Best Startup
Sigma Polaris helps solve the staffing crisis using DEI-tech for recruitment. We value diversity, and are on a mission to prevent +100.000 cases of bias by 2023.
Tell us about yourself?
I am Danish, a mathematician, a former flautist to the queen, a shipwreck survivor, and recently became a Dr in Rationality Theory. I got into this work on DEI and technology, because I think we can change the world in three ways.
Via Technology, via ideas, and via art. Human Resources and Recruitment is broken, following outdated qualitative approaches, which is worse than ever in the current post-pandemic climate.
Our tech is helping the people working in these impossibly difficult function, by supporting and enforcing their decision making using science, data, and objective facts. Not replacing them, but supercharging them.
I hate to see people make errors of bias and inefficiency because they are forced to use intuition, when science and data can help them.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Don’t bootstrap haha. It is not that one cannot, and in fact we successfully did, but it is much much harder and I don’t think it is often worth the pain of worrying about every single penny and month on the runway.
What problem does your business solve?
Almost all companies currently struggle finding good people.
They also struggle achieving diversity. With an open mindset and our cutting-edge technology, they can achieve one with the other. Assess people on aptitude, not CVs, and suddenly they find better applicants than ever, that look different. They just need to be ready for that second part!
What is the inspiration behind your business?
I have know a lot of people who had amazing minds but the “wrong” cv, or socially different. It has been physically painful to hear some of their stories always returning to “you are not what we are looking for”.
If you are ready for diversity, you may not find what you are looking for, but something even better. After all, by the very nature of the sentence it is hard to expect the unexpected.
What is your magic sauce?
Our technology uses over 10.000 candidate data points to profile individuals, as opposed to using self-proclaimed experts guesses. This means that the process is data-driven and the numbers speak for themselves.
People using our tech have 4-5times higher success when positioning people for roles (literally, the candidates are 4-5 times more likely to get hired!) while preventing 29cases of bias in average for each hire. This is science and data, and we share our results publicly.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
The recruitment process is under pressure. It will break over the next decade, and there will be many new approaches appearing. We hope to show the value of science and unbiased approaches, to help the next generation of recruitment be as amazing and fair as it should be.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
I thought numbers, results, and ROI calculations would be enough to convince people to adopt better approaches. I now realise that marketing and design unfortunately can be barriers to even game changing processes.
But, we are now much prettier, and our results are better than ever. A shame it took the naïve academic so long to realise that the façade matters as much as the foundation and functionality when talking about a house.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We want people who are passionate about Diversity, dislike the inefficient and biased recruitment practices, to help us spread the word.
There are alternatives. We are looking for companies who wants an edge in their hiring and influencers to help spread the word. DEI-tech might not be able to change the entire world, but recruitment is broken, the world is biased, and science can help. Let it!
