Marcus Richards
ThriveMap creates digital “day-in-the-life” assessments for high volume hiring. Companies use our technology to design bespoke pre-hire assessments that model a typical day in the job.
They are used instead of traditional hiring processes such as CV sifting and interviews and are proven to reduce new hire attrition and reduce time to hire. So the next time you apply for a job you may be sent a link to complete some job-realistic tasks and scenarios instead of going for an interview.
Tell us about yourself?
As a former recruiter I’ve sat through thousands of interviews and realised how inefficient, inaccurate and biased the whole hiring process is.
We wanted a way to help companies to design objective hiring assessments that actually helped candidates to learn about what to expect when they start in the role.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
If you’re building something for everyone you’re building something no one will want. Seth Godin talks about find the smallest viable audience for your product, also known as your early adopters and building something they’re going to love.
I thought I understood this when starting out, but it’s only sunk in recently. Trying to sell to or take feedback from anyone who’s not your ideal customer can be a huge waste of time.
What problem does your business solve?
New hire attrition. This can be over 100% in some industries. This means if you have 200 staff you need to hire at least 200 more just to remain at headcount.
Most attrition comes when there’s a gap between what a candidate expects a job to be like and the reality of it. Realistic Job Assessments can help close that gap, as well as saving a lot of wasted recruiter time.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
We were inspired by the lack of inspiration in the assessment industry. Companies have been using pre-hire assessments for 60 years now but hiring attrition has remained a constant problem.
We noticed that most assessments don’t actually help the candidates learn about the job or culture and saw an opening to develop a way for companies to design their own assessments at scale.
What is your magic sauce?
This is going to sound old fashioned for a tech business, but genuinely it’s customer service. Our focus has always been on delighting our customers, not because of some trite company value, but because we can empathise with their problems and are curious enough to want to solve them.
So many companies try to avoid customer requests, we’re the opposite – always asking what more we can do for them. That’s created some incredibly tight bonds with our customers.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Currently our audience is high volume, frontline recruitment. But our goal is to open up our platform so that anyone looking to hire can use our software to identify what attributes to look for in new hires, design a realistic assessment that measures those attributes and use data to optimise it over time.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
I think the pandemic made us re-think our customer acquisition strategy. Most companies put hiring freezes on and many people looked to transition between industries making recruitment event more difficult.
The impact of the pandemic on hiring, on employee attrition and on ways of working are still showing in our data. It feels evident to us that companies will start to adopt more technology in their hiring processes to help reduce bias and make hiring more efficient in the near future.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We’d love any companies with a high volume hiring need (e.g. hiring 50+ people a year into a specific role type) that are experiencing staff attrition to get in touch. You can find out more here: https://thrivemap.io/
