From A People Perspective

Martin Hauck (00:25)
Hey everybody, it's Martin and today we've got an awesome guest. Today we've got Olive Turon from TestGorilla. She's a head of people and culture there. Olive, welcome to the show.

Olive (00:37)
Hey, hi Martin, thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Martin Hauck (00:40)
No, ⁓

no, no, of course it's, it's awesome to have you. ⁓ We like to do some quick icebreakers for the folks here dive into two things. So as you can tell from my background, I'm a bit of a music fan. So I'm always curious to know what, people are listening to these days. And my main question is if you are left to only have one album to listen to for the rest of time.

Olive (00:49)
Great.

Mmm!

Martin Hauck (01:09)
for whatever reason you can't listen to other music and you've got one album to listen to what are you listening to?

Olive (01:14)
wow. Do you know what? I'm not really an album listener. I was such an eclectic taste in music ⁓ that I'm more about the kind of the random playlists. But, but let me see. Someone at work ⁓ recently ⁓ posted on our Slack music channel.

Martin Hauck (01:29)
Okay.

This is such a clever work around because then you get to listen to more artists. So ⁓ brilliant. How about playlist? Like what's your all time go-to playlist that you couldn't live without?

Olive (01:48)
right.

Yeah,

yeah, a few years ago, I did a huge running race, like 250 kilometers across the Sahara Desert, a big one. And you can imagine that there was quite a lot of training runs involved. And I listened to the same playlist on every single one of my training runs for three years, which is kind of psychopathic, I think. But it was...

Pavlovian by the end, you know, I would hear a certain song and I'd know that I was at this age and my boyfriend put together that playlist so it's Olive's running playlist and it is It's hours upon hours of just random pop rock rap ⁓ yeah, just the weirdest artists nestling up against each other completely randomly

Martin Hauck (02:22)
Yeah.

Okay,

that is a very cool relationship to music. Yeah, ⁓ there's some questions on like the psychology questions that we could dip into today. ⁓ But I will join you in that category of people that has no problem listening to the same song over and over over over again. ⁓ There's some good like...

Olive (03:08)
Yeah. literally.

Martin Hauck (03:14)
like electric mixes where it's like there's no vocals that I'll use for working and I will listen to the same like 10 minute song on repeat and I won't know how many times I've listened to it like two hours will have gone by and it's just like, that song's still on. Cool. We need to change it. Yeah. Yeah.

Olive (03:32)
Exactly. There was ⁓ this particular race, I don't know why, but they every morning, you do it every seven days, and everyone starts at the same start line together. And every morning over the loudspeakers, play ⁓ Bat Out of Hell, meatloaf. Which is like, absolutely not necessarily my taste, but I made sure it was at the beginning of this specific playlist.

Martin Hauck (03:53)
Hmm.

Olive (04:00)
Yeah, over the years of preparing for this run, I listened to it so many times that I sort of, I don't even really hear it anymore, but it's like sort of sits somewhere in my brain as I start running. Because I don't know what would happen if I listened to that song right now, for example.

Martin Hauck (04:13)
It's been muted. Yeah.

I

worry I've got two dollars, two daughters and I set alarms on my phone for very specific times of the day. and so it's like, as school time gets closer and closer, cause my, my oldest daughter and I are notorious for not being on time. She by nature of probably having learned it from me, I all take full responsibility on that. But, ⁓ so we use like,

Olive (04:29)
We.

Yeah.

Martin Hauck (04:50)
this classical like flight of the bumblebee song ⁓ for when it's like one minute left to get late. So anytime that song comes on, like I'm like, all right, there's no, no more jokes. We've got to go. And it's like a really frantic. So you, you said Pavlonev and I was like, ⁓ I've 100 % if she hears that song 20 years from now, she's just going to start. She's going to, I've got to go. don't know where I need to go. Yeah. I think I need to go to school, but yeah. Yeah.

Olive (04:53)
Yes.

Yes.

⁓ I gotta go!

Bye.

Martin Hauck (05:19)
No, fascinating. ⁓ One one, obviously, we're not here to talk about this, but I'm very curious. ⁓ You said you had like songs to kind of like help you along the way in terms of like, how long would you run in one particular 250 kilometers? I heard that right, right? Okay.

Olive (05:35)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the

longest day was probably about 10 hours running, 10 and a half hours running, which was double marathon. And then the rest of the day was more or less a marathon a day. So yeah, four hours or something, four, five, six.

Martin Hauck (05:53)
Hey, I

want to do a podcast about this. This is insane. Wild. I've always thought like the, Iron Man was a big deal, but this is insane. Yeah. Like seven, eight. Well, kudos. Yeah. okay. ⁓ yeah, we don't need to do any more icebreakers enough ice has been broken. I think. Yeah. ⁓ so help me, you know, apart from the running thing and maybe if there's a cool story of like how that incorporates, but, ⁓ you're we're,

Olive (06:04)
Thanks.

⁓ thank you.

Martin Hauck (06:23)
present day, you are the head of people and culture at TestGorilla, but you weren't always there. Kind of give me a sense of how you got to where you are.

Olive (06:29)
Good.

Yeah, for sure. is, yeah, unexpected twists and turns along the way, to be honest. I'm ahead of, I'll work backwards because I think we'll start now and we'll go back as far as you'd like. So yeah, head of people and culture at TestGorilla We'll spend plenty of time, I think, talking about TestGorilla so I'll introduce that probably in a second. I've been in this role for just over a year, a year and two weeks.

as head of people and culture. So I look after our sort of end to end talent and people ⁓ processes strategy. It's my first time in a people role. Before being people in culture, I was chief of staff at TestGorilla So very connected to the company, very connected to the people, but in a non-official people HR.

Yeah, setting, to be honest. I joined when TestGorilla was a year or so, a year and a half. We had maybe 50 people at the time. We've got about 180 today. So relatively early stage, and I was very involved in setting up a lot of our of internal operations and working very closely with the founders. So I knew our people and our culture well. But yeah, I was working a lot more kind of company strategy.

topics and strategic projects, I think he loved that in us. And that was a brilliant role. I loved that so much. was being right at the heart of a scale up is, yeah, what a time to just learn so much about a business and its people. Before that, I did a very similar role at another startup that was attached to a national bank here in

Martin Hauck (08:06)
Mm.

Olive (08:32)
the Netherlands where I live. And that gave me that first taste of sort of being at, yeah, kind of a strategic leadership level, working very holistically across the business, deeply understanding everything that was going on, being a bit of Jack of all trades, probably master of none, but knowing enough to be able to kind of dip toes in and get getting people working on the right things, being able to communicate it.

as well. And that sort of chief of staff job was something I'd really been aiming for for a while. Before that, I'd taken a year out of work, which was I was preparing for my run. So I was a full time runner, more or less for that year before then, picking up a few strange projects while I did that year just to kind of keep my brain.

Martin Hauck (09:08)
Yeah.

world.

Olive (09:31)
occupied, not just pounding away on the streets as I was running. This was a period where I was living in Denmark for a year. So I ⁓ got in touch with various different entrepreneurs in the local community and ended up doing sort of advisory work on random projects. Really, I worked with a pop star on releasing a perfume. I worked with

Martin Hauck (09:40)
Mm-hmm.

Olive (10:01)
⁓ had a drone ⁓ company, a racing drone company, and set up an academy that taught kids about sort of STEM subjects via drone racing. Quite a random year. But again, sort of mixing the kind of the operational and the strategic. Going back there, then I...

Martin Hauck (10:08)
wild.

Yeah.

Olive (10:29)
Previous to that, I spent a few years at Google in London. And that was a really big grounding in a variety, again, of different roles. My latest one there was managing an event space and sort of customer enablement and education initiatives. And before that, I was sales. So I was in Google Cloud sales to various different. ⁓

enterprises in the retail space. ⁓ And that was the point which I really realized that sales wasn't for me. And it was the beginning of my career long respect for people who work in sales and absolutely recognizing that it's not my forte. And then before that, I was on a graduate scheme at JP Morgan in their private bank where I worked as a ⁓ relationship manager for high net worth and ultra high net worth people.

It was brilliant in the sense of really sort of getting to know people and understand relationships and building relationships. And I suppose it also was the lever for me to join Google really and kind of continue a little bit in that kind of salesy space, taking what I'd learned in private banking into a more dynamic environment, which is what I was really looking for.

Martin Hauck (11:33)
Mm-hmm.

Olive (11:56)
But yeah, and then before that I studied English literature and French medieval literature at university. So really by taking us on this little walk down memory lane, nothing adds up, but there is strands that have come together and over time have sort of refined and maybe sort of made some sense. At least it feels.

Martin Hauck (12:12)
Yeah, yeah.

Olive (12:24)
The role that I'm in currently makes a lot of sense for me. And it's just taken a few different ⁓ rivers and streams and things happening for me to arrive in this place.

Martin Hauck (12:29)
Yeah.

have a ton of questions on the background stuff, but I think the one that I'll ask ⁓ is, mean, at least it makes sense for myself and maybe you share if this is, you think of it differently, but it's like, okay, currently a TestGorilla right? And that's on the assessment side of things. And we'll get into that, but ⁓ you've worked at some places where ⁓

Olive (12:42)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Martin Hauck (13:10)
their assessment of talent is, are notorious, like Google is notorious for having very, not necessarily strict, but involved hiring processes, right? And ⁓ it's the sheet that people try to copy off of essentially. And so JP Morgan, ⁓ no different there. ⁓

Olive (13:25)
Yeah? Yeah.

So.

Nope.

Martin Hauck (13:39)
And so you've had what's also interesting is just like some, it's interesting because you started at very corporate and you worked yourself into ⁓ super unique and now, you know, more, more, you know, traditional tech startup kind of space. ⁓ So a diversity of experiences that are really cool, all of which you have a lens on first off as, a candidate, right? You're joining these companies.

Olive (13:47)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Sure,

yeah.

Martin Hauck (14:06)
So there's

an interesting lens there. I don't know. Am I seeing the same stream as you are? Like you said, there are rivers and streams that makes this make all sense to you. Like, am I seeing the same thing?

Olive (14:11)
Nothing.

Yeah, I think you've taken it in a new angle that I really like. I hadn't really thought about the sort of the candidate and sort of application experience. I think that's very true. Yeah, they were all very different. I don't know whether the fact that I've been trying different ones along the way means that I'm running away from those initial very heavy corporate ones.

But it has definitely given me a lens on how different companies recruit, how they engage with people throughout the hiring process, how they sell themselves as companies to candidates, both through employer branding and then through the of the interview process itself. Yeah, I've definitely had, yeah, been very lucky to have lots of different experiences there, which hopefully informs

Yeah, how we do things at Eskorela

Martin Hauck (15:16)
Yeah, no.

I mean, through all those experiences, you have this, this lens of, well, clearly this company's doing it right. Because, you know, once you join, ⁓ or you could say like, well, here's, here's where they're lacking in, in how people ⁓ or companies are, are essentially matchmaking, right? Like that's, that's what recruitment is. That's what hiring is.

⁓ is this the right fit? And you know, there's, there's been some back and forth in the industry around the word fit and whether or not like a culture ad versus culture fit, but for all intents and purposes, ⁓ there's, it's, it's one of the things that people haven't necessarily sorted out yet because they, there's so many different approaches. ⁓ but I guess from, from your lens and, TestGorilla is like, what, how do you, how do you do it?

Olive (16:03)
Sure.

Martin Hauck (16:12)
define this problem or maybe set the stage for us here. Yeah.

Olive (16:15)
Yeah,

of course. Maybe I'll take a minute to describe TestGorilla as well. that be helpful? So TestGorilla, we're a talent discovery platform. We ⁓ build and ⁓ sell to companies around the world a variety of different solutions that help them identify ⁓ and hire the best possible talent for the roles that they have.

Martin Hauck (16:19)
Yeah, yeah.

Mm.

Olive (16:42)
We really major in sort of assessment products. So skills, skills tests, well as cognitive tests, personality tests, that in a certain combination, we believe can really help companies hire the best hand for almost any role out there. We're also moving into the sort of talent sourcing.

space as well, so helping companies get access to brilliant candidates who've got skills, ⁓ behavioral competencies, and the attributes really that are needed, that that company is looking for specifically. And helping to sort of have find those, those needle in a haystacks, right? It's, as you were saying, hiring is about matchmaking. And we

companies ⁓ and candidates as well can encounter all different kinds of challenges trying to do that matching, right? We as a company might say we've got a very specific idea of what a candidate, the perfect candidate might look like. It's probably laden with all kinds of assumptions and biases. And if we can peel that back and just focus on assessing ⁓ and identifying people who've got the real

core skills and attributes that we need to kind of take ourselves away from previous experiences or assumptions that we might have about what the perfect candidate could look like. That opens up a whole new world of possibilities around finding the right person for the right job. And likewise for candidates, right? They might feel like they've got a certain company in mind or a certain job in mind given their experiences to date. And sometimes it needs a little

matchmaking hand to say, have you considered this or have you considered that if you consider a company and they're really looking for people with skills like yours. So TestGorilla aims to sort of support that match. Yeah.

Martin Hauck (18:43)
Hmm.

Interesting.

And, I've yet to see this done in like a overarching, like the testing has been around for a really long time. Like that's not, ⁓ not, that's not the issue, right? People know that we need to, to test candidates.

And companies come up with their own, use third party tools, they use a mixture of them. But I find...

Olive (19:21)
Yeah. They use them

in strange places during the interview process. We can talk about that. Like where you do it in the funnel also can change the impact of those tests.

Martin Hauck (19:29)
Yes, yes.

Yeah, no, no, I mean, every thing that you screen for effectively screens out people as well as screens in people and, you know, doing it at the wrong time for sure has, has an impact. guess, ⁓ that appreciate the like overarching view of, of, TestGorilla. how does, how do you, and how does TestGorilla sort of like, what's the problem that, that you're solving? Like,

Olive (19:42)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

No.

Martin Hauck (20:03)
And I feel like I know what it is in terms of like, broadly, but like, maybe help. You kind of have to solve a very specific problem as a company to do any to do good at it. But so how, would you say like, which problem are you tackling specifically?

Olive (20:19)
Yeah, maybe it helps to anchor perhaps to go really big and talk about our vision. We want to put a billion people in their dream jobs. ⁓ A pretty lofty goal, but we imagine a world where people and jobs can be more perfectly matched than they are today. We believe that this match isn't happening.

Martin Hauck (20:28)
Hmm.

Olive (20:49)
currently, and that's for all different kinds of reasons. We can talk about some of those in a second. But we want to, and our mission really is democratizing opportunities for all. We believe that there's a huge issue in the sense that hiring is, the majority of hiring still today is so traditional. There are so many legacy practices that excludes a lot of people from being hired because of

their background, maybe their identity, even if we, you know, there's still a lot of biases that come through in hiring that people are judged more on the, their CVs versus what the skills they actually have and might be, and might excel in. They might not come through on a CV or they might be, you know, people are still blinkered by schools that people have gone to. And, you know, even when they're

20 years into their career, you see the word Harvard on a CV and you think, oh yeah, that'd be great. Yeah, we believe that the world of hiring is biased and we want to address that. Then I would also say that the other problem that we're solving for, and it's very much linked, is that we just believe that there's a way to get the best possible people in the jobs. And yes, that tackles bias, but actually,

Martin Hauck (21:53)
Hehehehehe

Yep. Okay.

Olive (22:18)
what every company should be aiming to do is to get the right person in the right job at the right time. And traditional hiring practices are not always the best at really predicting job success, that someone's actually going to do a great job. So we wanted to find a way to do that.

Martin Hauck (22:39)
There's an interesting piece here and I love seeing this ⁓ circumstance play out with guests because sometimes companies and folks at the companies can't really ⁓ forgive the phrase, but like eat their own dog food, so to speak, right? Like you can't use the tool to work.

for your own company in itself. Like previous company I was at, for example, would it, you know, was Caseware. It's an audit and accounting tool. I'm not an auditor nor an accountant. So when I'm getting people excited about the company or when I was getting them excited about them, I wasn't really speaking firsthand. And there's ways to do it, obviously. And I was, you know, authentically excited about what they were doing, but I, I'd never experienced a tool firsthand. You've got this interesting ⁓ position to be in to, to,

have much closer view of using, you know, TestGorilla upfront and saying like, Hey, this is our mission. This is what we want to do. Well, by the way, we use it ourselves. and I, I guess you've, you've probably seen, I imagine, you know, your hiring process has seen iterations, right? And, you know, no hiring is, you can't have perfect score when it comes to hiring. and, and so, ⁓ I guess you've, I've seen, you've seen.

Olive (23:39)
You're welcome.

Wow. Yeah.

Martin Hauck (24:03)
the tool being used in fantastic ways. And you've also seen, you know, hiring processes have flaws. I guess before we dive into that necessarily, but just sort of like, what's the consequence of not making the right hire just in general.

Olive (24:06)
No.

Yeah.

everything, everything that sucks. Okay, consequences of not making the hire. You can have some, you know, some immediate ⁓ cases of just pure miss hires, right? I mean, you go through all the process of onboarding someone. It might have been quite an exhausting search.

you pat yourself on the back, you found someone, they start within X number of weeks, it becomes very clear that something was glaringly missing from the interview process. And maybe it leads to, you know, an early exit on the basis of them being mess hire. Maybe it's something that only gets discovered a month down the line, and then maybe you start performance management process. But all of that is not something that you really should be able to pull within the first period of someone.

Martin Hauck (25:01)
Yeah.

Olive (25:15)
working there. So it costs money, it costs time to resolve those issues. And then potentially having to relaunch that search again, as time suck and money suck. But then, you know, there's also the other opportunity costs, right? You may have, you there was, probably hiring for a reason, or hiring as, you know, as a recruiter is urgent, right? So you've hired someone

Martin Hauck (25:28)
Hmm.

Olive (25:45)
to do some work urgently and they haven't been able to do it, and then you're going to have to delay that further. There are probably brilliant other candidates in the pipeline that you've had to let go and they've gone to find other opportunities. I think also, they're the obvious ones, right? But the trickier ones is when there's just a bit of a mismatch where there's maybe there's, we always seek to be raising the bar with every new hire that we make.

Martin Hauck (25:52)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Olive (26:13)
And if you're not doing that, then over time, the quality standards could degrade a little bit, particularly hiring managers. So important to have to be hiring people who can really set bar high, motivate their people around it, be fantastic leaders. And so if you're hiring managers, for example, who can't do that, you're diluting quality standards a bit over time. What I feel very passionately about is, yeah, it's results, of course, but also people who cannot become culture champions.

Again, also you see this a lot in sort high growth startups and you're hiring very quickly and in large volumes. And if you're not being really smart about making sure that there is behavioral alignment, that there's ⁓ kind of culture, ad or match or whatever word we're to be using these days, that can also dilute culturally. And that has huge manifestations over time.

Martin Hauck (27:04)
Hmm hmm.

Olive (27:12)
you can't capture in the moment. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, where did it start?

Martin Hauck (27:15)
It's really hard to trace back as well. Yeah. Yeah, you're not going to look

back on it and say, that was the reason.

Olive (27:23)
Yeah, yeah. And I think also, you know, I think

Hiring, it's so difficult to get right all the time. But I think by taking your time, where you can afford to, to really, really hone in on the stuff that's important, it will pay dividends. People will be excited and enthused about the new people you're bringing onto the team and it has a sort of a positive and...

and reinforcing impact when you're bringing people in who can help out their teammates in excellent ways, who provide new collaboration opportunities, new people to learn from. Yeah, and when people themselves feel they've been matched to their dream job, I mean, it's, you can't hold them back, right? It's such a confidence boost. Lots of opportunities open up for them. seen it, lots of people at TestGorilla

Martin Hauck (28:15)
Hmm.

Olive (28:26)
to see they've been hired on the basis of their skills. It doesn't just give them and their managers and people around them confidence that they're going to be brilliant. It gives them confidence that from day one, everyone's brought in and everyone's rooting for them and they can do the job.

Martin Hauck (28:30)
Hmm.

Is it fair

to say that, you know, going through the recruitment process ⁓ at TestGorilla or any company that uses TestGorilla in a meaningful way is a bit of a shakeup to the traditional recruitment and hiring approach. ⁓ And that's kind of why it's refreshing for candidates to be like, I'm being hired for my skills, not like some weird bias that I don't even know about sort of thing.

Olive (29:08)
Yeah.

Yeah,

for sure. We see this a lot in in candidate feedback, ⁓ both candidates who apply to TestGorilla Rilla and those who apply to our customers as well that it feels refreshing, right? It feels refreshing as a candidate to be assessed based on what you can actually do, ⁓ not necessarily on how much luck you've had in your life.

Martin Hauck (29:18)
Hmm.

Olive (29:41)
by far, right? What family you were born into, what area of the world you lived in, so what education, know, schools you were exposed to. Whether you, you know, someone managed, you know, your neighbor managed to get you on a grad scheme at a prestigious, you know, law firm or whatever, you know, actually being assessed on the skills that you have and your core competencies is refreshing.

At TestGorilla also provide all companies with the opportunity to just auto-release test results to candidates as well after they've taken the assessment, which feels also quite radical, right? It kind of lifts the hood a little bit on the decision-making process. It gives candidates an idea of where they are really strong and where they might still have some work to go.

Martin Hauck (30:27)
Hmm. Hmm.

Olive (30:40)
work to do and yeah we often get compliments from TestGorilla with candidates who weren't successful in the process but still sort of applaud the process which is kind of amazing.

Martin Hauck (30:56)
No, it's, it's, you know, one of the hardest things I'm sure you've seen it and know it firsthand, but one of the hardest things about being a recruiter is the fact that, you know, you're saying no to 99 % of the people you talk to. And so anything that gives you the ability to sort of make that experience delightful, even though you're providing negative news is kind of, kind of a win because there's times where, you know,

Olive (31:11)
Yeah.

Martin Hauck (31:25)
I, you try to, you know, I think good recruiters try to take an agnostic approach to it where they're equally on the company side as well as the candidate side. And you want particular people to succeed sometimes for probably the wrong reasons, right? Like biases are going to creep in. like, I just really like person X, Y, Z, right. And, and, you know, they're, they went to the same school as you and you're, you know, you're keen on seeing, seeing folks from your school. ⁓

kind of like, that's not the right reason, but there's also other reasons where I, and I, I see this a lot with recruiters where it's like, they know the recruiter knows on paper that this person's prob, like they have to advocate for the candidate. So they find this awesome, you know, talent and they have to advocate for the, because on paper they know like, okay, listen, I know they didn't go to this school and maybe their experiences indirectly, but everything that I talked to them about, you know, maybe if they don't have like,

the right testing in place or whatever, they just instinctively know that like they do really well here and they advocate for that person. That person gets hired like as a great, fantastic thing. ⁓ especially when you've seen candidates, ⁓ when you go through that motion of, okay, well, we feel like we've identified what our ideal candidate is. And it's people from this school who

previously worked at these companies and these are the only people that are going to succeed in this role kind of deal. So, ⁓ more comment on just how that kind of manifests, guess, knowing that that's a thing and knowing that's real. What's like the biggest ⁓ thing that you've heard and seen from companies where they weren't really using any sort of

Olive (32:50)
Hello.

Martin Hauck (33:14)
skills based assessment or anything like that? ⁓ Where's the first place a company should start? Or what's the first thing they should do to actually start getting that wow factor that you were talking about?

Olive (33:15)
Win.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah,

of course. Yeah, I think if a company has been hiring in a particular way for a long time, and especially if you look at huge successful companies, the big banks, the law firms, the consulting firms, they've done a pretty decent job at creating big successful companies with the people they've hired so far. So there's a big mental shift.

to change the hiring process, ⁓ which I totally understand if it ain't broke or if you don't perceive it to be great broke, then why fix it? So I guess that's part of it, right? It's understanding what your hiring goals are and really lasering in on where you might improve. There might be a few metrics. I've spoken about this sort of finding the best.

talent and removing some of the biases and you know that would be with the appreciation that a more diverse workforce is a better one on many different angles. But other companies use ⁓ skills based hiring and tools like TestGorilla because they've just got so many candidates to get through. They just can't afford to screen so many candidates so you're using a tool that can automate that. So think really understanding where you could be improving.

Martin Hauck (34:28)
Mm.

Olive (34:50)
and already a process which might be amazing in many ways, but there's always room for improvement. So finding that metric or that improvement point. Finding a very small area of the organisation to test it on, I think is, you know, or just one or two roles to just start playing with it. I think is, and you know, maybe more junior roles to start with something that's kind of less immediately business critical.

Martin Hauck (35:17)
Mm-hmm.

Olive (35:18)
⁓

I think is always a good one. ⁓ And spending a lot of time with the people team, the hiring team, the TA team, to get their buy-in as well. know, we're not changing, you know, our users are for the most part recruiters, TA teams, depending on the size of the company, could be a hiring manager as well.

Yeah, really working with those people to help them to buy into the process and the benefits that it could bring the company and them as individuals. That's a big change management piece. And then start testing, really. And I think, you know, baby steps, because anything that's sort of change in legacy needs to, yeah, you need to land it gently and start measuring the impact.

Martin Hauck (36:12)
That, that I like, mean, nothing simpler than just saying baby steps, ⁓ which, which is such an easy way to look at it. but, and, and like looking into like past, get excited by the solution being implemented fully and just like, you said, you know, brand promises X we'll, we'll partner with brand and, then, you know, six months later and you're like, this is hard work.

Olive (36:17)
Yeah.

Martin Hauck (36:37)
You mean there's a lot of stuff I have to do behind the scenes to make this all to, to, reach this utopian future that the salesperson sold me on. but I love that you're saying like, start small. Like you need to start in a corner of the business, see how that goes and then kind of let it spread like wildfire over time versus like.

Olive (36:41)
Yeah

Yeah.

Martin Hauck (37:01)
Hey, we're using this tool and everybody, the adoption rate is only X and then, you know, people that don't do the right thing start, you know, being grumpy about it and people that do, you know, it's, it becomes kind of like, like that. It's very startup-y I think in terms of like, you don't, you have to launch the, the beta program with a small cohort of people within a company before you go all the way. ⁓

Olive (37:23)
Sure, yeah, get the feedback,

make adjustments on the basis of feedback so that the users have been listened to, find some champions. There's always going to be a few people who love it, who maybe used that tool or that process before a different organization so it can really kind of speak to the benefits. But yeah, I mean, we've been using things like CVs to hire people on for like hundreds of years.

Martin Hauck (37:34)
Hmm.

Olive (37:52)
⁓ or similar to CVs. The change isn't going to come overnight, but change is coming, right? The number of companies who are using some form of skills-based hiring is picking up every single year. As you said, think at the beginning of the call, testing is no longer this completely radical thing. I think the radical thing now is making sure that you're testing for the right thing, that you're using the test in the right ways.

Martin Hauck (37:54)
Yeah.

Olive (38:19)
that you're ⁓ interpreting the results correctly to make actually proper, well-informed hiring decisions. So that shift is starting to happen, certainly, certainly.

Martin Hauck (38:33)
and ⁓

I know we're not going to solve this problem in the next, you know, five to 10 minutes. ⁓ but I'll, I'd love to leave with this, this question, ⁓ because it feels like the one that's kind of on everybody's mind and you, you hinted towards it at the beginning. But as we've been talking, I've been thinking about it more and more specific to the problem that exists today, which is people and culture folks, chief of staff folks, anybody, the army of one.

Olive (38:45)
Mmm.

Martin Hauck (39:05)
You know, people like members of the community, the ones that get the most value are the ones that are doing all the things because there's so many things going on. But everybody is basically the trend that I hear about the most in the last, I would say six months is that the applicant, the number of applications per job is just like skyrocketed. It's like no longer 50 people applying to a role. It's like a thousand. And so I'm.

Olive (39:32)
Yeah.

Martin Hauck (39:34)
really grateful we didn't talk about AI because we've just been talking about that so much. And it's just such like a zoom ahead in terms of like, you know, it's important to talk about, but it's been refreshing not to have to talk about that. ⁓ But I guess ⁓ you talked about the placement of where a test should come into play. And I think

Olive (39:48)
I won't mention it.

Mmm. Yeah. Mmm.

Martin Hauck (40:00)
the natural instinct, especially when you've got like 1000 applicants and you do want to have some form of like, well, I'm not going to be able to review 1000 resumes. So your instinct if you're being smart about it is to like, if I think you're being smarter, I like my instinct will use me so not to make anybody else and but like let's front load with a test like a small one is that is

Olive (40:25)
Yeah.

Martin Hauck (40:28)
I'd love your take on, know, is that still the right instinct? Does it need to be shifted? What's how do companies deal with this like massive volume of applicants and how would they use the tool to do that as well?

Olive (40:30)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, you have the correct instinct, Martin. Yes, well done. Mark, I would say that you may be a little bit unusual in the kind of recruiting industry. I tests, I think because people...

Martin Hauck (40:46)
you

Olive (41:00)
I think still in the recruitment world, there's a lot of trust in these legacy processes that we've spoken about. So CVE, ⁓ my God, cover letter, bane of my life, I hate cover letters. Screening cover letter, making a gut feel ⁓ on behalf of the recruiter. They have a school card, but you know, this looks like a good candidate will put them through to a screening interview, da, da, da.

Martin Hauck (41:16)
Yeah.

Olive (41:28)
That feels like I think a safer place to start for many professional or TA professionals and end processes currently. Where we tend to see tests coming up is actually a bit later in the process, a validation tool. So maybe people have gone through a few interviews already. Some have been screened out, some have seemed brilliant. We're going to take a few to later stage and then we'll test them. And then we...

the test results might factor into the final decision. That's often how we see the test being used. We at Descarilla always advocate for doing the test as early in the process as possible. Indeed, using it to screen, as you say, especially when you've got so many people applying, having a test upfront is fantastic for many reasons. One, you reduce that bias at that critical screening phase.

So you get people in the process who may have been screened out for just random reasons previously. You screen them through on their skills and then you can go deeper in the interviews. But also we know that in sort of best practices, best high-end practices in terms of the validity of different kind of ⁓ interviewing or kind of assessment practices.

Martin Hauck (42:27)
Yeah, I love that.

Olive (42:51)
the absolute best one for predicting job success is structured interviews. Really clean, clear structured interviews where everyone's being asked the same question the same amount of times, yeah, we all know structured interviews. That still comes out the best in various different studies in terms of finding the right candidate for the job. But if you use ⁓ tests, skills tests, behavioral tests, ⁓ critical sort of thinking tests, et cetera,

beforehand to screen people into the structured interview process, then you've just sort of turbocharged your candidate pool, your interviewee pool, ⁓ because you've really got the people who've actually got the skills who are going to be interviewed on those skills. It saves everyone time as well. I think also, there's also just, for me,

as well, get FOMO, right? And I would like to know that all my candidates are going through an assessment. I can see them on a scoreboard and I can see how they're scoring and we can say we're going to take the top, you know, people who've scored in the 80th percentile and above and we're going to, you know, then we're going to screen them through rather than thinking, ⁓ I've only had time to review ATCVs today.

and I've got a back load of however many hundreds more. There might be that gem, but how do know? yeah, screening upfront is the way to go with the tests is the perfect position.

Martin Hauck (44:32)
Yeah, no fair,

fair. Well, ⁓ any any final thoughts? I mean, I feel like you and I could probably go on for much longer. And then I'd love to and maybe we have a part two of this or something like that. But any any sort of things that are percolating in your mind, you're like, I've got to, I've got to share this with the audience or this is this is, you know, we missed this part and we need to talk about it.

Olive (44:45)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think maybe we touched on it a little bit, but I think ⁓ maybe we'll bring it full circle to this idea of ⁓ kind of matchmaking and maybe a little bit of a plug to our recent state of skills based hiring report, which you can find on the TestGorilla website. It was all about matchmaking ⁓ between candidates and companies. And I think people do best.

in a company where there is that match. And that match will never be perfect. And I think we can always, we should always aspire to be surprised by interesting matches as well, right? You know, there might be a little tiny disconnect that actually sparks a whole different type of connection. That's fantastic. We don't want to be all hiring people that are the same, obviously. But when you can create that match where it's not...

Martin Hauck (45:39)
Yeah.

Olive (45:54)
just based on skills, we are doing skills based hiring, but where there's those behavioral competencies, ⁓ where there's values alignment, when there's the match of that holistic candidate self, where there's the match for as much of themselves that they want to bring to work, you can match as much of that as possible to the company, that's where the magic happens. So skills based hiring can do that because there are so many

different things that you can test for both in the tests and in the follow-up interviews and using it as part of a multi-measure hiring process, right? Don't just do the tests and hiring the basis of the test results. We'd never have that. But have it at the beginning and... Exactly. But have your tests at the beginning, follow up with the structured interviews, maybe do more multi-measure assessments or work sample.

Martin Hauck (46:34)
You saved us so much time, Olive. Only one interview.

Olive (46:51)
where you can see that whole 360 lens, that's where you'll find the match. And that's where you'll have full knowledge and appreciation of who you're really bringing in. And the person who's coming in will feel seen and they'll feel appreciated from all different angles. That's the match. That's what we're trying to do with skills-based hiring. Yeah.

Martin Hauck (46:55)
Mm-hmm.

All of this has been a delight. Thank you so much for your time today. And yeah, hopefully we chat again. I'm sure we'll stay in touch regardless. And for the folks that you mentioned, the skills-based hiring report, ⁓ where should folks go to pick that up or download that?

Olive (47:32)
Yeah,

we are, it's on our website. I believe that there's a link on the top of the website at the moment, testgorilla.com.

people can find me on LinkedIn, look at all the TestGorilla kind of marketing around that conversation. If you don't catch it live, there'll be recordings to find. I'm sure. Thank you. Appreciate it, Martin. Bye bye.

Martin Hauck (47:50)
And we'll have a link as well and share that within TPPG as well. So thanks so much for the time today, Olive. Appreciate it. All right. Take care.