Findem: Data-Driven People Decisions

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Q: Tell us the story behind the company. What led you to start it?

Hari: I was an engineer before I took the leap into entrepreneurship, and so my brain is wired to try and solve the hardest problems, and particularly those that will result in the biggest impact. That’s how my business journeys have always started. When it came to Findem, I was driven to develop a solution to one of the world’s most monumental business problems — building exceptional teams. 
 
Anyone who has scaled teams will tell you that it’s the single most important job of any business leader, and it’s a highly difficult problem to solve. When I was scaling my last venture, I painfully learned this firsthand. It’s a tall task to bring together individuals from different walks of life, and ensure they gel with the company and are competent within their positions. Plus, it only gets harder when the company is undergoing a high level of growth. However, it’s fundamental to business success. 
 

The talent scaling problem previously could be tackled in only one way, which was to use brute-force searches along with a human element. When I examined this challenge closer, it occurred to me that talent acquisition and scaling are actual data problems at their core and the correct way to solve them was by approaching them as such. This kernel of a business idea first grew into a passion project and then eventually into Findem, which we launched from stealth mode in late 2020.

Q: A brief about the company and its products.

Hari: Findem is a people intelligence platform that helps to make all people decisions data-driven. Be it sourcing candidates, promoting an employee or developing talent within the company, people’s decisions today are strewn with subjectivity and bias. Our platform uses AI and deep data analytics to fundamentally change how HR leaders search for candidates and manage their workforce while removing bias from the equation. 
 
On the sourcing front, our people intelligence platform uncovers the best active and passive candidates for the job by replacing keyword or Boolean searches with attribute-centric searches. Attributes can be tangible, such as whether someone is female, a previous founder, or worked for a top-10 VC-funded startup, as well as intangible, such as whether someone embodies the company’s values, possesses an entrepreneurial spirit, or is a go-getter. These attributes provide a data-informed picture of each individual and can be used to find the exact fit to fill talent gaps, reveal unbiased insights on individuals or teams, and benchmark organizations against their competitors.

Q: What are the new trends that you see in the HR market where you could be catering to?

Hari: A big one is the transformational impact of AI and machine learning (ML) on talent sourcing and hiring. More HR professionals are becoming data fluent and, using AI and ML, they’ll be able to extract talent insights that weren’t previously possible. For example, evaluating which recent hires were successful and why, which candidates were shown to be loyal in previous positions and, using predictive analytics, who might be more prone to job hopping. AI and ML are also seeing more widespread adoption within the organization to make strategic talent decisions, whether that’s rooting out people internally to recruit rather than searching externally, or identifying areas to upskill employees to meet their business goals. 
 
People analytics has become one of HR tech’s darlings in the past couple of years because the applications here are vast, extending from sourcing to talent management to competitive workforce benchmarking. This year, we’re really seeing organizations move from piloting to operationalizing people analytics, which presents a big window of opportunity for us. The appetite for investment in this technology is strong. For example, Gartner data shows us that 70% of organizations expect to spend more on talent analytics in the next several years. We’re seeing companies interested in using it to predict flight risk and flight triggers to reduce turnover, learning where they achieve a close-to-perfect staffing balance, identifying their talent gaps and using data to pinpoint their exact recruiting needs, and employing DE&I analytics to build a more representative and higher-performing workforce. 

Our platform also has an interesting play when it comes to hiring for a high-performing remote workforce. Findem’s advanced people analytics can identify the attributes that make up a successful remote employee. With this analysis, HR can use our People Intelligence platform to search for “copycat” candidates who possess alike attributes and target them. They can also use that information to impart those successful remote-worker traits onto others within their workforce through targeted professional development.   

Q: What improvement are you planning to your solutions?

Hari: We have our heads down working on a few innovations to our platform. One of the biggest — and an area where we’ve seen a good deal of interest — is a fully self-service version of our talent sourcing solution. Findem’s goal was always to build a platform that was simple enough for anyone within the HR function to use, so it’s the next logical step for us to take. 

Q: Could you please share a case study?

Hari: We have a compelling case study with Coder, an Austin-based software company that modernized its recruiting methods and is seeing some impressive results. You can read about their challenges and how our People Intelligence platform has helped them improve the quality and diversity of their hiring here: 
https://7ne8f348nex37bepa19718a6-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Coder-Case-Study.pdf

Q: What are the market pain points that you address?

Hari: The struggle to hire diverse talent is a much greater obstacle than it sounds like at face value and one that we’re helping companies approach head-on using data and analytics. It’s extremely important to stack your pipeline with diverse candidates. When you focus on diversity and inclusion in the talent pipeline, you avoid recruiting a homogenous group of candidates, and your business benefits by hiring employees who bring various viewpoints and backgrounds to the table. Using our advanced analytics, they can look at the make-up of their workforce to identify where they have diversity holes, then use our sourcing solution to find candidates who have the attributes that fill them. For instance, the analysis may show they have a large deficit of female engineers or veterans in leadership positions. They can then specify those attributes in their search to surface matches.  
 
Another big pain-point that we regularly hear from recruiters and hiring managers is that sourcing talent is time consuming, costly and wrought with quality issues. When you’re manually sourcing, there’s a threshold that you realistically can’t surpass. Each talent professional can only feasibly reach out to about 40 new candidates each week. When you introduce our data-driven solution to the process, now you’re free from the manual binds and that number grows exponentially— the platform can send outreach emails to 50, 500, 5,000 or even 50,000 new candidates each week because the technology doesn’t get tired or maxed out. And the quality doesn’t diminish. We find companies also become less reliant on pricey staffing agencies with fees that average nearly 22% of the annual salary.  
 
There are a number of market deficiencies that HR teams bumping up against—they’re not as successful as they want to be at tapping internal talent, they’re not effectively leveraging their employees’ connections and they’re simply lacking the data insights they need about talent when they need them. We strive to tackle all or any one of these for them.   

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