December 27, 2023 • 22 mins
Are you trying to build cohesive teams? Then, skill-based hiring can revolutionize your recruitment process. Host William Tincup speaks with Josh Millet, CEO and co-founder of Criteria, about the power of skills-based hiring. Millet's insights and expertise provide a refreshing perspective on how skills-based hiring can transform traditional recruitment practices and drive long-term success in organizations.
Millet explains how Criteria's talent success business model goes beyond pre-employment assessments to offer a comprehensive suite of tools for building and optimizing teams. He emphasizes the importance of evaluating a candidate's potential to acquire new skills rather than solely focusing on their existing knowledge or educational background. Millet also discusses the need to devalue over-reliance on college degrees and experience as indicators of future success, highlighting the potential for skills-based hiring to level the playing field and promote diversity.
By shifting the focus to a candidate's abilities and skill potential, organizations can make smarter hiring decisions and build cohesive, high-performing teams for long-term success.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
William Tincup (00:32):
This is William Tincup and you're listening to
the Recruiting Daily podcast.
We have Josh Ante from Criteriaand he and I recently kind of
reconnected and I learned abunch about their Criteria's
business that I was unaware of.
So it was actually a really goodkind of reconnection.
We've known each other for along time.
Today's show is going to be aqualified endorsement of skills
(00:55):
based hiring.
Because during when we werecatching up, I asked him, you
know, what's your what do youthink about the skills based
hiring?
You're like, I
Josh Millet (01:03):
like it, but
William Tincup (01:03):
there's things, there's things that's qualified
and I'm like, Oh, that'd be agreat podcast.
So Josh, would you do us a favorand, uh, and introduce yourself
and also Criterion.
Josh Millet (01:17):
Yeah, thanks, William, for having me on.
Great to be here.
Um, yeah, I was just thinking,as you said, that a qualified
endorsement is not the sexiest,like, marketing title, but we'll
work through it.
I think it'll be an interestingdiscussion.
Um, so I'm the CEO and cofounder of Criteria.
Um, Criteria historically was apre employment assessment
(01:37):
business, and we've kind ofevolved more recently into what
we call a talent successbusiness.
Our software includes a wholesuite of tools.
Assessments are still a very bigpart of it.
We've also expanded intointerviewing, structured
interviewing specifically, soour customers use our structured
interviewing tools.
We also have some post hiretools aimed at building teams
(01:57):
and kind of post hire teamoptimization, growth and
development, that kind of thing.
Um, so our product, uh, Visionhas expanded a little bit in the
last couple of years.
William Tincup (02:06):
To say the least, to say the least,
because, uh, folks, uh, in theindustry would say Criteria
Corp, uh, for a long time, andthen it just got shortened to
Criteria, which I really like.
And, uh, I think, I think a lotof folks had you pegged in the
pre employment and, and really,really, I mean, y'all, y'all
are, y'all are great in preemployment because you just know
it backwards and forwards.
(02:27):
And the fact that you've bledinto the, into the, uh, uh, the
organization, I think it's justa Gene, I think it's kind of
natural.
I think your customers probablypulled you.
If I, if I could do thearchaeology of it, I'd probably
go back and find that yourcustomers kind of came to you
and said, Hey, you're doing agreat job over here.
Can you, can you do this thingover here?
Yeah,
Josh Millet (02:46):
that's definitely true in the post hire space,
right?
Our customers pulled us there.
Um, they were telling us prettydirectly, you know, several
years ago that like, theseassessments are great, but once
I have the person You know, inthe tent.
Now what?
Yeah, what do I do?
How do I grow and develop?
And it started out first as sortof just kind of onboarding help.
Okay, this is your new hire.
(03:07):
Here's how he or she looks.
And then from there, it's kindof developed into a recruiter,
recruitment.
Okay, you, you hire, um, uh,great people, hopefully with the
help of our software and ourassessments.
Uh, but that doesn't necessarilymean that'll translate into
great teams.
I know we, we connected lastweek, William, we were joking
about my beloved LA Clippers.
Uh, yes.
(03:28):
Yes.
A lot of Hall of Famers there,but the collective output is not
necessarily what you'd expectbased on that.
And
William Tincup (03:34):
that was during that string where they were,
they lost when Harden firstjoined, they had lost a series
in a row.
I'm like, there's so much talenton this team.
This is, there's, there's atleast three.
Hall of Famers, at
Josh Millet (03:46):
least three.
And they have a good coach aswell.
They've turned it around alittle since then, but it's
still not what you'd expect.
And I think our, um, ouremphasis there is, you know,
building a product that managerscan help, can use to help them
kind of manage at scale.
That's right.
And, and to sort of optimizeteams based on alignment and,
(04:08):
and, and framework that we'vedeveloped around, um, you know,
sort of team health, I wouldcall it, and team optimization.
Not from the standpoint of, youknow, um, we use, uh, a criteria
internally, we use engagementpulse surveys, right?
It's not really that, it's morearound is, is the team
collectively aligned?
Are they all rowing in the samedirection?
Not are they, you know, engapulse surveys are really
(04:30):
helpful, but they're more about,okay, do we have a happy, Happy
team is their flight risk, ifthey're not happy, that kind of
thing.
Um, this is more about teamoptimization at scale.
What I love about that
William Tincup (04:40):
is, again, we've seen the Olympics, uh, through
the years.
We've seen World Cups, if youfollow, uh, football, and it's
not always the most talentedteam that wins.
It's the team that's the mostcohesive, uh, generally speaking
that, that usually wins thosetypes of things.
So I love the fact that you'rekind of helping that cohesion,
(05:01):
uh, giving visibility andinsight into a cohesion of a
team that you could be a, youknow, you could be an all star
in sales, just, just rocking itat one company.
And then you come over toanother company and you're put
on a different team and thedynamic doesn't suit you.
And you're not as successful,and it's for no other reason
(05:24):
than that there's cohesionwasn't there.
So I like the, that, thatvisibility and insight into co,
well, I say cohesion is probablya better word than, than that,
but, but for managers to be ableto understand that.
Both in the hiring process, butthen through onboarding and
into, and most importantly, asthey're doing work, uh, to, to
(05:44):
really understand how that, howthey're all, you said, rowing
and, uh, you know, in the samedirection.
I think that's a great metaphor,actually.
Yeah, totally,
Josh Millet (05:54):
totally agree.
We, we've had a sort of betaversion of that product out for
quite a while, uh, but we'repretty dramatically overhauling
it and, and re releasing it in,in Q1 of, of next year.
And, um, it's interesting, uh,because the usage of that, even
among our bigger customers, it'sfunny, a lot of the times
they're using it for, like,really team sized units, so like
(06:15):
eight or ten people, you know,like a, a single span of control
of, of one manager, not likehow, how big a team it is.
Of course, if you do that acrossthe org, you can kind of see how
does my whole org look, but alot of our sort of early
adopters there are looking at,oh, how does my team of eight
engineers work together, or myproduct management team work
together, um, and so it's reallyabout giving insights to that
(06:35):
individual manager.
Which, you know, one day we hopethat'll all flow up to the, to
the C suite and the head of HR,but it's, it's kind of being
adopted bottom up, um, where,you know, it's small, you know,
you think about the, the, thetwo pizza team size, right?
Or one manager.
And, um, so you're gettinginformation on, does, does the
team know what the goals are?
(06:56):
Do they feel aligned?
Um, you know, things like this.
Are they motivated?
Um, not like, are they happywith the org and are they going
to leave?
You know, there, there, there'sa correlation there, but it's
not as strong as you'd think,right?
Some, um, certainly likedysfunctional teams that aren't
aligned that tends to breedunhappiness, but you can, you
can also have happy folks whodon't quite know what the, you
(07:18):
know, North star is.
So, and that's stuff we want tobe able to give to the manager
to act on like in, in real time.
William Tincup (07:26):
So, so as you, so as you look at.
The way that the market hasshifted into skills, skills
everywhere.
So skills in internal mobility,skills in hiring, skills,
skills, skills, skills, skills,skills, skills.
You can't go anywhere.
Can't go to a conference and nottalk about skills.
I don't necessarily mind that.
But it's eerily familiar to, ifyou've been in this game as long
(07:51):
as we have, to competencymodels.
Like there was a real hot momentthat, you know, competency
models.
We gotta, everything's gotta bearound a competency model.
We gotta hire to it, we gottapromote to it, succession
planning, everything's gotta betied to it.
Comp, the whole bit, but we haveto have these models.
Years later, I would ask thequestion like, who actually did
(08:11):
that?
Right?
Like, like, I know, I know the,I know the IO folks built
Josh Millet (08:15):
them
William Tincup (08:18):
you know?
Yeah.
And at big company X, whatever,I can't say X, uh, big com, Acme
company,
Josh Millet (08:23):
big, big company.
X is off the table.
Now.
I know it's taken, it's taken.
Can't, driving
William Tincup (08:28):
me crazy.
I can't say that, but it's like,I know, I know that we're built,
but I don't think, I don't, Ican't, I can't find.
A company that fully implementedthat across all of those things.
So when I look at skills basedhiring, I kind of have this deja
vu moment where it's like, arewe just doing the same thing
(08:49):
using different words?
Josh Millet (08:51):
Yeah.
I think, and the commonalitythere, I think is like, I would
characterize both, both thosethings or those movements or
whatever, as, as like necessary,but not sufficient.
Right.
Right.
And, and so like overall, we're,we're big fans of skills based
hiring.
I think the basic impulse isreally sound.
I think it's going to be, youknow, one of the biggest.
(09:11):
Uh, I don't know what to callit, one of the biggest movements
in HR and TA, the next probablybetter part of a decade, right?
It's getting wider adoption.
The implications of it arereally positive societally, I
think, right?
You know, I think it has a lotof potential to level the
playing field, the, um, it's,it's way past due that we sort
(09:32):
of start to devalue.
Um, you know, college degreesand experience a little bit,
not, not altogether, they havevalue, but, but they've been
overvalued.
We've been over indexing on themwhen we make hiring decisions
for like decades, which is,which is
William Tincup (09:47):
a bias that we've had.
I went to Princeton, so I earnedthat degree.
Now, obviously, if you went toPrinceton, you're just like, I
didn't go to Princeton by theway, but you know, the bit, the
bit is, is.
No, no, no, they didn't, theydidn't want me.
Um, but the, the thing is, isthere's a bias inherent in that
(10:08):
is that people will only look atpeople that they feel that they
are, that's like them.
And so if you went to Michigan,you obviously believe in the
alumni of Michigan.
So you're going to hire peoplethat went to Michigan.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so devaluing, it's also,there's some of that bias that
was laid, laid in there that if,if the person could do the job,
(10:29):
but they just so happen to havean associate's degree or no
degree, so what?
Like can they, can they do thejob job?
Josh Millet (10:38):
And I think the other thing about it is like,
there's a pretty.
Huge body of evidence now thatshows that in terms of
predictive signals, they're,they're kind of at best okay,
like they, they are pretty weaksignals when you compare to, to
them to some other things thatyou can pretty easily evaluate
in a, in a job seeker.
So why are we using them asthese gatekeepers when, you
(11:00):
know, especially you look at theUS, for example, you, you're
just using a four year degree asa requirement.
You're.
Pretty much right off the bat,excluding almost 60 percent of
the population from applying forthat role, and that 60 percent
is not representative, right?
So there's, there's a lot of,um, really bad diversity impact,
(11:21):
if you care about that.
There's, there's also just like,in, in today's There's a labor
environment where, you know,whatever you say about what's
happening in the economy, youknow, today, at the end of 2023,
there's a profound laborimbalance, labor supply
imbalance that we're going to befaced with in the next decade,
and it obviously has to do withthings You and I can't change
(11:43):
like demographic trends, agingpopulation, all that.
There's not enough workers incertain industries.
Um, you know, what's happened inthe technology industry where,
where we play is, is obviously,um, I think pretty unique that,
you know, all of a sudden peopleare like, oh, it's harder to get
a job.
That's not the case when youlook outside of the technology
bubble.
You know, we've had a bigcorrection technology, but you
(12:03):
look in healthcare,manufacturing, all these other
industries that, that we workwith and people can't.
hire fast enough still, even,um, even today.
And so there's a labor shortageissue.
And that is, that is one of theaccelerants, I think, behind
skills based hiring is, like,people have been sort of down
with the theory behind it for awhile, at least, you know,
companies that are sort offorward thinking, but now
(12:26):
there's no choice, right?
I mean, because if you're, ifyou're filtering out because of
a lack of experience or lackPedigree, educational pedigree.
If you're filtering out 70, 80percent of the population,
you're, you're just kind ofshowing up with one hand, but
you know, one hand tied behindyour back for the, for the
talent core.
So it's,
William Tincup (12:43):
it's, it's usually hiring managers, um,
that I, at least that I've foundthat are the ones that are the
kind of locked in, locked inkind of how we did things
yesterday.
They're the ones that, becausethat's how they came up.
So they came up a certain wayand so they think that everyone
needs to go through the samesimilar process that they did.
So, so I think it's kind ofundoing that, that kind of bias
(13:06):
or at least kind of reworkingthat bias to then say, you know
what, the audience has changed,you know, candidates.
Have changed, you know, they,they desire speed, they desire,
uh, you know, they, they wantpersonalization and, and if you
can't solve for those things,uh, they want fairness.
(13:27):
Like there's all kinds of thingsthat this, you know, these two
generations, millennial and GenZ, they want that, you know,
boomers and Gen X didn't reallycare as much about.
Yeah,
Josh Millet (13:38):
it's, it's also, it's also reflective of just a
generally risk averse view, Ithink, which, which is like,
yeah, if I hire someone whodoesn't have a college degree,
um, I might have egg on my facelater, and I should have, you
know, but, um, that's justThat's just an inappropriate
view, and HR, you know, tends tobe appropriately so, you know,
(13:59):
risk, risk aware, let's say.
Right, right.
But, you know, as you're tryingto build your workforce for the,
for the next 10 years, that,that view just has to kind of be
phased out, out of necessity, ifnot out of, you know, um, for,
for other reasons.
So, I, I totally agree with youthere.
Is
William Tincup (14:16):
there any, is there any other things around
skills based hiring?
that we should be aware that weshould be looking at is
especially with AI, uh,generative AI and things like
that.
Is there anything else that youcan look at it and see the edges
of skills based hiring and say,Hey, we should just kind of
Josh Millet (14:32):
keep an eye on it.
Yeah.
I mean, so to, to get to thesort of the, the, the headline
of this conversation, I thinklike skills is a really good
place to start.
And, and it's really the sortof.
Different conceptions of whatskills are that has me sort of
only endorsing it in a qualifiedway.
I think if you think of skillsas pretty narrowly as, like,
(14:54):
knowledge that you've acquired,then skills based hiring is not
going nearly far enough.
Because, um, you know, what weneed to be doing in terms of
making talent decisions if wewant to predict long term
success is Looking at the sortof potential a person has to
acquire more skills, right?
The job requirements and, youknow, with the rise of AI, but
(15:16):
even before then, the jobrequirements are changing so
quickly, you know, there's allthese predictions about a huge
percentage of the jobs that arethat are prominent today won't
be in five years and differentjobs will have appeared and even
within jobs that the skills thatare being required are changing
so quickly especially in incertain fields so if you're
focusing only kind of in abackward looking way on what
(15:36):
does this person know at the atthe point I hire them which is
one way to think of skills islike can this person do x um
then you're you're Not going farenough and kind of overturning
the way we've been doing hiring.
Um,'cause that's backwardlooking.
You need to sort of, um, it'ssort of a cliched term, but you
need to be looking at potentialand hiring for potential.
Um, as in like, what is thisperson's potential vis-a-vis
(15:59):
acquiring new skills.
And there's a lot of ways tomeasure that.
If you, if you measure, if youlook at learning ability, the
velocity that people take in newinformation and, and adapt to it
and digest it and apply it, allthose things are predictive of.
you know, what future skills aperson could have.
So, so I think from thatstandpoint like Yeah, if we
think of skills very broadly asdemonstrated capabilities or
(16:22):
abilities that a person has,great.
Let's, you know, I'm all in onskills based hiring.
Let's, uh, let's move forwardwith, like, looking at what the
person can actually do ratherthan, like, whether they went a
particular ability route as into a particular college to, to,
uh, acquire those skills or tolike get a degree that's
(16:42):
supposed to be a proxy for thoseskills.
And it's pretty unreliableproxy.
It turns out a lot of the time,I think,
William Tincup (16:48):
you know, the way I've, I've.
You know, trying to, I guess I'mthe visualization person.
So I think of skills as likemercury and like on a plate.
I don't know if you ever brokethermometers and played with
them or not, but yeah, I did.
I didn't eat any of it, but Idid.
That's good.
That's comforting.
Josh Millet (17:06):
It's comforting.
William Tincup (17:09):
I don't know why he died so early.
The thing is, is like.
They're fluid and they don't,they don't, they don't conform
to this, this, this, therigidness of the way that we
think of, uh, and, and theyalso, it's like micro skills.
So you have a skill, okay, let'ssay it's Java development.
What's the breadth and depth ofthat skill?
(17:30):
Yeah.
And Oh, by the way, that's aPolaroid or that's a, that's a
snapshot in time and there's.
Both the upside of, okay, youknow, your job development, and
then you've learned otherthings.
Okay, that's additive, butrarely do we talk about decay.
Josh Millet (17:47):
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
I think that fluid, um, I likethat, Mercury.
I didn't know where you weregoing with it, but I like it.
You know, I think, um, for me,it's, it, it, programming
languages are actually a perfectexample, right?
We did a release, Scott,probably Three or four years ago
now, a release of like a bigoverhaul of our product.
We had the whole engineeringteam working on it for months
(18:08):
and finally released it.
And we were reflecting as wewere kind of celebrating the
release that, um, it was writtenin at the time, I think it was
written in React, right?
Which was a framework that, um,when we hired that team of like
eight engineers that worked onthat release, none of them.
New React, right?
Not a single one.
Um, and some of them were hiredbefore it existed.
(18:29):
So of course, it was just athought in someone at Facebook's
mind.
Right?
So, uh, you know, so of coursewe couldn't have tested them on
that skill that we were then twoyears later going to do or three
years later do a release basedon, you know, that programming
language.
So that's a, that's a fieldwhere, you know, the shelf life
of most programming languages islike, Some of it can be measured
(18:50):
in, like, quarters or months,not, not even years, you know,
um, and so, you know, you wantto, what you want to be focused
on in hiring great engineers ifyou're, if you're planning to
keep them for anything more thansix months is, you know, how,
how curious are they, are theyabout acquiring new, you know,
learning new languages, howproficient are they at learning
new languages, not just do theyknow X language on the date of
(19:12):
hire, which, It's a piece of it,but it ends up being a
relatively small piece.
It's interesting.
William Tincup (19:18):
I was talking to Indeed yesterday and he was
doing a kind of the jobs andhiring report type stuff.
And, uh, and I asked the, theeconomist, I said, what, what
shocked you?
He goes, I was shocked thatthey're.
I was shocked that there wasn'tmore jobs that that, that were
titled, or somewhere in thetitle was ai.
Hmm.
That AI was a, a bullet point.
(19:43):
Uh, and in some cases, not evena bullet point.
Like we're, we've, we're talkingevery day about ai.
Like we talked about thebeginning of the internet.
We're talking about.
It's coming.
It's coming.
It's coming.
It's coming.
Mm-Hmm.
uh.
But from, from theirperspective, it's like, yeah,
but it's not showing up in jobpostings in the way that you
would think that it would showup in job postings, which is
(20:04):
kind of fascinating.
Like, how do you test for that?
How do you assess for that?
You
Josh Millet (20:08):
know?
I see the same trend actually.
Like, um, I think you were at HRTech, right?
And I was there, um, had, Ithink it had been a year.
I took a year off the yearbefore.
And, um, of course everythingwas all, you know, every booth.
You know, AI, it was, it waseverywhere.
Um, every summary you read atthe conference, you know, makes
it seem like it was only an AIconference.
(20:29):
And then we, we do our likeannual survey, um, each fall, I
think it came out a couple ofmonths ago, like a benchmark
hiring survey.
And a very small percentage ofHR people, even at companies,
you know, of scale, these aren'tlike small businesses, are
actually using AI in theirtalent acquisition process.
(20:50):
Like 12%, like a tiny number,you know, and it's every, and it
has to do, I think, a lot with,um, you know, it being a very
high stakes thing, and there's alot of, there's a lot of
regulation, there's a lot ofcoming.
Uh, legislation around it and,you know, the New York bias law
and all that, and it harkensback to what we mentioned
earlier.
There's, um, appropriately,there's a risk averse, um, kind
(21:14):
of angle to what a lot of TApeople do.
It's a highly, um, litigiousarea, obviously, um, and so,
yeah, the hype in this case, HR,is way ahead of the Uh, of
adoption, right?
Even though people, there'suniversal interest and we're,
we're using it a lot at Criteriainternally, starting to build it
into the product, of course,but, um, we got to do so in a
(21:36):
really careful, considered way.
Um, because it's still earlydays in terms of adoption.
William Tincup (21:42):
I love it.
That's flown by.
Josh, thank you so much for yourtime and thanks for, uh, us, you
know, I just love the title andus being able to nibble around
the edges.
It's easy to be a cheerleaderfor skills based hiring and
skills based promotion andskills based everything, uh,
which, which is, and we, and weshould, because it's a better,
it is a better model.
(22:02):
We all know that.
Um, but, but we also need to becritical.
And walk slowly.
So thank you so much for yourtime and talking to the
audience.
Josh Millet (22:12):
Yeah, of course.
Thanks for having me, William.
This was fun.
William Tincup (22:15):
Absolutely.
Thanks for the audience.
Appreciate you.
And until next time.
This is William Tincup and you're listening to
the Recruiting Daily podcast.
We have Josh Ante from Criteriaand he and I recently kind of
reconnected and I learned abunch about their Criteria's
business that I was unaware of.
So it was actually a really goodkind of reconnection.
We've known each other for along time.
Today's show is going to be aqualified endorsement of skills
(00:55):
based hiring.
Because during when we werecatching up, I asked him, you
know, what's your what do youthink about the skills based
hiring?
You're like, I
Josh Millet (01:03):
like it, but
William Tincup (01:03):
there's things, there's things that's qualified
and I'm like, Oh, that'd be agreat podcast.
So Josh, would you do us a favorand, uh, and introduce yourself
and also Criterion.
Josh Millet (01:17):
Yeah, thanks, William, for having me on.
Great to be here.
Um, yeah, I was just thinking,as you said, that a qualified
endorsement is not the sexiest,like, marketing title, but we'll
work through it.
I think it'll be an interestingdiscussion.
Um, so I'm the CEO and cofounder of Criteria.
Um, Criteria historically was apre employment assessment
(01:37):
business, and we've kind ofevolved more recently into what
we call a talent successbusiness.
Our software includes a wholesuite of tools.
Assessments are still a very bigpart of it.
We've also expanded intointerviewing, structured
interviewing specifically, soour customers use our structured
interviewing tools.
We also have some post hiretools aimed at building teams
(01:57):
and kind of post hire teamoptimization, growth and
development, that kind of thing.
Um, so our product, uh, Visionhas expanded a little bit in the
last couple of years.
William Tincup (02:06):
To say the least, to say the least,
because, uh, folks, uh, in theindustry would say Criteria
Corp, uh, for a long time, andthen it just got shortened to
Criteria, which I really like.
And, uh, I think, I think a lotof folks had you pegged in the
pre employment and, and really,really, I mean, y'all, y'all
are, y'all are great in preemployment because you just know
it backwards and forwards.
(02:27):
And the fact that you've bledinto the, into the, uh, uh, the
organization, I think it's justa Gene, I think it's kind of
natural.
I think your customers probablypulled you.
If I, if I could do thearchaeology of it, I'd probably
go back and find that yourcustomers kind of came to you
and said, Hey, you're doing agreat job over here.
Can you, can you do this thingover here?
Yeah,
Josh Millet (02:46):
that's definitely true in the post hire space,
right?
Our customers pulled us there.
Um, they were telling us prettydirectly, you know, several
years ago that like, theseassessments are great, but once
I have the person You know, inthe tent.
Now what?
Yeah, what do I do?
How do I grow and develop?
And it started out first as sortof just kind of onboarding help.
Okay, this is your new hire.
(03:07):
Here's how he or she looks.
And then from there, it's kindof developed into a recruiter,
recruitment.
Okay, you, you hire, um, uh,great people, hopefully with the
help of our software and ourassessments.
Uh, but that doesn't necessarilymean that'll translate into
great teams.
I know we, we connected lastweek, William, we were joking
about my beloved LA Clippers.
Uh, yes.
(03:28):
Yes.
A lot of Hall of Famers there,but the collective output is not
necessarily what you'd expectbased on that.
And
William Tincup (03:34):
that was during that string where they were,
they lost when Harden firstjoined, they had lost a series
in a row.
I'm like, there's so much talenton this team.
This is, there's, there's atleast three.
Hall of Famers, at
Josh Millet (03:46):
least three.
And they have a good coach aswell.
They've turned it around alittle since then, but it's
still not what you'd expect.
And I think our, um, ouremphasis there is, you know,
building a product that managerscan help, can use to help them
kind of manage at scale.
That's right.
And, and to sort of optimizeteams based on alignment and,
(04:08):
and, and framework that we'vedeveloped around, um, you know,
sort of team health, I wouldcall it, and team optimization.
Not from the standpoint of, youknow, um, we use, uh, a criteria
internally, we use engagementpulse surveys, right?
It's not really that, it's morearound is, is the team
collectively aligned?
Are they all rowing in the samedirection?
Not are they, you know, engapulse surveys are really
(04:30):
helpful, but they're more about,okay, do we have a happy, Happy
team is their flight risk, ifthey're not happy, that kind of
thing.
Um, this is more about teamoptimization at scale.
What I love about that
William Tincup (04:40):
is, again, we've seen the Olympics, uh, through
the years.
We've seen World Cups, if youfollow, uh, football, and it's
not always the most talentedteam that wins.
It's the team that's the mostcohesive, uh, generally speaking
that, that usually wins thosetypes of things.
So I love the fact that you'rekind of helping that cohesion,
(05:01):
uh, giving visibility andinsight into a cohesion of a
team that you could be a, youknow, you could be an all star
in sales, just, just rocking itat one company.
And then you come over toanother company and you're put
on a different team and thedynamic doesn't suit you.
And you're not as successful,and it's for no other reason
(05:24):
than that there's cohesionwasn't there.
So I like the, that, thatvisibility and insight into co,
well, I say cohesion is probablya better word than, than that,
but, but for managers to be ableto understand that.
Both in the hiring process, butthen through onboarding and
into, and most importantly, asthey're doing work, uh, to, to
(05:44):
really understand how that, howthey're all, you said, rowing
and, uh, you know, in the samedirection.
I think that's a great metaphor,actually.
Yeah, totally,
Josh Millet (05:54):
totally agree.
We, we've had a sort of betaversion of that product out for
quite a while, uh, but we'repretty dramatically overhauling
it and, and re releasing it in,in Q1 of, of next year.
And, um, it's interesting, uh,because the usage of that, even
among our bigger customers, it'sfunny, a lot of the times
they're using it for, like,really team sized units, so like
(06:15):
eight or ten people, you know,like a, a single span of control
of, of one manager, not likehow, how big a team it is.
Of course, if you do that acrossthe org, you can kind of see how
does my whole org look, but alot of our sort of early
adopters there are looking at,oh, how does my team of eight
engineers work together, or myproduct management team work
together, um, and so it's reallyabout giving insights to that
(06:35):
individual manager.
Which, you know, one day we hopethat'll all flow up to the, to
the C suite and the head of HR,but it's, it's kind of being
adopted bottom up, um, where,you know, it's small, you know,
you think about the, the, thetwo pizza team size, right?
Or one manager.
And, um, so you're gettinginformation on, does, does the
team know what the goals are?
(06:56):
Do they feel aligned?
Um, you know, things like this.
Are they motivated?
Um, not like, are they happywith the org and are they going
to leave?
You know, there, there, there'sa correlation there, but it's
not as strong as you'd think,right?
Some, um, certainly likedysfunctional teams that aren't
aligned that tends to breedunhappiness, but you can, you
can also have happy folks whodon't quite know what the, you
(07:18):
know, North star is.
So, and that's stuff we want tobe able to give to the manager
to act on like in, in real time.
William Tincup (07:26):
So, so as you, so as you look at.
The way that the market hasshifted into skills, skills
everywhere.
So skills in internal mobility,skills in hiring, skills,
skills, skills, skills, skills,skills, skills.
You can't go anywhere.
Can't go to a conference and nottalk about skills.
I don't necessarily mind that.
But it's eerily familiar to, ifyou've been in this game as long
(07:51):
as we have, to competencymodels.
Like there was a real hot momentthat, you know, competency
models.
We gotta, everything's gotta bearound a competency model.
We gotta hire to it, we gottapromote to it, succession
planning, everything's gotta betied to it.
Comp, the whole bit, but we haveto have these models.
Years later, I would ask thequestion like, who actually did
(08:11):
that?
Right?
Like, like, I know, I know the,I know the IO folks built
Josh Millet (08:15):
them
William Tincup (08:18):
you know?
Yeah.
And at big company X, whatever,I can't say X, uh, big com, Acme
company,
Josh Millet (08:23):
big, big company.
X is off the table.
Now.
I know it's taken, it's taken.
Can't, driving
William Tincup (08:28):
me crazy.
I can't say that, but it's like,I know, I know that we're built,
but I don't think, I don't, Ican't, I can't find.
A company that fully implementedthat across all of those things.
So when I look at skills basedhiring, I kind of have this deja
vu moment where it's like, arewe just doing the same thing
(08:49):
using different words?
Josh Millet (08:51):
Yeah.
I think, and the commonalitythere, I think is like, I would
characterize both, both thosethings or those movements or
whatever, as, as like necessary,but not sufficient.
Right.
Right.
And, and so like overall, we're,we're big fans of skills based
hiring.
I think the basic impulse isreally sound.
I think it's going to be, youknow, one of the biggest.
(09:11):
Uh, I don't know what to callit, one of the biggest movements
in HR and TA, the next probablybetter part of a decade, right?
It's getting wider adoption.
The implications of it arereally positive societally, I
think, right?
You know, I think it has a lotof potential to level the
playing field, the, um, it's,it's way past due that we sort
(09:32):
of start to devalue.
Um, you know, college degreesand experience a little bit,
not, not altogether, they havevalue, but, but they've been
overvalued.
We've been over indexing on themwhen we make hiring decisions
for like decades, which is,which is
William Tincup (09:47):
a bias that we've had.
I went to Princeton, so I earnedthat degree.
Now, obviously, if you went toPrinceton, you're just like, I
didn't go to Princeton by theway, but you know, the bit, the
bit is, is.
No, no, no, they didn't, theydidn't want me.
Um, but the, the thing is, isthere's a bias inherent in that
(10:08):
is that people will only look atpeople that they feel that they
are, that's like them.
And so if you went to Michigan,you obviously believe in the
alumni of Michigan.
So you're going to hire peoplethat went to Michigan.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so devaluing, it's also,there's some of that bias that
was laid, laid in there that if,if the person could do the job,
(10:29):
but they just so happen to havean associate's degree or no
degree, so what?
Like can they, can they do thejob job?
Josh Millet (10:38):
And I think the other thing about it is like,
there's a pretty.
Huge body of evidence now thatshows that in terms of
predictive signals, they're,they're kind of at best okay,
like they, they are pretty weaksignals when you compare to, to
them to some other things thatyou can pretty easily evaluate
in a, in a job seeker.
So why are we using them asthese gatekeepers when, you
(11:00):
know, especially you look at theUS, for example, you, you're
just using a four year degree asa requirement.
You're.
Pretty much right off the bat,excluding almost 60 percent of
the population from applying forthat role, and that 60 percent
is not representative, right?
So there's, there's a lot of,um, really bad diversity impact,
(11:21):
if you care about that.
There's, there's also just like,in, in today's There's a labor
environment where, you know,whatever you say about what's
happening in the economy, youknow, today, at the end of 2023,
there's a profound laborimbalance, labor supply
imbalance that we're going to befaced with in the next decade,
and it obviously has to do withthings You and I can't change
(11:43):
like demographic trends, agingpopulation, all that.
There's not enough workers incertain industries.
Um, you know, what's happened inthe technology industry where,
where we play is, is obviously,um, I think pretty unique that,
you know, all of a sudden peopleare like, oh, it's harder to get
a job.
That's not the case when youlook outside of the technology
bubble.
You know, we've had a bigcorrection technology, but you
(12:03):
look in healthcare,manufacturing, all these other
industries that, that we workwith and people can't.
hire fast enough still, even,um, even today.
And so there's a labor shortageissue.
And that is, that is one of theaccelerants, I think, behind
skills based hiring is, like,people have been sort of down
with the theory behind it for awhile, at least, you know,
companies that are sort offorward thinking, but now
(12:26):
there's no choice, right?
I mean, because if you're, ifyou're filtering out because of
a lack of experience or lackPedigree, educational pedigree.
If you're filtering out 70, 80percent of the population,
you're, you're just kind ofshowing up with one hand, but
you know, one hand tied behindyour back for the, for the
talent core.
So it's,
William Tincup (12:43):
it's, it's usually hiring managers, um,
that I, at least that I've foundthat are the ones that are the
kind of locked in, locked inkind of how we did things
yesterday.
They're the ones that, becausethat's how they came up.
So they came up a certain wayand so they think that everyone
needs to go through the samesimilar process that they did.
So, so I think it's kind ofundoing that, that kind of bias
(13:06):
or at least kind of reworkingthat bias to then say, you know
what, the audience has changed,you know, candidates.
Have changed, you know, they,they desire speed, they desire,
uh, you know, they, they wantpersonalization and, and if you
can't solve for those things,uh, they want fairness.
(13:27):
Like there's all kinds of thingsthat this, you know, these two
generations, millennial and GenZ, they want that, you know,
boomers and Gen X didn't reallycare as much about.
Yeah,
Josh Millet (13:38):
it's, it's also, it's also reflective of just a
generally risk averse view, Ithink, which, which is like,
yeah, if I hire someone whodoesn't have a college degree,
um, I might have egg on my facelater, and I should have, you
know, but, um, that's justThat's just an inappropriate
view, and HR, you know, tends tobe appropriately so, you know,
(13:59):
risk, risk aware, let's say.
Right, right.
But, you know, as you're tryingto build your workforce for the,
for the next 10 years, that,that view just has to kind of be
phased out, out of necessity, ifnot out of, you know, um, for,
for other reasons.
So, I, I totally agree with youthere.
Is
William Tincup (14:16):
there any, is there any other things around
skills based hiring?
that we should be aware that weshould be looking at is
especially with AI, uh,generative AI and things like
that.
Is there anything else that youcan look at it and see the edges
of skills based hiring and say,Hey, we should just kind of
Josh Millet (14:32):
keep an eye on it.
Yeah.
I mean, so to, to get to thesort of the, the, the headline
of this conversation, I thinklike skills is a really good
place to start.
And, and it's really the sortof.
Different conceptions of whatskills are that has me sort of
only endorsing it in a qualifiedway.
I think if you think of skillsas pretty narrowly as, like,
(14:54):
knowledge that you've acquired,then skills based hiring is not
going nearly far enough.
Because, um, you know, what weneed to be doing in terms of
making talent decisions if wewant to predict long term
success is Looking at the sortof potential a person has to
acquire more skills, right?
The job requirements and, youknow, with the rise of AI, but
(15:16):
even before then, the jobrequirements are changing so
quickly, you know, there's allthese predictions about a huge
percentage of the jobs that arethat are prominent today won't
be in five years and differentjobs will have appeared and even
within jobs that the skills thatare being required are changing
so quickly especially in incertain fields so if you're
focusing only kind of in abackward looking way on what
(15:36):
does this person know at the atthe point I hire them which is
one way to think of skills islike can this person do x um
then you're you're Not going farenough and kind of overturning
the way we've been doing hiring.
Um,'cause that's backwardlooking.
You need to sort of, um, it'ssort of a cliched term, but you
need to be looking at potentialand hiring for potential.
Um, as in like, what is thisperson's potential vis-a-vis
(15:59):
acquiring new skills.
And there's a lot of ways tomeasure that.
If you, if you measure, if youlook at learning ability, the
velocity that people take in newinformation and, and adapt to it
and digest it and apply it, allthose things are predictive of.
you know, what future skills aperson could have.
So, so I think from thatstandpoint like Yeah, if we
think of skills very broadly asdemonstrated capabilities or
(16:22):
abilities that a person has,great.
Let's, you know, I'm all in onskills based hiring.
Let's, uh, let's move forwardwith, like, looking at what the
person can actually do ratherthan, like, whether they went a
particular ability route as into a particular college to, to,
uh, acquire those skills or tolike get a degree that's
(16:42):
supposed to be a proxy for thoseskills.
And it's pretty unreliableproxy.
It turns out a lot of the time,I think,
William Tincup (16:48):
you know, the way I've, I've.
You know, trying to, I guess I'mthe visualization person.
So I think of skills as likemercury and like on a plate.
I don't know if you ever brokethermometers and played with
them or not, but yeah, I did.
I didn't eat any of it, but Idid.
That's good.
That's comforting.
Josh Millet (17:06):
It's comforting.
William Tincup (17:09):
I don't know why he died so early.
The thing is, is like.
They're fluid and they don't,they don't, they don't conform
to this, this, this, therigidness of the way that we
think of, uh, and, and theyalso, it's like micro skills.
So you have a skill, okay, let'ssay it's Java development.
What's the breadth and depth ofthat skill?
(17:30):
Yeah.
And Oh, by the way, that's aPolaroid or that's a, that's a
snapshot in time and there's.
Both the upside of, okay, youknow, your job development, and
then you've learned otherthings.
Okay, that's additive, butrarely do we talk about decay.
Josh Millet (17:47):
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
I think that fluid, um, I likethat, Mercury.
I didn't know where you weregoing with it, but I like it.
You know, I think, um, for me,it's, it, it, programming
languages are actually a perfectexample, right?
We did a release, Scott,probably Three or four years ago
now, a release of like a bigoverhaul of our product.
We had the whole engineeringteam working on it for months
(18:08):
and finally released it.
And we were reflecting as wewere kind of celebrating the
release that, um, it was writtenin at the time, I think it was
written in React, right?
Which was a framework that, um,when we hired that team of like
eight engineers that worked onthat release, none of them.
New React, right?
Not a single one.
Um, and some of them were hiredbefore it existed.
(18:29):
So of course, it was just athought in someone at Facebook's
mind.
Right?
So, uh, you know, so of coursewe couldn't have tested them on
that skill that we were then twoyears later going to do or three
years later do a release basedon, you know, that programming
language.
So that's a, that's a fieldwhere, you know, the shelf life
of most programming languages islike, Some of it can be measured
(18:50):
in, like, quarters or months,not, not even years, you know,
um, and so, you know, you wantto, what you want to be focused
on in hiring great engineers ifyou're, if you're planning to
keep them for anything more thansix months is, you know, how,
how curious are they, are theyabout acquiring new, you know,
learning new languages, howproficient are they at learning
new languages, not just do theyknow X language on the date of
(19:12):
hire, which, It's a piece of it,but it ends up being a
relatively small piece.
It's interesting.
William Tincup (19:18):
I was talking to Indeed yesterday and he was
doing a kind of the jobs andhiring report type stuff.
And, uh, and I asked the, theeconomist, I said, what, what
shocked you?
He goes, I was shocked thatthey're.
I was shocked that there wasn'tmore jobs that that, that were
titled, or somewhere in thetitle was ai.
Hmm.
That AI was a, a bullet point.
(19:43):
Uh, and in some cases, not evena bullet point.
Like we're, we've, we're talkingevery day about ai.
Like we talked about thebeginning of the internet.
We're talking about.
It's coming.
It's coming.
It's coming.
It's coming.
Mm-Hmm.
uh.
But from, from theirperspective, it's like, yeah,
but it's not showing up in jobpostings in the way that you
would think that it would showup in job postings, which is
(20:04):
kind of fascinating.
Like, how do you test for that?
How do you assess for that?
You
Josh Millet (20:08):
know?
I see the same trend actually.
Like, um, I think you were at HRTech, right?
And I was there, um, had, Ithink it had been a year.
I took a year off the yearbefore.
And, um, of course everythingwas all, you know, every booth.
You know, AI, it was, it waseverywhere.
Um, every summary you read atthe conference, you know, makes
it seem like it was only an AIconference.
(20:29):
And then we, we do our likeannual survey, um, each fall, I
think it came out a couple ofmonths ago, like a benchmark
hiring survey.
And a very small percentage ofHR people, even at companies,
you know, of scale, these aren'tlike small businesses, are
actually using AI in theirtalent acquisition process.
(20:50):
Like 12%, like a tiny number,you know, and it's every, and it
has to do, I think, a lot with,um, you know, it being a very
high stakes thing, and there's alot of, there's a lot of
regulation, there's a lot ofcoming.
Uh, legislation around it and,you know, the New York bias law
and all that, and it harkensback to what we mentioned
earlier.
There's, um, appropriately,there's a risk averse, um, kind
(21:14):
of angle to what a lot of TApeople do.
It's a highly, um, litigiousarea, obviously, um, and so,
yeah, the hype in this case, HR,is way ahead of the Uh, of
adoption, right?
Even though people, there'suniversal interest and we're,
we're using it a lot at Criteriainternally, starting to build it
into the product, of course,but, um, we got to do so in a
(21:36):
really careful, considered way.
Um, because it's still earlydays in terms of adoption.
William Tincup (21:42):
I love it.
That's flown by.
Josh, thank you so much for yourtime and thanks for, uh, us, you
know, I just love the title andus being able to nibble around
the edges.
It's easy to be a cheerleaderfor skills based hiring and
skills based promotion andskills based everything, uh,
which, which is, and we, and weshould, because it's a better,
it is a better model.
(22:02):
We all know that.
Um, but, but we also need to becritical.
And walk slowly.
So thank you so much for yourtime and talking to the
audience.
Josh Millet (22:12):
Yeah, of course.
Thanks for having me, William.
This was fun.
William Tincup (22:15):
Absolutely.
Thanks for the audience.
Appreciate you.
And until next time.
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