Can voice analysis bring better job candidates? Start-up Urgent Career thinks so.
By utilizing linguistic technology to analyze and match sales professionals with compatible roles the company believes it can eliminate both unnecessary hiring mistakes for growing companies and poor career choices for sales professionals.
Said Urgent Career CEO Jeff Stewart, “The bottom line is that bad matches are disastrous for both candidate and employer. Digitally analyzing conversations is a better way to match sales professionals to roles where they will be most successful. A simple conversation contains an astounding amount of information that we can unlock using algorithms in order to better match candidates and clients.”
Basically, a sales professional inputs their phone number into the site. Then a counselor contacts them with a variety of questions. Once complete, the answers are crunched and ideal job openings and companies are matched said candidate. Sounds a bit complicated, but they assured me users and beta testers have found success and report ease-of-use.
Like most start-ups in our space, the dual challenge of generating job seeker traffic along with customers is clear and present. The company seems confident its pay-for-performance model (20 percent of base salary) will bring in employers, but admit the task of wrangling candidates will be a bit tougher. Agreed.
We spoke with the company at length regarding their model and strategy (20 mins.):
Notably, fellow blogger Matt Martone joined the company after leaving his gig at Yahoo! HotJobs (wiki – search). Those who know Matt will likely agree his association with the company alone is a vote of confidence. Should be fun to watch.
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July 7th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
I didn’t have 20 minutes right now to listen to the podcast, but do you discuss compliance/legal issues at any point?
July 7th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Love the fact that recruiters are represented by a shady in-the-shadows character!
July 7th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
I don’t think so, Willy. Sorry.
July 7th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
Toss this on the pile with handwriting analysis and head bumps. W.C. Fields and all that……
You know what makes good salespeople ? Superior products backed by superior service and good leadership. Tonal qualities, Syntax, Speech Complexity, etc. all add up to feel good nothingness.
Unless you are seeking to filter by social class, in which case you still would be better retaining some ‘mean girls’ (of either gender) to handle it.
July 8th, 2008 at 10:17 am
This is my first response on this site and I’ve read a lot of material here.
I don’t know about this idea. I agree with Martin. However, I believe product and service has nothing to do with it. For the most part people buy things for 3 reasons, because they “know, like and trust” you. Sales can be taught, but you can’t teach someone to get people to know like and trust them.
Good sales people are products of their environment. What I mean by this, is that if you were brought up as a people oriented person that values relationships, then more than likely you will be a good sales person because more people will tend to relate to you. Tone, syntax and speech complexity are all great things that will compliment a good people oriented person in sales but, they have nothing to do with being a good sales person. You can teach a monkey to sound good, but it doesn’t mean that they will be a good sales person.
My prediction: for the reasons listed above a good sales person and/or hiring manager who is educated in sales and very successful in sales themselves will be able to see right through this site and more than likely will not use it. But this idea may find success from new sales people (new college grads) and your average HR department.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
@Willy, Assuming you’re interested in an employer’s ofccp/eeoc compliance…
Call transcripts are kept completely confidential. They are never shared with the employer. They are data used for matching.
Our method of candidate delivery is similar to that of staffing firms.
So, as it relates to compliance, working with Urgent Career is no different than working with a recruiting firm.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
@Martin, I know a lot of really talented sales professionals pushing poorly designed products, with lackluster support and inexperienced managers.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
In my experience as CEO and founder of many fast growing companies, I have found that a top sales person outsells an average sales person 6 to 1; selling the same product, in the same territory, with the same level of support.
As to your skepticism about computational linguistics, I appreciate your concern. I too was skeptical until I saw this type of technology work on Wall Street.
With further research, we found examples in the intelligence community, insurance industry, internet search, and marriage counseling.
There is a great chapter on thin slicing conversations in Malcolm Gladwell’s best selling book Blink.
This technology is proven, just it has not been applied to matching Sales professionals to Sales Jobs.
If you really want to “geek out” with related readings I recommend:
“The Mathematics of Love” – John Gottman, Ph.D. (mathematical decomposition of communications)
“Predicting Divorce among Newlyweds from the First Three Minutes of a Marital Conflict Discussion.” – Sybil Carrere and John Gottman. Family Process. 1999. Vol. 38. No. 3. 293-301.
“How Plaintiff’s Lawyers Pick Their Targets” – Interview with Jeffrey Allen and Alice Burkin by Berkeley Rice. Medical Economics. April 24, 2000.
“Physician-Patient Communication: The Relationship with Malpractice Claims Among Primary Care Physicians and Surgeons” Wendy Levinson, Journal of the American Medical Association. 1997 Vol. 277. No. 7. pp. 553-559.
“Surgeons’ Tone of Voice: A Clue to Malpractice History” – Nalini Ambady et al., Surgery. 2002. Vol. 132. pp. 5-9.
“Who Are the Marital Experts?” – Rachel Ebling and Robert W. Levenson. February 2003. Journal of Marriage and Family. Vol. 65. 130-142.
Or feel free to reach out to me directly.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Chris, I disagree with your prediction. There are LOTS of bad sales people that are great at interviewing. Great sales managers understand that most companies only achieve 50% success rate in hiring sales people. It is a huge waste of time and money to manage a sales person that fails to reach revenue quota. We believe technology offers the best solution, and we have dedicated ourselves to pioneering the use of computational linguistics in the job matching process.
So far the Sales Managers, CEOs, Founders and Hiring Managers we are working with appreciate the application of mathematics to assessing sales people. The Urgent Career system will never be a complete replacement for interviews with the sales manager, but the service serves the most promising candidate to the hiring manager.
I predict that in 5 years, despite our pending patents, computational linguistics will be a common part of the job matching function;
>> Not just for the growing companies we service, but even more so for the fortune 500 companies.
>> Not just for the client facing positions we specialize in, but all positions that involve communication skills.
Sharing information via a call is hassle free for the candidate, and the information density in a conversation is high. The data in a conversation lends itself to algorithmic analysis… its much better than a resume, and its much better than “gut” which unfortunately common practice for sales matching.
July 9th, 2008 at 11:33 am
I am not dissing the field of computational linguistics- no doubt there will be more and more uses for it.
This situation is really applied linguistics because the method(s) are necessarily cross discipline; human behavior can’t yet be reduced to mathematic constructs.
This offering (it fits into my mental map like AI text search) is a brand promise to ‘black box’ decision-making via a veneer of technical omniscience that is nowhere close to absolute, and may not even reach the results of semi-skilled human selectors. Just as great salespeople outsell poor ones by 6 to 1, one may propose that great selectors out choose normal ones by a similar margin.
My problem with these tools is DE SELECTION. It’s not the people that get the thumbs up, but the ones that get the thumbs down that are going to cost end-users some money.
Every experienced businessperson knows one or several high performers that fell into their roles by a non-standard selection process and were therefore able to show their stuff and succeed, often dramatically.
There are very real risks that using this kind of tool will create homogonous looking groups of candidates while culling potentially transforming players- as we also all know, genius and madness don’t always look very far apart.
Of course the required denigration of the ‘gut’ method of selection is included. This is never done respecting the incredible complexity of some ‘gut’ decisions and the fact that we do indeed trust the gut in our selection of mates, homes, presidents, and any number of other areas. For example, in matters of stock picking, I would trust Warren Buffet’s gut instinct more than any software.
This all also plays in to the whole fallacy of assessment; that the person you assess today is the person who will be working for you tomorrow. Once a person enters a new situation and interacts with other people for a period of time, the person you assessed no longer exists. Assessment will not reach its potential until whole groups are being assessed at once, and with each variation of possible new team members being run down. For example, a single prima donna in a group is often fine, but two becomes one too many, and no assessment can illuminate that by itself.
Selling people on the idea that language analysis of a given candidate will reliably predict sales performance is not going to create better sales forces.
Great generals win with the armies they have. Great coaches win with the talent on-hand. Great business people create organizations that foster, enhance, and exploit the value of the people they lead- almost regardless of the selection methods (obviously provided that those methods are reasonably fitted for the situation).
July 10th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
It sounds to me like someone has taken the JobFox concept and made it even more of a hassle, and more expensive. I haven’t heard a lot of candidates complaining that it doesn’t take enough time to job hunt.
But joking aside, this really just sounds like an agency with a gimmick. The benefit (and cost) to employers is the same sales pitch that I hear from agencies every day. On the candidate side, it’s just a little more invasive. But the filtering still comes down to industry, location and comp.