Flourish & Thrive w/Jason Putnam

[00:00:04] Welcome to The Recruitment Flex with Serge and Shelley. I'm Serge.

[00:00:10] And I'm Shelley. And we talk all things recruitment starting right now.

[00:00:14] Bonjour and welcome to The Recruitment Flex. Shelley, are you sitting down because I got

[00:00:22] to keep an eye on you? You have your work boyfriend here on the podcast today. So

[00:00:28] No, no, stop it. But it is my pleasure to welcome back to the show once again,

[00:00:35] someone who I think the world of, the lovely, the talented and oh so handsome, Jason Putnam,

[00:00:42] who's the chief revenue officer with Plum. Welcome to the show, Jason.

[00:00:46] Thank you. Thank you. The feeling's mutual for both of you. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:50] Before you go into it, there's a couple things I want to call out. So Jason is

[00:00:54] an avid listener to The Recruitment Flex. Thank you, Jason. We really appreciate it.

[00:00:59] And probably around six months ago, I mentioned that I had a my buddy. My buddy

[00:01:03] was a toy when you were a kid. I love my buddy. My buddy was my buddy, right? And Jason,

[00:01:08] just the caring, thoughtful person. When we did an event recently in Toronto with him,

[00:01:14] he said he has a special gift for me. He actually packed my buddy in his suitcase and

[00:01:20] brought it. I'll tell you, it's a hit in my household. My little girls will not let go

[00:01:26] of my buddy. But Jason, thank you. That was one of the best gifts I've ever received.

[00:01:32] You're welcome. You're welcome. Yes. And speaking of gifts, I too received a gift.

[00:01:37] I think one time I mentioned in passing that I'm a big fan of the Red Hot Chili Peppers

[00:01:42] and Jason shows up with a hard copy of Scar Tissue, which is Anthony Kiedis' book.

[00:01:48] And I'm almost done. I'm in the final chapter.

[00:01:51] I'm so happy you enjoyed them, both of you.

[00:01:53] So for anyone in the audience that maybe hadn't listened to previous episodes that

[00:01:59] we've had with you on the show, Jason, just give us a refresher on you and your journey

[00:02:05] in TA Tech and a little bit about Plum as well.

[00:02:09] Yeah, I've been in and out of TA Tech for a long time. The last three were in TA Tech.

[00:02:14] So I was chief revenue officer at Plum, which is a Waterloo based company. I'm

[00:02:18] in Austin, Texas. We're about half and a half US and Canada. For that, I was

[00:02:22] a CRO for Panda Logic. And before that, I was a CRO for Bounty Jobs for four and

[00:02:27] a half years or so. And then Plum, I think a lot of people know Plum the last

[00:02:31] couple of years. It's been a bit of a coming out party.

[00:02:34] Historically, we were a psychometric platform that was able to deliver that

[00:02:38] very predictive data at scale, which was unique for us.

[00:02:41] If you didn't need these consulting in 140 hours per job, we really tried to

[00:02:45] do it both from the side of the human first, the people taking the

[00:02:48] assessment and making sure they were getting something in return.

[00:02:52] They were happy. They were fulfilled in what they received.

[00:02:54] That drove to the highest completion rate, but also the highest satisfaction

[00:02:57] rate. And then with that, both on the applicant side, but also the

[00:03:01] employee side, that data then went over into the corporation side.

[00:03:06] Corporation could use it both for talent acquisition, but also onboarding

[00:03:11] interview questions all the way through everything you would do in

[00:03:13] talent management. So session planning, leadership potential.

[00:03:16] And today that's how clients use us. Very big clients.

[00:03:19] Scotiabank, as you all know, Citibank, Bloomberg, Whirlpool,

[00:03:22] Hyundai, big clients use it almost on every applicant and they give it to

[00:03:25] every employee because now they have this really high completion rate for

[00:03:28] their employees as well. And ultimately they have the data and essentially

[00:03:31] we're getting to this predictive nature of quote unquote, what the

[00:03:34] industry calls soft skills.

[00:03:36] So I understand that there has been an awful lot happening at Plum,

[00:03:42] but we don't know what is there anything you can share with us

[00:03:46] outside of a media day that we did today?

[00:03:48] You will be the first people we're sharing it with.

[00:03:50] Should I put out the drum roll yet?

[00:03:52] Are you ready to announce your big Plum announcement?

[00:03:55] So I'll set it up a little bit.

[00:03:56] So in the last two years we've been on this mission, as I explained to

[00:04:00] really serve both sides, both sides, meaning the human and the

[00:04:04] corporation that's led to a lot of popularity.

[00:04:06] So an outcome of that is there's about 50,000 people every month who

[00:04:11] create their own Plum profile.

[00:04:13] The assessment is part of it, but it goes much more beyond that.

[00:04:15] We give people all their talents.

[00:04:17] We let them know how to interact with others.

[00:04:19] It's really a lot of value and by the minute people are sharing it on

[00:04:21] LinkedIn, but it's also led with the popularity of that to us

[00:04:26] growing in a down market.

[00:04:27] So we've grown about 230% in the last year.

[00:04:29] The last two years we won a bunch of awards and the announcement is

[00:04:33] we're taking that a step further and we're actually bifurcating

[00:04:37] Plum into two distinct offerings.

[00:04:39] So one for the person, for the human, and that's what we're calling

[00:04:42] Plum flourish and one for the business, which is Plum thrive.

[00:04:46] So we'll touch on Plum flourish just for a second.

[00:04:49] Think of it as our user centric solution.

[00:04:51] It is free.

[00:04:52] It'll always be free, but where we're going to now be able to invite

[00:04:56] individuals to map out their best fit career, to unlock the right

[00:04:59] opportunities, even if they're in an opportunity today and to

[00:05:02] build career paths.

[00:05:03] And we're going to do that with a combination of two things.

[00:05:06] All the psychometric data that we captured today with all the L and D

[00:05:09] stuff, but also their eligibility, what the industry calls hard skills.

[00:05:14] Now, if you look at Plum thrive, that's our enterprise solution.

[00:05:18] Very similar to what we have today, but we're enhancing it right now.

[00:05:20] We're poised to solve skills-based hiring in a way that's unique to Plum.

[00:05:25] We're combining hard skills and soft skills for the first time ever.

[00:05:29] In the way that we do it with proprietary technology and methodology.

[00:05:33] And what we're trying to do is uncover the role fit as well

[00:05:37] as the psychometric match.

[00:05:39] And that hasn't been done.

[00:05:40] There's a lot of people who have come to us to get our psychometric

[00:05:42] data, to put in their solutions from a hard skills perspective.

[00:05:46] We did the hard stuff first.

[00:05:47] We did the psychometric stuff at scale and we said, Hey, now it makes

[00:05:50] sense to bring hard skills in for the human first, because in order

[00:05:54] to career map them and help them be matched to jobs, we don't want to

[00:05:58] match a janitor to a CFO job or a CFO to a janitor job, no matter how.

[00:06:01] How great that job is, but it's this end to end solution.

[00:06:05] And it's really going to allow the corporations now to make full

[00:06:08] data decisions with every piece of data.

[00:06:11] That's the first part of what we're doing.

[00:06:12] And that was very big.

[00:06:13] It took us two years to build that part of it, to build it the right way.

[00:06:17] We could have just used a scraping technology and solved it in a

[00:06:19] week like everybody else does.

[00:06:21] We spent a year beta testing all the scraping technology out there

[00:06:26] and putting it through our system with real people and what we found

[00:06:29] because we're a science company is none of that data was actually predictive.

[00:06:32] None of it actually meant anything when we did it.

[00:06:35] So we went out and built it on our own a separate way

[00:06:37] and the results had been amazing.

[00:06:38] But the second announcement is we are also overlaying culture on top of this.

[00:06:42] So now you're going to have this holistic view culture, Shelley,

[00:06:46] only for TM, not for selection, because I know what you're going to ask.

[00:06:50] But now with our TM clients, which almost everybody has,

[00:06:53] you're going to be able to do a full culture gap analysis.

[00:06:55] And in the way Plum does it, we take science, we take very predictive

[00:06:58] things that are typically hard to do.

[00:07:00] And we want to have that same level of scientific accuracy prediction

[00:07:04] and do it in a very simple way like we did psychometrically.

[00:07:07] We're doing it the same way with our skills

[00:07:08] and we're doing it the same way with culture.

[00:07:10] So in all of those examples, you can roll out culture

[00:07:13] to all your employees and get your culture gap analysis done in eight minutes.

[00:07:18] And every employee is going to get a full career management platform out of it.

[00:07:22] So if you think about those three pillars for a CEO,

[00:07:25] they have fiduciary responsibility.

[00:07:27] They have the responsibility of culture

[00:07:28] and they have the responsibility of employee safety and growth.

[00:07:32] So with Plum Thrive, they're going to be able to check the culture box

[00:07:35] and actually check the employee development box with one tool.

[00:07:38] And then because when people flourish, business thrive,

[00:07:41] their business will thrive from a financial aspect

[00:07:43] because those two other boxes are taken care of.

[00:07:46] Help me understand how you're measuring hard skills.

[00:07:50] We're not measuring hard skills, we're collecting hard skills.

[00:07:53] If you think about our main goal is to know more about a human being

[00:07:57] than anybody else in their career journey.

[00:08:00] Our goal, if you put the human first, we want to be able to say

[00:08:03] to every person in the world, we want them to have a Plum profile

[00:08:06] and we want them to say, hey, I need to start a new career journey.

[00:08:08] I need to look for a job.

[00:08:10] I had a hard day at work today.

[00:08:12] Hey, this happened at work.

[00:08:13] I'm going to sit with my boss.

[00:08:14] I'm going to sit with my peer.

[00:08:15] We want them in Plum every day.

[00:08:17] That's the ultimate goal, to be able to empower them to do that.

[00:08:20] And if all that data is in one platform, it's going to make it

[00:08:22] much easier for the corporation at 100 percent completion rate

[00:08:25] to have the data they need to really do workforce management,

[00:08:28] culture gap, all the things that they want to do.

[00:08:31] So it's a long answer, Serge.

[00:08:32] But if you're trying to solve culture like everybody else

[00:08:34] and you're trying to understand every grain of sand in the desert,

[00:08:37] it'll never be done.

[00:08:39] Skills are changing all the time.

[00:08:40] New skills are created every day.

[00:08:42] Old skills are being sunsetted.

[00:08:43] The half life of skills is two and a half years now.

[00:08:45] It's at an all time low.

[00:08:47] So we had this idea two years ago.

[00:08:48] We spent a year mapping again to the current technology and it didn't work.

[00:08:52] So we said, what's a different way to do it?

[00:08:54] And what we found was there wasn't a job out there where.

[00:08:59] We needed to know more than five things about that person

[00:09:02] from a hard skills perspective, because we already knew so much psychometrically.

[00:09:06] And we really put this through a lot of testing and a lot of rigor

[00:09:09] with all different jobs.

[00:09:10] An example is pediatric oncologist in Ohio.

[00:09:14] If that person's an applicant,

[00:09:16] how many things do you need to know hard skills or eligibility

[00:09:19] about that person to interview them?

[00:09:21] I need to know if they're in Ohio

[00:09:22] and I need to know if they're a pediatric oncologist.

[00:09:25] Those are two things.

[00:09:26] The more complicated the job, actually, the less things

[00:09:28] you need to know about them,

[00:09:30] the less complicated the job, unless it's purely high volume hiring

[00:09:33] like picker packer or early career like Scusha does.

[00:09:36] No resumes at all. No hard skills at all.

[00:09:38] It's those in-between jobs like sales.

[00:09:41] If I'm going to hire a sales rep at Plum, what do I need to know?

[00:09:44] Are you in sales?

[00:09:45] Where are you in your career?

[00:09:46] Are you a CRO or are you a BDR?

[00:09:48] Maybe where do you live? But maybe that's irrelevant.

[00:09:50] What do you sell? Do you sell vibrating hairbrushes?

[00:09:52] Do you sell enterprise software?

[00:09:54] Right. There's only a few things I need to know.

[00:09:56] What we want to do is just make sure when you look at the psychometric data

[00:09:59] and you combine it with the hard skills data,

[00:10:01] if somebody is a 98 for Plum and they have five out of those five,

[00:10:04] like don't put them through a phone screen.

[00:10:06] Just do a proper interview.

[00:10:08] If somebody is a 98 and they have two skills,

[00:10:11] you maybe want to talk to him or if those two skills

[00:10:12] aren't the right skills, don't talk to him.

[00:10:14] If they're a 40 and have five out of five hard skills.

[00:10:18] Hey, guess what? They can probably do the job,

[00:10:19] but they're going to quit in six months

[00:10:20] if you look at it from a psychometric perspective.

[00:10:22] So again, we're trying to solve it in the easiest way,

[00:10:25] but also the most what I'll call humane way.

[00:10:27] And the other difference that we do now is it's not just about what you know,

[00:10:30] but it's aspirational. What do you want to do?

[00:10:33] So now when I'm looking at an applicant, whether it's external

[00:10:35] or for internal mobility or succession planning, they may be in sales,

[00:10:39] but we're also asking them, what do you want to do?

[00:10:41] Maybe they work at a small company today and then aspirational.

[00:10:44] We say, do you want to still work at a small company

[00:10:46] or do you want to work at a big company?

[00:10:47] So that same data that we're collecting on what they know,

[00:10:50] we're also asking them aspirationally, what do you want to do as well?

[00:10:54] So, Jason, I want to break it down.

[00:10:56] Like what is the journey look like?

[00:10:58] So I'm a client. I buy this platform from Plum.

[00:11:02] What is the candidate journey?

[00:11:04] What does it look like on the practitioner side?

[00:11:07] And maybe also because you talked about TM, where does that fit in?

[00:11:10] Are you leveraging in the same way in talent acquisition

[00:11:13] that you would in talent management?

[00:11:15] What would it look like in my process?

[00:11:17] Yeah, let's take it to the biggest case example you can do

[00:11:20] and then we'll drill down.

[00:11:21] Yeah, please.

[00:11:22] Let's say you're the CEO of a large company.

[00:11:24] OK, you're not a practitioner.

[00:11:26] And what you want to understand at the executive level is what is our culture

[00:11:30] and where are those gaps in that culture?

[00:11:32] Because in a dream world, you have what the executives want the culture to be.

[00:11:36] You have what the people think it is.

[00:11:38] And then you have what the people want it to be.

[00:11:40] In a dream world, all three of those circles, there's no overlap, right?

[00:11:43] It's completely aligned.

[00:11:44] We know that's not the case with most companies.

[00:11:46] It's more like a VIN diagram.

[00:11:48] You don't have to implement it this way.

[00:11:49] But the first thing you want to do is understand those culture gaps

[00:11:52] before you do anything else, because if you don't get the culture right

[00:11:56] and it's not the culture what the people in the boardroom think it should be.

[00:11:58] Like I think that's a big misconception.

[00:12:00] Let's understand what everyone in the company thinks it is

[00:12:03] and what they want it to be.

[00:12:04] Let's close that gap and then make sure the executives can be aligned.

[00:12:07] So now I know what the culture is.

[00:12:09] And if you think about it from a TA perspective.

[00:12:12] I post a job, I use Plum, and I have Plum

[00:12:16] be the first step in that application journey.

[00:12:19] So if you look at our clients, Susie uploads a resume.

[00:12:23] The next thing she does is Plum. Right.

[00:12:25] So part of that is the assessment part of it is building her plumb profile.

[00:12:29] Again, really high completion rate.

[00:12:30] But what happens on the backside is I've done this match criteria.

[00:12:34] So traditionally, psychometrically, it's not the assessment.

[00:12:37] That's one problem.

[00:12:37] It's what do I match the assessment to scientifically

[00:12:40] that is legal, compliant and predictive of success?

[00:12:44] Historically, you need to bring a consulting group in

[00:12:46] to do that competency and trait model to build that.

[00:12:48] And that takes 140 hours per job.

[00:12:51] The power of Plum over the last 12 years is we've truncated that down

[00:12:54] in technology to eight minutes.

[00:12:56] Anyone who's involved in that particular decision,

[00:12:58] whether it's an interview panel or internal mobility, whatever it may be,

[00:13:02] because it's only eight minutes, you can match every person to every job

[00:13:04] and every person to every situation internally.

[00:13:07] So let's assume at scale this company has every job done.

[00:13:09] Right. Takes eight minutes.

[00:13:11] And if it's high volume, you can just redo it.

[00:13:13] Then somebody goes out and takes the assessment.

[00:13:15] It's just matching those two things together.

[00:13:17] And historically, what we've done is we've matched psychometric

[00:13:21] data of the assessment to what we call a match criteria,

[00:13:24] which is a competency model.

[00:13:25] And we let you know how those people work.

[00:13:27] And Shelly, you may apply in your 98 for that job.

[00:13:30] And Serge, you may apply in your 40.

[00:13:32] But Serge, you may be a 95 for a different job at that company

[00:13:35] because it's not job specific.

[00:13:37] Everyone takes the exact same assessment.

[00:13:38] All 50,000 people take the exact same assessment.

[00:13:41] What changes is the match criteria.

[00:13:43] So then once Susie gets hired or even before she gets hired,

[00:13:46] we can use her psychometric data to serve up interview questions for the employer.

[00:13:51] Hey, you said you wanted teamwork as an example to be very high.

[00:13:55] And Susie may be a little low.

[00:13:57] Here's some questions you can ask her to see if she's built

[00:13:59] some coping mechanisms.

[00:14:00] But we also serve up those same interview questions to Susie.

[00:14:03] Hey, Susie, you're going to go into a job.

[00:14:04] You should ask some of these questions.

[00:14:06] That same data is used to onboard.

[00:14:08] And as soon as that person's hired as part of the assessment,

[00:14:11] you can measure leadership potential.

[00:14:13] So as soon as Susie's onboarded, the client knows, is she in the upper 10 percent?

[00:14:17] Is she in the bottom 10 percent?

[00:14:19] Where does she sit in that stack?

[00:14:20] And it's OK to let Susie know, hey, leadership may be draining

[00:14:24] for you in your career.

[00:14:26] Let's make you the best subject matter expert or you're in the top

[00:14:28] 10 percent or five percent.

[00:14:30] You're 22 years old.

[00:14:31] Let's put you on a leadership track right now.

[00:14:33] You know what that does for retention, obviously.

[00:14:35] But that same data can be used for situations within TM.

[00:14:40] So let's say there's a project coming and I need different personalities

[00:14:43] in that project.

[00:14:44] I need people who are innovative, but also who can execute.

[00:14:46] I can start building teams.

[00:14:47] I can use it to say, who should my next manager be on this particular team?

[00:14:51] If you think of sales hire the dude who's got 100 percent quota, right?

[00:14:55] We all know that story.

[00:14:57] But those don't always make the best managers.

[00:14:59] Now you can look at your organization and say, hey, Susie is upper

[00:15:03] five percent in leadership potential.

[00:15:05] Maybe she's not always at quota, but she knows the business.

[00:15:07] She's also a great match.

[00:15:08] Let's promote her for this job versus the person who's at 100 percent quota.

[00:15:12] But also anything if you're replacing a CEO two years from now,

[00:15:15] you can look at the entire org and figure out now with the new launch

[00:15:20] not only who's aligned with the psychometric side,

[00:15:24] but who has some of those baseline hard skills?

[00:15:26] And then where do we need to upskill them over time?

[00:15:28] Talk a little bit more about that.

[00:15:30] I'm just curious how it integrates into your tech stack.

[00:15:33] Like how does the data flow in possible challenges or opportunities?

[00:15:38] Yeah, it's not a ton of challenges.

[00:15:39] I think it's mostly opportunities.

[00:15:41] So on the front end, on the T.A. side, we can integrate with any ATS.

[00:15:45] For example, if somebody's using workday today and they're in their candidate

[00:15:48] view, they'll just see a plum score down the side.

[00:15:51] Yeah, right.

[00:15:52] Sort it. Shelly's a 98 surges 97.

[00:15:54] But now you'll be able to see the hard skills aspect in there as well.

[00:15:57] That level of integration is really interesting.

[00:15:59] Where it becomes harder is the true HRIS integration from a TM perspective,

[00:16:04] because so much of that data is hard to get to the dream world for me

[00:16:07] on the enterprise side is to be able to pull performance data into that as well.

[00:16:11] Because right now, what we've done is longitude and latitude, right?

[00:16:15] We've done hard skills and soft skills and where they meet.

[00:16:17] Nobody's really done that at the scalability that we just launched.

[00:16:20] What we don't have is altitude, which is aptitude.

[00:16:23] How well do you know a thing or how performant you are?

[00:16:26] That's not what we're prioritizing, because our goal is to not go after an ATS

[00:16:29] or even more in HRIS. We want to be a compliment.

[00:16:32] We want to be the data set that you can use across all of those platforms.

[00:16:36] So I want to come back to the flourish side, the side that's going to stay free,

[00:16:41] because that's the most intriguing part for me.

[00:16:44] For us too.

[00:16:46] So if you've got someone who has taken

[00:16:51] the flourish assessment and you mentioned something about career mapping,

[00:16:58] because all of us like, you know what people are immediately

[00:17:01] going to think about is Myers-Briggs.

[00:17:04] We were all forced to take it in grade 11

[00:17:06] and it told us that I would be good as an ice skating coordinator.

[00:17:11] I really didn't go down that career path.

[00:17:14] So what makes this different for the career mapping on the free side,

[00:17:19] the flourish side?

[00:17:20] Yeah, it's a fantastic question.

[00:17:22] So we use assessment data, right?

[00:17:24] We use IO psychology data.

[00:17:28] What you don't want to do is tell somebody you should be this.

[00:17:31] Scientifically, that's wrong.

[00:17:32] But we also have a really big cohort of data.

[00:17:35] There's 50,000 people who do this a month.

[00:17:37] But we also have all these match criteria that we've done,

[00:17:39] you know, exorbitant amount of times with our clients matching them to jobs.

[00:17:43] The best way you want to do this, I'm going to answer

[00:17:45] your question kind of two ways, Shelley.

[00:17:46] The three of us are going to go hire somebody for a job.

[00:17:48] Each of us, we do our own match criteria.

[00:17:51] We get it together. We aggregate it.

[00:17:52] That's very job specific for this moment in time right now for this company.

[00:17:56] That's not how you can career path somebody.

[00:17:58] That's how you can look at it from a selection perspective to screen people in.

[00:18:01] But with the level of data that we have, there's a bit of a bell curve

[00:18:04] in that data to say, hey, a lot of salespeople fit in this bell curve

[00:18:07] and a lot of actuaries fit in this bell curve.

[00:18:10] So we're able to serve up for somebody who of those 50,000,

[00:18:14] a huge percentage of them are under 30.

[00:18:15] And maybe they said, hey, I want to try a client success job

[00:18:19] because I don't know what I want to be when I grow up.

[00:18:20] And maybe that is great for them.

[00:18:22] But we're going to serve them up different career paths

[00:18:24] based on who they are psychometrically,

[00:18:26] irrespective of hard skills.

[00:18:28] And what our job is, we want to open up the eyes of those people to say,

[00:18:31] here's a lot of things you may be interested in.

[00:18:33] And if they're clicking in those, they can understand

[00:18:35] not only about what the job is because we're not serving them up actual jobs.

[00:18:40] That's not what we're trying to do.

[00:18:41] We're serving them up opportunities.

[00:18:42] Go out and find jobs like this.

[00:18:44] We want to serve them up paths that based on who they are

[00:18:47] from a personality perspective, they will probably be more likely

[00:18:50] to be happy, fulfilled and thrive in those roles.

[00:18:53] And we want to empower them to go do that.

[00:18:55] This is step two of flourish, right?

[00:18:57] The first part is what we did.

[00:18:58] The second part is what we just announced.

[00:18:59] Step three, four and five are incredibly exciting.

[00:19:02] We'll do another announcement when those things come out.

[00:19:04] But we're going to go deeper and deeper into understanding

[00:19:06] the human and empowering the human because in a dream world,

[00:19:09] what we want to have happen.

[00:19:11] I'll use Coca-Cola as a stand in company.

[00:19:14] We want everyone who applies to Coca-Cola to have a plum profile, everyone.

[00:19:18] And we want every employee at Coca-Cola to have a plum profile.

[00:19:21] And because it's about them first, Coca-Cola is going to get so much value

[00:19:26] in that because it's 100% completion and they're going to have all the data

[00:19:29] that they need.

[00:19:30] Now, somebody may be in Coca-Cola and this is different than career pathing.

[00:19:35] If they are an employee of Coca-Cola, in that example,

[00:19:38] we will serve them up real jobs in Coca-Cola that they're a fit for.

[00:19:41] And I want to talk about that two ways.

[00:19:42] I work at Coca-Cola.

[00:19:44] I log into Plum today.

[00:19:45] Hey, there's five jobs I'm interested in.

[00:19:47] Holy cow, I never thought of marketing.

[00:19:49] I'm in product today.

[00:19:50] Hey, you'd be great at marketing.

[00:19:52] And you have three of the five skills to get there.

[00:19:54] Go and take some of these courses.

[00:19:55] The other side, what we found out is that person who's going to go

[00:19:59] apply for a company, they apply to one job and they leave.

[00:20:02] And then they, as example, they apply at Coke

[00:20:04] or then they go apply at Pepsi.

[00:20:06] So what we've done now, and this is a part of both flourish

[00:20:09] and thrive today, is if I apply at one of our clients,

[00:20:12] let's say I apply at Citibank and I apply for a commercial banking job,

[00:20:16] we will serve them up every other job at Citibank

[00:20:18] that they're a match for and they can just apply.

[00:20:21] That is going to be great from a sourcing and a reduction in sourcing

[00:20:24] costs for, let's say Citibank as an example.

[00:20:26] But also it's going to make the recruiter's job way interesting

[00:20:29] when you look at what they're going to be able to do in their ATS.

[00:20:31] It truly is a recruiter co-pilot for them because they're going

[00:20:34] to be able to get down that short list and get to the cream

[00:20:36] of the crop really quickly.

[00:20:38] So I'm just going to switch gears here a bit because you talked about

[00:20:42] something that in my experience has never been done before.

[00:20:47] And that is what is our culture?

[00:20:50] Because culture, to me, you're right.

[00:20:52] There's what the words say on the poster.

[00:20:55] And then there's the actual behaviors within a department, a team, a group,

[00:21:03] or the entire organization of how we treat each other.

[00:21:08] Do executives really want to know what their culture is?

[00:21:13] Because then the next step is what do I do with this?

[00:21:16] We're very particular.

[00:21:18] I think you guys know this about who we want to partner with,

[00:21:19] even on the client side.

[00:21:21] If there is an executive who doesn't want to know what their culture is,

[00:21:23] we don't want them as a customer, right?

[00:21:25] It's not going to be a good fit for us.

[00:21:27] It's like saying, Hey, I don't want to know what's in my bank account

[00:21:29] because a check might bounce.

[00:21:30] No, you have to know what's in your bank account.

[00:21:32] So if you want to take any action, you better understand

[00:21:35] what you're dealing with.

[00:21:36] And the fact that you can cohort it will make life easier.

[00:21:39] So it's not just what your company culture is perceived to be.

[00:21:43] You can now cohort it by region or by age or by job function.

[00:21:49] We have some people beta testing it now.

[00:21:51] They acquired a company, very different perception of culture here.

[00:21:54] You can just close your eyes and pretend it doesn't exist

[00:21:56] or you can figure out how to bring it together.

[00:21:58] This is the magic of where you're trying to go, Shelley.

[00:22:00] So if you think about a CEO says we want a culture of innovation,

[00:22:05] you can look at your entire organization because of plum and say,

[00:22:08] are they innovative?

[00:22:09] That's something you can measure psychometrically.

[00:22:12] And if nobody in the company is innovative, are you truly an innovative company?

[00:22:16] And then when you ask the rank and file, the people below the executive team

[00:22:19] hate to call them the rank and file, but everybody else,

[00:22:21] if they don't want a culture of innovation,

[00:22:25] do you really have a culture of innovation?

[00:22:27] What are your choices? Do you fire everybody? No.

[00:22:30] But being able to then dig down on the individual level,

[00:22:32] one of the clients that's beta testing it,

[00:22:34] they're going through a huge transformation.

[00:22:36] And what you normally would have done in transformation

[00:22:38] is you just tear the bandaid off and say, let's go.

[00:22:41] What they were able to do is use the psychometric side of plum and say, OK,

[00:22:46] we believe that people who are high in adaptation and high in innovation

[00:22:49] are going to be early on adopters for change.

[00:22:51] So they started putting people in cohorts.

[00:22:53] They took those people who are the highest in innovation

[00:22:56] and adaptation and teamwork. Right.

[00:22:58] And they said, let's start the change with them,

[00:23:00] as opposed to rubbing sandpaper over the entire group.

[00:23:03] So then they said, OK, those people will help the fast followers

[00:23:07] who are then help the next group, who will then help the next group.

[00:23:10] So that's how you action the data.

[00:23:11] There's a lot of people that will measure culture and they give you

[00:23:13] the diagnosis, but they don't give you the treatment.

[00:23:16] So with this, you're going to have the diagnosis and the treatment.

[00:23:20] I'm seeing it. OK, I get it. I get it. Thank you.

[00:23:23] Welcome. Search.

[00:23:25] Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about hard skills, soft skills.

[00:23:29] LinkedIn just came out and basically said that in five years,

[00:23:32] 68 percent of the skill sets needed in the workforce

[00:23:36] are going to be different.

[00:23:37] That's a huge number.

[00:23:38] That's almost 70 percent of the skills that are existing right now

[00:23:41] are not going to exist in five years.

[00:23:43] So it kind of points to a world where the importance of soft skills

[00:23:48] is elevated. Do you feel the same way?

[00:23:51] Are you seeing that at Plum?

[00:23:52] What is your data telling you when it comes to evaluating soft skill

[00:23:55] and hard skills and what's going to be important in the future?

[00:23:59] 100 percent, we see that.

[00:24:01] And that's what we've been screaming from the rooftops for 12 years

[00:24:03] and even louder from higher rooftops in the last two and a half.

[00:24:06] But part of the problem is, even though we think it and you think it,

[00:24:09] it's hard for the legacy

[00:24:12] TA leaders or TM leaders or more importantly, hiring managers to think of that.

[00:24:15] There's going to come a point where those people, including me,

[00:24:17] get so old that the next group will think of it differently.

[00:24:20] Now, again, if I look at a heart surgeon, I need somebody who's a heart surgeon.

[00:24:24] But if I look at a developer search, what we normally would have done

[00:24:27] to go hire a developer is I need a front end developer

[00:24:29] and they'd have to know these four developer language,

[00:24:31] or they have to at least know these two.

[00:24:33] Think about what chat GPT has done.

[00:24:35] What a developer is going to be two years from now is very different.

[00:24:38] They don't need to know those languages.

[00:24:39] The most important skill they have to have psychometrically is communication.

[00:24:43] They're going to have to communicate with chat GPT in a prompt way

[00:24:46] to be able to write the code on their own.

[00:24:48] But again, I can close my eyes or I can just say I have the data.

[00:24:52] Part of the big reason we're doubling down on flourish was about the human first.

[00:24:56] We want those people to be able to come in

[00:24:58] and update those skills that they have learned.

[00:25:00] The psychometric part doesn't change.

[00:25:02] We want them to be able to come in and go, hey, I've gotten better at this

[00:25:04] or I've learned a new skill and keep it updated all the time.

[00:25:07] And if they don't have a skill today, we will serve them up

[00:25:10] some light elements that we've constructed.

[00:25:12] But if they're one of our clients, that'll be the GPS to their elements.

[00:25:15] We want to take that further and even align them with people

[00:25:18] who may be mentors for them to be able to give them

[00:25:21] some skill sets in the future to be able to help them.

[00:25:23] So psychometrics already is the most important skill.

[00:25:26] It's four times more predictive of success on a job than a resume.

[00:25:30] It's just the majority of people don't believe it

[00:25:31] because they're so used to the legacy way of matching people to jobs.

[00:25:35] Someone's going to ask, how is AI involved in this process

[00:25:41] and what you're doing on your end?

[00:25:42] There's no way I am on the psychometric side.

[00:25:44] Frankly, you don't want to be on the psychometric side.

[00:25:47] Where you're going to see and you guys are podcast hosts.

[00:25:50] And we've heard Joel and Chad say the same thing.

[00:25:51] They get served up jobs for hostess jobs, right?

[00:25:54] Like at restaurants.

[00:25:55] That's the downside of scraping and matching.

[00:25:58] Part of that is the LLM that's out there.

[00:26:00] Everyone uses two or three LLM, large language models, to be able to do this.

[00:26:04] Right. So the data is really bad and non predictive.

[00:26:06] So where AI comes in is how we built the algorithm with our own data.

[00:26:10] That's proprietary to us.

[00:26:12] So there's AI involved in that.

[00:26:14] And it's only going to get better and smarter over time.

[00:26:16] The fact that 50,000 people a month are taking it and it's all proprietary.

[00:26:20] The speed at which that LLM is going to learn is going to be insane.

[00:26:24] So even though we're not matching in the same way that others do,

[00:26:27] it's just going to get better and better.

[00:26:30] Can I ask something here?

[00:26:31] Does the plum score change over time?

[00:26:33] So if Susie comes in, she's 22 and has a high potential to be in leadership.

[00:26:40] If she were to take the plum assessment again.

[00:26:44] Say five years later into her career, would it change?

[00:26:49] Yeah.

[00:26:49] So the match score can always change.

[00:26:51] So I want to bifurcate the two, Shelley.

[00:26:53] OK. The match score will always change because the requirements of the job

[00:26:58] may change, even if it's the same job at the same company,

[00:27:00] because a new leader may come in or the company is going through changes.

[00:27:03] But if you separate it and look at the actual psychometric assessment part of it,

[00:27:06] all the science points to that by the time you're 22 years old,

[00:27:09] who you are as a human being is incredibly stable.

[00:27:12] So we allow people to take it once a year,

[00:27:15] but the frequency by which it will change is minuscule.

[00:27:19] For example, I'm actually very low in teamwork.

[00:27:22] Now, that doesn't mean I can't do teamwork.

[00:27:24] None of this is what you can or can't do.

[00:27:26] It's just what drives you or drains you.

[00:27:28] So if you gave me a choice Friday afternoon of

[00:27:32] going to a team happy hour, getting my to do list done,

[00:27:34] I'm going to choose getting my to do list done

[00:27:36] because that's just who I am innately doing that. Right.

[00:27:39] Somebody else who's high in teamwork is like,

[00:27:41] I'll get that done Monday. I'm going to go to a happy hour.

[00:27:43] So we allow people to take it once a year.

[00:27:45] It rarely changes.

[00:27:46] Now, what people end up building is coping mechanism

[00:27:48] because I'm low in teamwork and I'm an executive.

[00:27:51] I have to put things on my calendar to be this almost crutch

[00:27:55] to make sure I'm showing teamwork.

[00:27:58] Or if I was low in execution,

[00:28:00] I have to construct my calendar differently to make sure

[00:28:02] I'm getting the stuff I don't want to do first done

[00:28:04] in the beginning of the day

[00:28:06] and then the stuff I like to do at the end of the day.

[00:28:08] The only time it'll really change is traumatic injury.

[00:28:11] Or if you've had just extensive coaching for years and years

[00:28:14] and even then, it's only going to change slightly.

[00:28:16] So we've always had this that you only have to take it once.

[00:28:18] You can take it once a year.

[00:28:20] The jobs you get matched to that score will change

[00:28:22] and you don't see your scores.

[00:28:24] But now with the hard skills, we're able to now put additional

[00:28:26] things in there that you are getting better at over time

[00:28:28] or learning new over time.

[00:28:31] Is there also vision and or plan

[00:28:34] where if a company has had their culture map

[00:28:37] and we can see where those gaps are part of the strategic

[00:28:42] workforce plan would include where T.A.

[00:28:46] needs to strengthen the gaps within the organization?

[00:28:51] Or is it going to be part of the learning and development plan?

[00:28:56] Like whose camp does that fall into?

[00:28:58] It's a phenomenal question. We get asked all the time.

[00:29:00] We never want culture to be an element of selection

[00:29:02] because I think it's icky.

[00:29:04] There's a lot of cultures out there, and some companies

[00:29:06] may love their culture and we may hate it.

[00:29:08] And then the people who say the culture that they want

[00:29:10] may not be the right people who should drive culture.

[00:29:13] We want culture to be an internal aspect.

[00:29:15] And you brought it up.

[00:29:16] I think it's a learning and development,

[00:29:18] and I think it's a session planning and a future leadership

[00:29:20] potential, not I want to bring people in who look like

[00:29:24] the executive team. I know that's not what you're saying.

[00:29:26] But if the culture of this Canadian bank is you got to

[00:29:29] smoke cigars and drink bourbon, like I think it could be used

[00:29:33] for evil instead of good at times.

[00:29:35] Right. And we just want to be really careful in selection.

[00:29:38] But we want it to be a strictly a team function, not a T.A. function.

[00:29:43] So, Jason, I've been following Plum really closely.

[00:29:46] And one of the things that I've noticed is there seems to be a way

[00:29:50] bigger focus on talent management than talent acquisition.

[00:29:54] And it gives me a sense that you're seeing something on the macro side

[00:29:58] of where the market is right now.

[00:30:00] There seems to be a lot more internal movement.

[00:30:02] Companies trying to maximize the people they have internally.

[00:30:05] What are you seeing?

[00:30:06] What are you feeling in the marketplace right now?

[00:30:08] Yeah, and I'm very blessed to not just get the perspective of Plum.

[00:30:12] I get it from you all.

[00:30:13] And we've all known each other, but I sit on several boards, too.

[00:30:15] And some are outside the industry.

[00:30:17] And that outside perspective is actually really interesting.

[00:30:19] All of us in the industry think this guy is falling and it's not.

[00:30:21] Yeah, right. If you work at a cybersecurity company, they're like,

[00:30:24] I can't get to all the leads that I have. Right.

[00:30:26] Or some of these manufacturing companies.

[00:30:27] So to me, there's always this vacillation in the industry

[00:30:31] and it goes up and it goes down.

[00:30:33] And that is based on kind of supply and demand and what's needed.

[00:30:35] We don't have enough candidates.

[00:30:37] We have too many candidates and depends on the market.

[00:30:39] But the other vacillation that goes up and down and it's about every five

[00:30:42] to six years from what I've seen is we're going through an exercise

[00:30:46] as a company of point solutions that are best in breed

[00:30:50] or consolidation, even though they're not best in breed.

[00:30:52] So what I believe has happened over the last six months

[00:30:55] is talent management has become more important for most organizations

[00:30:59] than talent acquisition because they over hire it on purpose.

[00:31:02] Nobody wants to hear it. They're trying to do more with less.

[00:31:04] That's what everybody's actually doing and what they're using

[00:31:07] the word productivity, which is true.

[00:31:09] If people are in their job and they're happy in their job,

[00:31:12] they're going to be three hundred twenty two percent more productive.

[00:31:14] That is not our stat. There's a study out there.

[00:31:16] They're going to stay three years longer.

[00:31:17] So companies are getting smart as to saying, let's look at the people

[00:31:20] we have and get the most out of them more with less.

[00:31:23] So they'll be more productive and they'll stay longer.

[00:31:25] But the other thing that's happening is people are, from what we've seen,

[00:31:29] getting away from best in breed and getting more into consolidation.

[00:31:32] So they may look at a platform and say, hey, this platform

[00:31:35] doesn't have the best CRM or doesn't have the best ATS,

[00:31:37] but we'd rather just have one.

[00:31:39] That's also about efficiency doing more with less rates.

[00:31:41] They're getting a better deal by consolidating it into one platform.

[00:31:45] We are seeing as many inbound in TM as we've seen in TA.

[00:31:50] And we're seeing those same needs at our clients today.

[00:31:53] The speed at which the world is changing.

[00:31:56] You can break down 10 years ago,

[00:31:59] what would have taken five years to change is now happening in five months.

[00:32:04] That speed of that change is not my stat.

[00:32:06] So knowing that's happening, there's a bit of a latency

[00:32:10] from what comes down from the boardroom and the C-suite to to the everyday worker.

[00:32:14] Even if you're a VP, everyone's playing this catch up game

[00:32:17] where they think the sky is falling.

[00:32:19] But actually now the boardroom says, oh my God, go higher.

[00:32:21] And we're seeing that bounce back and forth.

[00:32:23] We had people in the pipeline three months ago and they're like,

[00:32:26] we're not hiring anybody. We can't do it.

[00:32:28] Even though they want TM to today, they're like, we got to go.

[00:32:31] We're about to go on a huge hiring spree.

[00:32:34] But normally that would have been like a three year window.

[00:32:36] And now it's like a three month window.

[00:32:38] So it's upside down to some extent, surge.

[00:32:40] And it's also dependent on industry, but it's all over the place.

[00:32:44] But I think that's good.

[00:32:45] And that's part of we launched talent management years ago.

[00:32:48] And it was a nice to have for a lot of clients during COVID.

[00:32:51] And now I think that's the must have and TAs are nice to have.

[00:32:54] But most people are buying the whole platform anyway,

[00:32:56] because they're thinking ahead of having a solution

[00:32:59] that can address everything they need, irrespective of where they are in that journey.

[00:33:03] Perfect. So PlumFlourish and PlumThrive

[00:33:07] are available today, Tuesday, May 21st.

[00:33:11] So for anyone that wants to get more information, both as a possible candidate,

[00:33:16] but also as a company, where should they go?

[00:33:19] Just go to Plum.com.

[00:33:20] Again, we have 20 percent of people just go there and learn more about themselves.

[00:33:24] So if you're somebody listening and you want to create your own Plum profile,

[00:33:26] go there. It's it's great. You'll love it.

[00:33:28] And same thing if you're a potential client, if you're an employer,

[00:33:31] no matter how big or small you are, go there.

[00:33:33] There's some more data and we'll make sure you get taken care of.

[00:33:36] Jason, where can they get a hold of you?

[00:33:38] LinkedIn is the best. Just go to Jason Putnam on LinkedIn.

[00:33:43] So as you're aware, we're big fans.

[00:33:45] So for everyone, go fill out a Plum profile.

[00:33:49] And I think we've encouraged in the past, but this is another reminder.

[00:33:52] So on that note, Jason, thank you for everything that you guys do

[00:33:55] for the industry. This is really exciting.

[00:33:57] Thank you for coming on the show.

[00:33:59] Of course. Thank you both.

[00:34:00] And congratulations. Au revoir.

[00:34:06] Shelly, let's face it,

[00:34:13] texting candidates is the easiest way to hire quicker today.

[00:34:17] But your cell phone doesn't connect to your ATS.

[00:34:19] You're sharing your personal number with strangers.

[00:34:22] It's pretty scary, right, Shelly?

[00:34:24] And it's not even legally compliant.

[00:34:27] This is where our friends at Rectex come in.

[00:34:29] They've created simple yet powerful text recruiting software

[00:34:33] that works with your ATS.

[00:34:35] Plus, it's designed by recruiters for recruiters.

[00:34:39] So you know it works to learn more and book a demo.

[00:34:42] Visit www.rectxt.com.

[00:34:48] Mention the recruitment flex and get 10% off annual plans.

[00:34:53] Imagine how fast we could solve the world's biggest problems

[00:34:56] if more SaaS startups would gain traction sooner.

[00:35:00] Welcome to the Tech Entrepreneur on a Mission podcast.

[00:35:03] This podcast is dedicated to sharing experiences

[00:35:06] from B2B SaaS CEOs who are going above and beyond

[00:35:09] to deliver change that is noticed.

[00:35:11] You will hear their secrets and learn what is required

[00:35:15] to build a SaaS business that the world starts talking about

[00:35:18] and keeps talking about

[00:35:19] and how to overcome the roadblocks to do so.