Mobile Product

Jason Finkelstein, chief revenue officer, Traitify, recently discussed the personality data, the science behind it, and the early returns with Incite Group’s Robert Gray…

Incite: How does Traitify work and what’s the core focus?

Finkelstein: Currently, online experiences are personalized based only on your behavior. Traitify believes a key element is missing to create a truly personalized experience--your personality.

Traitify has invented a novel way to collect personality data using a 90-second image-based test--all backed by real science.

Our first market we're focused on today is "employment" where we use our personality tests to give job seekers tools to discover a career path or the right job to apply for and give employers tools to engage career site visitors, convert them to applicants, and to accurately predict if an applicant will perform well and stay long in the job (before ever speaking with them).

Because our tests are about 90 seconds to complete, image-based and mobile-friendly, they have a 95 percent plus completion rate when administered near the top of the applicant funnel--this completion rate is unheard of for traditional "assessments".

Incite: Who’s the target customer/user?

Finkelstein:Traitify's customer is the enterprise. Our companies are mainly large hourly workforces (restaurant and hospitality groups, grocery chains, retail stores, call centers, etc.) who have very high annual turnover-- 50 percent to 150 percent.

These are companies who have either never considered using a personality assessment before--because traditional ones take 30 to 60 minutes--or are using traditional tests, but are unhappy because these tests have abysmally low completion rates and destroy candidate funnel throughput.

Incite: What’s your value proposition in this process then?

Finkelstein:Traitify helps companies reduce turnover--thereby saving lots of dollars in wasted sourcing, screening, training, onboarding costs; increase recruiter efficiency—the number of interviews, total hours interviewing, time to hire, etc.); and increase productivity by hiring better fit candidates.

Incite: How does Traitify use digital marketing to reach new consumers/customers? And what’s working?

Finkelstein: Traitify has a unique go-to-market advantage over traditional assessment companies because our product format is so "lightweight."

Legacy competitors would never think to put their product forward and let customers try it out... because who wants to spend 30 to 60 minutes taking an online test?

With Traitify, you get a Buzzfeed-like personality test experience, but with all the real science behind it--so a user can experience Traitify's image-based test in 90 seconds on a mobile phone (or tablet or laptop or other device).

Leading with product has become a fantastic lead gen tool for us because Traitify can be easily shared and quickly experienced across HR/Talent Acquisition teams.

Also, our API-based approach makes it easy for partners to embed our technology for various other use cases you wouldn't necessarily think of. Imagine using the results of a personality test to create targeted marketing messages to drive higher email open rates and click through rates.

Incite: What’s the most surprising finding from your work so far?

Finkelstein: Surprisingly, few businesses are aware of the trend happening around them such as the power shift in the employment marketplace.

Unemployment is near an all-time low. Platforms like Glassdoor are pushing workplace transparency to an all-time high which means companies can no longer hide bad work environments. And personal computing power is at an all-time high which means workers have massive option value--they can find and apply to other jobs with a few clicks and are no longer beholden to a job they don't like, just for a paycheck.

Companies unaware of these changes or ignoring the significance of these changes are still approaching workers in very antiquated ways. This is why there's huge opportunity to innovate around candidate experience. And for Traitify, this gives us lots of confidence that old school assessments--which are painful for workers--are ripe for disruption.

Incite: How deep is your moat to stop copycats/competitors?

Finkelstein: Traitify has patented the methodology to collect personality data using images.

Beyond our patents, our product and technology are built on real personality science, blending in industrial organizational psychology and clinical psychotherapy. Our Psychology and Statistics teams have conducted extensive studies to validate the science and predictive nature of our tests. Simply, it takes A LOT of time to conceptualize, formulate, and test an assessment--this is an iterative process and would take copycats many years to catch-up.

Incite: How do companies use the service vs. how job sites do?

Finkelstein: Companies use Traitify by embedding us in their career site and/or in their applicant flow. Because we're API-based, it's very easy to integrate Traitify into other platforms like an ATS (Applicant Tracking System).

In a simple example, applicants take the Traitify test during the application process and the results get fed into an ATS where the company's talent acquisition team can use the results to prioritize which applicants to spend their valuable time on.

With job sites, it's more about creating marketplace liquidity. There is a certain segment of the job seeking population who are either transitioning in their career or are very early in their career and don't know what job to search for. Yet most job boards are designed like Google--a blank search box and a blinking cursor.

It turns out many visitors just leave the search box blank (up to 15 percent of visitors depending on the site) and end up just browsing jobs in a particular geography.

Imagine instead if you gave the job seeker a tool to make an intelligent recommendation to them about what job they should apply for based on their unique personality. This is similar to the idea of Netflix giving you personalized movie recommendations or Amazon giving you personalized product recommendations or Google giving you personalized search recommendations. It makes for a better user experience and increases engagement.