Michael Novack is the founder of Kiosite, a platform for matching job seekers to career opportunities. He points out that each vacant position costs the average firm about $9,000 in recruitment expenses alone. Although it varies by position, the cost of making a bad hire can be up to five times the amount of that person’s salary.
Michael Novack is the founder of Kiosite, a platform for matching job seekers to career opportunities. He points out that each vacant position costs the average firm about $9,000 in recruitment expenses alone. Although it varies by position, the cost of making a bad hire can be up to five times the amount of that person’s salary.
There had to be a better way to hire the right people and cut unnecessary expense. According to Novack’s estimates, there are 1.87 million students expected to graduate or look for internships this year, which puts the recruitment market to be over $20 billion.
So Kiosite launched Talify, a new platform that uses intelligence and data to match college students with the best fitting job opportunity. Talify officially launched on March 1, after conducting a pilot test for about 24 months limited to five campuses: Harvard, Duke, University of Pennsylvania, Washington University, and Vanderbilt and scaling up this past fall to 200 schools.
Novack explains that on Talify, “candidates complete one instrument, but embedded within it are multiple measures, including job interest, self-assessed skill, experience, and personality.” The tests can also assess leadership qualities, empathy, problem solving, ability to work on a team, and entrepreneurship, among others.
For instance, in one section of the assessment, students are asked to rank, in order of importance, what they prefer to do on the job. That includes tasks such as “solving complex problems” and “working with data” to “generating new business” or “working on a team” as opposed to “working with things.”
Another takes a common interview question, “Give me three words that best describe you.” But instead of prompting the candidate to recite a memorized list of traits that they think will present them in the best light, the assessment gives a list of attributes and asks candidates to choose whether they most or least describe them. “Gregarious,” “quick,” “industrious,” and “impulsive” are some of the choices. Others such as “weary” or “undisciplined” have the potential to be relegated to the “least” category (for obvious reasons), but the candidate must choose one of each in each section.
“So much more goes into success than personality,” Novack admits. It’s a part of the equation, he says, but Talify is meant to go beyond a simple measure of personality by integrating and correlating job-specific skills, interest, and biographical data.
Chez Froggie 