I've been to four times, but I've spoken twice. And I love the assessment space in general. I love IO psychologists because they love to drink in general. That's true.

[00:20:40] But it's – the thing is, it's like there's so much science out there, not just on the academic side, but science in our space. Do you have to build it all yourself? A, and if you do, which is fine, how do you get somebody on the outside to come in and audit your work and make sure that your science is what you think it is? And I'm thinking of Charles Handler in particular.

[00:21:08] I'm thinking of some of the work he's done historically where he's just come in and validated and just made sure, okay, we think it's doing this. Great. Let a third party come in and go, yeah, it's actually doing exactly what you want it to do. Yep. In fact, Charles actually validated one of our assessments for – Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. It's – it talks too much. Like, well, we talk science.

[00:21:34] It's – to the practitioners, either HR, TA, hiring, whatever, it's talking over their head because they care about the output. They don't care, okay, did you build your own personal assessment or did you use Hogan? Did you – you know, whatever. They don't care. And nor should they, by the way, in my opinion.

[00:21:56] They should care about the outcome being the highest quality candidate for that fit for that job. Yep. But you're a scientist, so, you know, it's probably okay to talk about science. For sure. So, an interesting stat, and I just came across this maybe a year or two ago.

[00:22:22] So, if you give normal humans two columns of numbers and you just say, are these columns correlated? If the numbers are correlated at, like, a 0.7, you know, kind of height-weight correlation, people can see it. They can look at the two columns. They can see, oh, yeah, as this number gets higher, this other number gets higher.

[00:22:50] But when you get below 0.6, pretty much people don't see it. I mean, unless they start, like, crunching the numbers, they just don't automatically see the path. And in our field, a 0.6 is just through the roof. I mean, there are essentially a couple of assessments that might touch the 0.6, but for the most part, you know, a well-done interview is like a 0.4 correlation.

[00:23:19] And what occurred to me when I came across that is when people think they see a pattern and they say, oh, this is working really well or this really isn't working, I don't think they're really seeing it. I think they're just kind of looking at their past three or four examples and, oh, it seems to be working. And unless you crunch those numbers over fairly significant sample sizes, you really don't know.

[00:23:49] I mean, you can say we built this test following best test design protocols and the subject matter experts like the questions and it all makes sense. And it's a type of test that we know historically works. But to me, the final check on that is, is it actually working in the field the way you expect it to?

[00:24:11] And to measure that, what we do is we have a process we call the continuous improvement feedback loop, which is every person hired using higher score at a minimum one year after they've been on the job. We go back to the client, we say, is the person still there? How are they doing? It might be as few as four questions or as many as 30 questions, depending on the exact job of client.

[00:24:38] But think of it as just like a two minute check in. How are things working? So for some clients, we continue that. We do it one, three, five, seven, you know, basically every other year through the lifetime of the employee. But the simplest metric there is one year after somebody's hired, would you hire that person again? Like knowing everything you know now. And that's bilateral. That's what the employee as well. Yeah. One year later, would you take this job?

[00:25:08] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's interesting you mentioned that because the last thing, what we're starting to do now is add on to that. And the employee's measurement, are you happy you took the job or are you still there? If you're not there, why did you leave? And that really matters. Oh, yeah. Spencer, I got a question.

[00:25:33] I don't know that this pertains to the product necessarily, the solution, maybe the science. Why do we always use one year as that benchmark? Why do we go back after a year and not six months? Well, first of all, we don't. A year is the default. There are some, you know, especially like seasonal type jobs where you actually don't expect them.

[00:25:57] If you're a sandwich maker working, you know, college type jobs, those windows are shorter. For them, they might say if they work for 30 days, that's good. I think other than that, it's just kind of become tradition. Yeah. But there's no scientific reasoning behind that. No, no. Okay. And we definitely have jobs.

[00:26:26] You know, I talked about the refinery jobs. They'll often say operators are shit until they've been there for five years. You know, it just takes that long to really get up to speed. And those are more of the jobs where we talk about the one, three, five, you know. Got it. So when you're first talking to a prospect, they've obviously, they've reached out. They have a problem. They want to hire.

[00:26:57] What's your process? And really what Ryan and I love to kind of get around to is like the questions they should be asking you. You know, because they'll say, hey, listen, I just lost three engineers or three, you know, this, that, and the other. I obviously have a problem. I need to hire. I need to hire quickly. I need to cost somehow to go down. And I need the highest quality candidates humanly possible.

[00:27:24] And then, so what's your retort to that? Well, the first thing is the clients will often be looking for something that's not really what they need. Or it's not truly going to solve their problem. For example, they'll say, we just need candidates.

[00:27:53] And they think. That's volume. Yeah. And they think they'll know the good from the best. So we kind of take that as a foot in the door and we do help them. And, you know, we will typically get two to ten times the number of candidates that they were getting. You know, so if they were getting 10, we'll get 20 or more.

[00:28:25] But then for us, the focus is really on accuracy. Like we know we can get the candidates. Well, we know if they're not getting zero candidates. Zero is a special note. That's usually a sign that, you know, there's a big disconnect in pay. Or there's just something wrong with that job. So we kind of use the opportunity of here are your candidates.

[00:28:54] But then we really try to educate them on the value of better assessment and finding the right people. And some clients are open-ed. Other ones, they just want the candidates. And we kind of meet them where they are. Yeah. Where in the demo, so as you're demoing people, talking to prospects, where in the demo do they kind of, where does it click for them? And they're just like, yeah, this is the solution we need.

[00:29:23] Yeah, that's also interesting because I know when it's going to be easy because most people will look at the demo. Yeah. And within 30 seconds, they're just like, this is what we need. And sometimes they'll say that a lot. Sometimes they're playing, you know, hard to get. But you can tell by the questions.

[00:29:50] You can tell even by their reactions. Like, they just get it. And if they don't, the odd thing about a lot of software companies in our space, Spencer, if they don't, the salespeople will continue to push them to try to get it. And it's the diminished return. It's like, it's a litmus test. They either get it. Or they don't. Or they don't. And if they get it, okay, good.

[00:30:20] Now, let's dig a little bit deeper into the problem. And let's figure out how the technology and the science can actually help you with the problem. But if I've got to push the boulder uphill of getting you to understand why this is important, yeah, I've got better things to do in my life. Now, different story if they're assessing you versus three others. And they're in. They've bought into the idea. They know what they need. Now you just got to, why are we different?

[00:30:50] Why are we better? But, yeah, William, you're dead on. If they don't get it, you're not going to get something like this. If you imagine, let's say I showed you 15 candidates rank ordered based on their composite overall score. And maybe that composite score is based on five individual scores. So you see five numbers and then a big number, zero to 100. People in the 90s are like your A candidates.

[00:31:19] So you can see right away, I have this number that's ranking everybody. It's measuring everything we need to measure. We can customize what we need to measure. So we're not locked into these five measurements. So the people, I think of them, honestly, they're a little bit more engineering kind of stereotype. They see a bunch of numbers. It all adds up. It makes sense. It's like this is what we need. Occasionally, we'll get people who are a little more touchy-feely.

[00:31:49] And they'll literally say, like, I'm not a math person. Like, what am I looking at? And you can tell it's going to be a much harder sell for them. Now, they might still be interested because they want double the candidates and they want, you know, some of the scheduling and some nice to have. It's taken me a long time to really get past the fact, like, I'm totally focused on accuracy.

[00:32:18] I'm just obsessed with getting the right person in the job. Even if it's hard, even if however many steps it takes, like, I'm really obsessed with that. And I've kind of had to meet the clients in the middle. Like, sometimes they're just not going to do everything. You know, they can't. It's not logistic. They need a seat. They need a person. And the accuracy can be less because they need a person. Hopefully, that's not in a critical role.

[00:32:48] But the idea is, you know, good is good enough. Okay. Assuming you have a team around them that can. 100%. You know, manage that. 100%. And it's not a critical risk-facing position. Yeah. You're not saving lives. You're good. Yeah. You're carrying tires. You know, whatever. Yeah, yeah. So you can't stack them as straight. It's all good. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. We can teach you that over time. We can get you there.

[00:33:16] So do you have an assessment or do, is there a part of an assessment that assesses for risk? Like a risk tolerance? Or behaviors around risk? The individual's acceptance of risk of like doing something risky? I know personality-wise, there are personalities that will absorb more risk than not. Yes. Right? And there's better words for that.

[00:33:46] But I'm thinking about back to the examples that you were given of really, really dangerous jobs. And you don't need a person that's not safety-oriented or that, you know what I'm saying? Like, it's like, how do you assess for that? So our default personality assessment is a big five inventory called the BVI.

[00:34:15] And that's an in-house. So just think of a generic job. We kind of take that. And you can use the right map and apply that to just about any job. But when you get into the safety-sensitive roles, usually you're not worried about even understanding the person's whole personality. But you're super focused on what you're talking about, about risk. Right. So for that, we have a specialized assessment called the Outlook Inventory.

[00:34:45] And it's really all about, you know, does the person follow the rules? And how willing are they to, you know, step over the yellow line to grab a screwdriver? You know, it's not that big deal. Well, it's very predictive. In fact, people who score in the red zone on that are 10 to 20 times more likely to be involved in a safety incident at work. So just... I didn't see that. Yeah. Yeah. That's...

[00:35:15] You don't need a forklift driver that steps over the yellow line. You need a forklift driver that does what they're supposed to do. And repetitively. Like, there's no wildcatting. There's no... Today, I think I'll do it differently. No. You do it the exact same way. Some people's personality or whatever, their upbringing, whatever kind of makes them them them. Some people are that way and some people aren't.

[00:35:41] And if we're recruiting, we need to recruit and filter those people in or out based on the outcome that we need. I will say there's... There is a bit of a risk to that test in the sense of if you want people who are going to go on to become supervisors, management, kind of work their way on.

[00:36:05] If you are too risk averse, you're not going to go become a plant manager, so to speak. Like, the higher you get, the more you have to... It becomes more about risk management and taking intelligent risks. But there are a lot of jobs where you just don't... You don't want them to cross the yellow line. No. No. No. I'm thinking of miners in particular at this particular second.

[00:36:34] I'm thinking, you know, you don't need miners that are entrepreneurial in their thoughts. You need miners to do the job, whatever that job is in front of them. And again, dealing with internal mobility and what they would do next. Okay. Can we train them to then do this and do it differently, et cetera, in a different position? Maybe or maybe not. Yeah. I mean, the three of us know plenty of people.

[00:37:02] They've had the same job 20 years, 30 years. And it's like they're happy because they like that. And they don't need to go. Not everybody needs to be the CEO. And not everybody can be the CEO. No. They're just good, constant, solid performers. And that's generally what makes a company run, right, across the board. Spencer, final question for me in the couple minutes we have left.

[00:37:29] We've talked about everything you're doing, right? But where does tech – we talked about recruiting and sourcing. We talked about the assessments, all this stuff. Talk about the technology. How does all of this get tied into one platform? And does an organization have to have the entire platform? Or can they module – bring this into modules?

[00:37:56] If you were a client, you get access to the entire platform. But parts of – that would either be turned on or off. So potentially, you'd see more, see less based on your desire. And it's very much designed to be a la carte in a sense. We have some clients who just use one assessment.

[00:38:24] They don't even understand what the platform can do. It doesn't matter. They're happy. Yep. That's it. In fact, we have clients who just use us to get candidates. And then they feed the candidates into a different applicant tracking system. And they don't even log it.

[00:38:45] That, you know, part – just because we're a small vendor, we can't dictate how other people are going to do things. So we have to basically say, what do you like about your current process? And what are you missing? And we take the parts that are missing. If you don't have a good personality assessment, we plug in ours. But also, we can – you mentioned the Hogan. Like, we can take the Hogan scores and we can plug them into higher score.

[00:39:15] So we have to be incredibly adaptable to be competitive as a small provider. I like that. I think that's a great competitive advantage. Last question for me, Spencer, is what questions should we have asked you that we didn't ask you today? Hmm. That's a good question.

[00:39:40] I would say, what makes us unique in a very competitive market? All righty, Brian. What makes them unique in a very competitive market? You knew that was going to happen, Spencer. Come on now. So what does make you unique?

[00:40:03] I would say what makes us unique is it's not so much the technology or even the science. It's – we have a definite philosophy of how hiring should be done. So we kind of have this pristine castle on the hill. Like, that's our target.

[00:40:32] And we can compare that to what you're currently doing. And we can basically say, you know, here are five things you could do to reach that castle. And if you do one thing, it's going to improve your process. If you do four things, it's going to improve it more. But we can always kind of help nudge the clients in the right direction or clients who are just willing to go for it. We can take them there.

[00:41:00] And we know it works because we've been tracking it for 10-plus years. You know, we have the data to support it. And a couple of kind of examples of just where we're different in that respect. If you're applying for one of our jobs, almost every other system on the planet, the first thing you do is you create an account. For us, you don't have to create an account. You go – you start answering questions about the job just immediately.

[00:41:30] Immediately. What we know is statistically when you make somebody make an account, there's a big drop-off, big attrition just right away. Yeah. A card abandonment in the e-commerce world. If you make them upload a resume, big drop-off right away. So, so we're constantly looking at like where are those drop-offs, either at the assessment level or the question level. And maybe, maybe that question is rubbing them a little wrong. Let's save that.

[00:41:59] Maybe we ask that question later in the process. Yeah. Like a very old school example in our first iteration. I can't believe we had this, but we actually had social security as, as a question. Because we were basically copying a paper application. Do you believe in the concept of social security? What was the question? Well, the – nobody would – or there was a huge drop-off right when you ask people their social security number.

[00:42:28] So we stopped asking that. It's like you need to learn that before you hire them. But it shouldn't be on your first page of questions. Right. Right. So I think by working our philosophy into the technology, we're providing a service that's difficult to match. Yeah, I think for me, out of this show, one of the things that I'll pull away is, one, is your adaptability.

[00:42:59] So being able to help people with the things that they need and, again, not force a bunch of stuff on them. I love that. And I think your personal passion for quality, I think that that's also really important because you're always trying to make things better. Like you're not going to rest with whatever you've built, with whatever has been built in the past.

[00:43:25] You're just going to try to find a way to make it better, which is not common in our space, I would tell you. But this has been a fantastic show. Spencer, thank you so much for carving out time for Ryan and I and the audience. And where can they find you? Let's do a little URL, Dale. Yep.

[00:43:49] HireScore.com would be the best place to reach out. You can also reach me direct at Spencer at StayingDS.com. That's staying decision systems. Jobs Mike walks off stage. Spencer, thank you so much for the audience. Thank you for listening, watching, etc. And until next time. All right. Take care, guys. All right. Bye. Bye. Bye.