Happy New Year!
I hope each of you had a wonderful holiday season surrounded by friends and family.
By the time you're reading this, we'll be quickly approaching the end of January and it's sure to be another fast moving year.
When Dan (my co-founder and Traitify's CEO) started Traitify (then called Woofound) back in 2011, I don't imagine either of us could dream of the journey that would lead us to 2020.
In these last few years, we've had the opportunity to work with world class leaders from organizations across the globe who are passionate about changing the way companies utilize assessments to hire and retain the best talent.
The past year has also marked a major shift in my position with Traitify, as I transitioned from the Chief Operating Officer role to become Traitify's first Chief Product Officer. It's difficult to express how excited I was, and continue to be, about the opportunity to focus on our product and work with the team to innovate and deliver value to our customers.
I'm immensely proud of the work that our product teams have accomplished over the past year. and we continue to be an organization that prides ourself on bringing all team members to the table when building or refining a product.
From day one, Traitify has been committed to delivering a product like no other, a new standard of assessments built on science but reflective of our modern age (and accommodating to our modern attention spans!). I'm excited to share with you some of our plans for the year ahead and also spend some time reflecting on what was accomplished in 2019.
If you're like me, it can be a challenge to pause, take a breath and reflect on all that happened over the last twelve months. I'm often so eager for what's next, that I forget to take stock of what has built to the current moment. While preparing for our annual leadership planning retreat a few weeks ago, I made it a priority to review and celebrate our 2019 work and reflect on how it's prepared us for what we'll do this year.
With that in mind, I'd like to share what I feel are some highlights for our product in the last year. Feel free to jump ahead to the 2020 preview as well, I won't be offended!
Traitify has always prioritized candidate experience, and in 2019 we doubled down on our commitment by releasing our first Big Five Candidate Report. For me, this represented a continued push to recognize that Candidates should be treated like customers and that crafting a great candidate experience requires some level of transparency and a shift away from the typical "black box" experience representing many application processes.
As noted in previous posts, our approach in creating this Candidate-centric report was to allow configuration by the organization based on what they felt was appropriate and reflected their brand and values. This configuration allows customers to turn on or off certain elements of the report and can be modified at any time.
It was also important for us not to add a distraction to the application process. Because of that, we allow for results to be sent to Candidates post-apply or presented after Candidates complete the assessment. As with everything we do, we want to empower our customers to configure our solutions to best suit their needs.
I fully anticipate that we'll continue to refine this report and add new, exciting content in the future to keep Candidates engaged in the process and ultimately feeling valued for the time they've spent applying.
Prior to last year, our customized Interview Questions existed in a helpful, but admittedly cumbersome guide. These questions have been designed to aid Hiring Managers in the vital interview stage of the selection process and the last thing we wanted to do was to make those questions difficult to engage with. An intuitive and easy solution to this problem was to add these questions to the Big Five Hiring Manager report and make them readily accessible to every Hiring Manager meeting with Candidates - and that's what we did!
The new Big Five Hiring Manager report is available today for all Traitify customers and includes additional insights into each Candidate including their scores on each of five Big Five dimensions as well as what benefits and caution zones exist for the Candidate based on their scores.
Our goal is to make these reports as easy to engage with as our assessment while still providing the necessary insights for Hiring Managers during the selection process.
Did you know that Traitify offers a robust administrator dashboard? Not only that, but in 2019, we built out an entire reporting feature accessible within the administrator dashboard, allowing administrators to create one-time or recurring reports that are fully configurable based on the data most important to them. While not the most sexy of features we released in 2019, this was one of the most useful and impactful for customers who leverage the administrator dashboard on a frequent basis.
Have I mentioned translations? Well, we now offer our assessments and outputs in over ten languages! In 2019 we added Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian - all supporting our growing international customer base.
We also built a Financial Risk Tolerance Assessment, added SMS assessment invites, and continued to build new ATS integrations.
Wow - it was a busy year!
Now that we've spent a little time reviewing some of the highlights of 2019 - let's look ahead and preview some exciting things we have planned for 2020. If you've been reading these posts over the last year, you'll be in the loop on many of these and if not, I hope you're as excited as I am after learning what's coming!
As we continue to expand our product offerings this year, our new Cognitive Assessment will join our Big Five Assessment in helping organizations prioritize, select, and develop talent. This assessment will measure General Mental Ability ("GMA") which is considered to be one of the most effective predictors of fit and performance for certain roles. Each Candidate taking the Cognitive Assessment will have five minutes to respond to a series of abstract reasoning questions with varying levels of difficulty (accommodations will be made for Candidates with learning disabilities).
The Cognitive Assessment will be able to be combined with Traitify's Big Five Assessment to produce an aggregate score or used independently. For each role in which the assessment is used, a unique Ideal Candidate Profile will be established, specifying the range of scores that are ideal, and combined with the Candidate's personality score (when desired). Traitify's Customer Success and Psychology teams will work with each Customer to define these Ideal Candidate Profiles for each role, based on analysis of the role, current employee scores, interview with Managers, and existing research.
For each Candidate who completes the Cognitive Assessment, Traitify will provide a Fit Score, Recommendation (for example, "Preferred Fit" or "Potential Risk"), a full report indicating the Candidate's Fit Score, how accurate and how fast the Candidate completed the assessment (along with insights based on each), and an indication of how the Candidate compared to the rest of the Candidate pool (for example, "This Candidate scored in the top 10% of Candidates").
As you might expect, we're also developing a Candidate report, designed to be shared with the Candidate and that can also be incorporated into our existing Big Five Candidate report.
As with Traitify's Big Five Assessment, the Cognitive Assessment will have the ability to be integrated with an organization's applicant tracking system or within Traitify's SaaS application.
If you'd like to learn more about the Cognitive Assessment or how it could complement existing usage of Traitify, please reach out to us.
Studies have shown that the most common reasons behind an Employees voluntary departure are lack of engagement and no opportunity for advancement with the organization. In an effort to reduce this voluntary turnover and to increase happiness in the workplace, Traitify is developing two unique reports, one for Employees and one for Managers, focused on engagement and mobility.
For an Employee who has taken Traitify's Big Five Assessment, this report will provide customized content based on the Employee's personality. Each piece of content is designed to provide insight into how the Employee can grow within the organization and also professionally. Content can be shared with Employees in a variety of ways, including via text message, to encourage recurring engagement that is digestible and not overwhelming.
Additionally, each Employee report will showcase a path for advancement within the organization (if applicable) and how the Employee can focus on any "gaps" that may exist and how to address those along their path.
Managers will also have a unique report for each Employee reporting to them. This report provides guidance for the Manger on how to best engage, incentivize, motivate and communicate with each Employee based on that Employee's unique personality, as well as the Manager's personality. Manager's will also have insight into the growth paths for each Employee and can use this data to plan for advancement within the organization.
Our Cognitive Assessment and Engagement and Mobility Reports represent just some of the new products we'll be developing over the course of this year. Following the release of our Cognitive Assessment, we'll be announcing some exciting, innovative changes to our Big Five Assessment and also releasing a new version of our Hiring Manager report, designed to help Hiring Managers quickly get the information they need when evaluating and meeting with Candidates.
I'm also hoping to connect with some of you, our valued customers, this year to get feedback and input on what we're building, so please let us know if you're interested in some early looks at our products - your partnership is immensely appreciated and valued!
Thank you for taking the time to learn a little about what we're doing this year and also indulging me as I look back. Please reach out to us anytime via support@triaitfy.com, your dedicated Customer Success Manager, or email me directly at josh@traitify.com.
