pymetrics: Build The Workforce of the Future

Innovation is necessary in today’s world that has high unemployment figures and employees working in roles that do not do justice to their actual potential. But there is an NY-based company that believes that AI's power can be leveraged to match the best talent with the best-suited roles. Established in 2012, pymetrics helps companies build the future workforce, using behavioral science and audited AI technology, resulting in more diverse teams and more efficient processes.

Talent Pioneer is born

While working as an academic neuroscientist at Harvard and MIT, the founder and CEO of pymetrics, Dr. Frida Polli, came to understand that even at a premier learning institution like Harvard, the hiring process was outdated. She felt that the process was unchanged since she had left the institution. “My classmates were prepping for 6 months to land their “perfect” internship or job, only to hate it 3 days in. I was experiencing the problem too,” said Dr. Frida Polli. Having a 30-page-plus academic resume didn’t help either. The resume could not point towards what Frida could do in the business world, let alone indicate that she could be a tech entrepreneur. “I was a 38-year-old single mom who didn’t fit the 20-something male entrepreneur mold. There had to be a better solution,” added Frida.

Platforms like Spotify and Netflix take in information about you and give personalized recommendations that seem to know you better than you know yourself. Their movie recommendations are not based on their descriptions. Instead, they analyze movies deeply based on traits and then match you with suggestions based on what you like in movies. pymetrics was set up to do the same in the job hunt market. It harnessed the power of ethical AI to match people to the jobs where they are most likely to succeed.

Increasing Female Representation

The world’s leading companies are trying to increase the gender, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity at the workplace. One of the world’s leading investment firms with over 2,000 employees wanted to develop a more efficient, effective, and data-driven early career hiring process that would enable the firm to increase the diversity of their summer intern and full-time analyst classes.

The company partnered with pymetrics in 2017. At the time, the company received around 20,000 applications for vacancies all over the globe. Hence, innovation was necessary.

pymetrics invited the investment firm’s current employees within investment, non-investment, and innovations roles to play the pymetrics games. The data collected from the gameplay was used to create custom success profiles that incoming candidates were objectively compared against. Candidates that were “highly recommended” and “recommended” by pymetrics were automatically progressed to the next stage. Throughout, the pymetrics platform aggregated all candidate performance data with a keen focus on assessment completion, satisfaction, and time to complete to provide a comprehensive report to the recruitment team at the end of each hiring cycle.

The job candidates found the company’s new hiring process to be engaging and easy to complete, with the satisfaction rate reaching 95%. The pymetrics exercises took just 33 minutes on average. In terms of efficacy, pymetrics-recommended candidates were 97% more likely to ultimately receive an offer from the client than the candidates who were not recommended, allowing their recruiting team to re-focus their efforts and valuable time on recommended candidates.

Before introducing pymetrics, the firm sourced a large percentage of new employees from referrals or talent pipeline programs with top local universities, focusing on only nine universities. With pymetrics, offers were extended to candidates from over 66 different schools. Female representation among recommended candidates increased by 44%, with the client increasing their female representation by 62% from application to offer. Minority representation among recommended candidates also increased by and 9% following a study period.

The Leader Upfront

Dr. Frida Polli, CEO

Frida decided to apply her wealth of knowledge in neuroscience and data science to solve real world problems. She co-founded pymterics in 2012. She has appeared on various news channels including BBC, CNN, CNBC, and NPR. She earned her BA from the Dartmouth College and obtained her MBA from Harvard. She also has a PhD from Suffolk University. She did her predoctoral training in neuroscience at the Harvard Medical School and her postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience at MIT.

“pymetrics helps companies build the workforce of the future, using behavioral science and audited AI technology, resulting in more diverse teams and more efficient processes.”

“We use behavioral assessments to evaluate job seekers. Rather than focusing on backward-looking resumes or self-reported questionnaires, we collect objective behavioral data that measures a job seeker's true potential.”

“The pymetrics platform can evaluate job seekers for any role within your company, and ultimately, any role in the pymetrics ecosystem. Every job seeker has a fit - redirect, don't reject.”