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Caitlin MacGregor was launching a new company to sell a Canadian software product in the United States when she discovered that if she hired someone who didn’t work out, it would cost the company around $300,000.<\/p>\nCaitlin MacGregor was launching a new company to sell a Canadian software product in the United States when she discovered that if she hired someone who didn’t work out, it would cost the company around $300,000.<\/p>\n
Determined to get it right the first time, she decided to use psychometric evaluations (also known as aptitude or personality tests) to vet every candidate.<\/p>\n
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It led her to look at people who didn’t have the education and experience that a software distributor would normally be looking for.nOne of those candidates who scored highly was Christine Bird.<\/p>\n
“If we had relied on the traditional hiring process, she’d never have made the shortlist,” MacGregor, who hired Bird and began grooming her for management.<\/p>\n
Now, Bird is MacGregor’s co-founder at Plum, a Kitchener-based startup that wants to make psychology-based assessments one of the first steps in the hiring process.<\/p>\n
“Resume’s have no predictive ability,” MacGregor says.<\/p>\n
Plum uses an test to measure personality, problem-solving ability and social intelligence, things that MacGregor says are better predictors of what a person will be good at.<\/p>\n
Employers also fill out an evaluation about the role they’re looking to fill. Plum can then give a “unique match score, related to that unique role,” MacGregor says. That match score can be used by an employer to shortlist the candidates they’d most like to interview.<\/p>\n
While there are companies that already do psychometric evaluations, their processes tend to be expensive and labour intensive – meaning that even businesses that use these sorts of evaluations generally do it late in the hiring process. Some companies even wait until after they’ve hired someone.<\/p>\n
MacGregor says that’s too late for it to do any good.<\/p>\n