Before becoming the Founder and CEO of Scoutible, Angela Antony spent nine years at Harvard studying psychology, law, and business with a focus on labor market policy. After Harvard, she worked at the White House under the Obama administration as part of the National Economic Council.
During this time, she was writing a book about her studies titled Invisible Handcuffs, which became the primary research underlying Scoutible. Angela started the company as a way to address hiring’s failures directly and leverage AI for social good – and after sitting with her, it’s easy to see its benefits.
M.R. Rangaswami: How does Scoutible’s technology help companies discover new talent?
Angela Antony: We live in a society where human talent is consistently underutilized and undervalued. As the future of work changes, companies are often at a loss at how to discover the reservoirs of talent hiding in the flood of applications they receive. The core problem is that most companies don’t know what traits lead to job success and what to look for in a candidate. Employers are forced to rely on resumes as a proxy for talent, but people’s talents go far beyond their educational pedigree and work history. In fact, 89% of turnover is actually due to soft skill mismatch, not hard skills.
Scoutible combines gamification, psychological science, and AI to help companies discover talent hiding behind resume biases, socioeconomic barriers, and exhausted candidate pools. Our technology empowers employers to look beyond outdated markers of ability to view a candidate for their true potential to thrive in a specific role. We’re able to highlight perfect-fit candidates who may have been discarded in a 6-second resume screen.
M.R.: How did you come up with the idea of using a game to assess candidates and predict their fit for specific jobs?
Angela: Considering all the different ways we can assess a candidate’s personality, cognitive abilities and soft skills, traditional psychometric testing is the most accurate medium to capture all the data points required. However, because traditional psychometric testing is costly and can take days of full-time testing per person, it’s not feasible for employers to implement at scale.
Through my years of research at Harvard, I discovered that many clinical tests are actually structured like games, but they just don’t feel fun. Scoutible takes all the rigor and precision of psychometric testing and packages it into a 20-minute adventure game. By gathering a continuous stream of data via gameplay and using its AI to benchmark against top performers, Scoutible is able to quickly pinpoint with high degrees of accuracy who would be best suited for any given role.
M.R.: Can Scoutible be used to eliminate bias in recruiting and promote diversity?
Angela: When it comes to hiring, resumes create a breeding ground for conscious and unconscious bias. For example, studies show that ‘whitening’ an applicant’s name leads to twice as many callbacks for interviews. Resumes can serve as a proxy for socioeconomic status, and recruiters tap into their conscious bias when scanning for factors such as place of education or previous work experience. Unconscious bias begins kicking in once recruiters take note of a candidate’s name due to implied gender and ethnicity.
Scoutible’s platform gates out all the potentially discriminatory information that’s not predictive of future performance. Instead, we highlight a candidate’s natural strengths and attributes that have historically correlated with performance on the job. One of our core missions is to eliminate bias in hiring to increase diversity on teams and level the playing field for individuals from all demographics.
M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sand Hill Group.