Welcome to the CXR channel, our premier podcast for talent acquisition and talent management. Listen in as the CXR community discusses a wide range of topics focused on attracting, engaging and retaining the best talent. We’re glad you’re here.
Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:20
Hello watchers and listeners. I’m Chris Hoyt, president of CXR, and I am your host for today’s special segment within the ecosystem of our humble podcast from CareerXroads. Now, our broadcasts include fun and informational segments like Uncorked. And that’s where we chat with talent leaders from around the world while sharing their favorite drinks. Have you met, where we’ll introduce you to an industry professional and catch you up on their current industry challenges? We do Moments that Matter. And that’s where tell IT pros tell us about moments of racism or inequality that they’ve experienced or witnessed and decided that’s enough and decided to take some sort of action, or our CXR eXpertease segment, which is today, where an industry leader shares with you just one life or career lesson that stands out to them. And they do it in what we like to think of as sort of a rapid fire 10 to 15 minute chat now, you can subscribe to all of these and more at CXR.works/podcast, and here or watch them wherever you consume your favorite shows. Not today, I’m pretty pleased to have with us an industry friend of ours that’s actually been in the space at some time, but that we’ve gotten a chance to know a little bit better and learn more about over just the last few months. So today, Caitlyn McGregor, who is the co-founder and CEO of Plum is going to join us for the next quarter hour. Caitlin, thank you for agreeing to be on the show.
Caitlin McGregor, Plum 1:39
Thanks for having me.
Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:40
Yeah, we’re delighted. Now I look before we get started at that, let’s learn a little bit about Caitlyn. So my understanding is you’re kind of a you’re a little bit of a serial startup sort of President type. Right? You did. You created me, me to westyle from scratch? I think he did that piece. You were the president of go cue software in the US getting that off the ground in the US. And now you are the co-founder, as I mentioned and CEO of Plum where you’ve sort of you’ve been for almost 10 years, right?
Caitlin McGregor, Plum 2:12
Correct.
Chris Hoyt, CXR 2:13
Okay, so is it is it just getting something off the ground and running you just love that you’re passionate about are you just kind of a glutton for the struggle?
Caitlin McGregor, Plum 2:21
I think that creating something from nothing really is my superpower. But, you know, when it’s your own company, it’s never done. It’s really, you know, being able to continually grow it and evolve it into the next thing. And ultimately, the the ultimate goal is being able to have a permanent impact on how we do things. And that’s, that takes time. So it’s not just the first early steps, it’s really getting it all the way there i think is is where I’m going to hopefully have the opportunity to keep taking Plum
Chris Hoyt, CXR 2:52
Well, I love that I love it. And I agree with you completely. It’s your it’s your chance to continue to grow, right, continue to change and shift everything. So before we jump in Caitlin what is something we should know about you? Like why? Why should the listeners or the watchers care what you have to say?
Caitlin McGregor, Plum 3:10
I think it’s my first hand experience being my first customer really having access to the predictive power of industrial organizational psychology. You know, I’m somebody that didn’t come from this space, and I got to see firsthand how game changing it is. And so much so that I’ve dedicated now my career to trying to make a fundamental change in in the industry. And so I can’t wait to tell you that story. But I think, you know, it’s the fact that I wasn’t inside it. But I be, I got to see firsthand the impact that allowed me to and now I’ve been at it for 10 years, I’ve seen a lot and become an expert through through doing it.
Chris Hoyt, CXR 3:52
So this is not a product pitch or endorsement. But but I do think it’s important for people to really know where you’re coming from, right? When we say Plum, any of the websites Plum.io like Caitlin, can you give us a one sentence sort of elevator elevator pitch of Plum, so that people kind of can kind of have a footing in the conversation, what is Plum?
Caitlin McGregor, Plum 4:15
So we are taking best practices from industrial organizational psychology and marrying them with user friendly technology to be able to scale this highly predictive data to be able to unlock people’s full potential. So helping people hire, grow, develop and retain their employees, using data that really quantifies where people will thrive if just given the opportunity.
Chris Hoyt, CXR 4:42
Nice, and I like Plum. It was a fun thing for us to go through. And I think we even shared. We’ve we did the assessment I think we even shared our team results openly in one of our tech showcase meetings which obviously any of our members can find and watch on the site, which can be a little humbling when you open the kimono up for everybody to see sort of where you brain sets. But with all of that in mind, once you guys deliver, let’s back out of the product a little bit and just share with me, cuz this is why you’re here. Why do you feel io psych is so important to the to the hiring process? And how did you get there to that space? And given your work history? That’s kind of an interesting, interesting leap for you to suddenly be all in on.
Caitlin McGregor, Plum 5:22
Yeah. So, you know, as you said, I built this company me to we style from the ground up, I was the first employee director of operations. It was a sweatshop free, locally made custom apparel company, based in Toronto, and I was fresh out of school, I just taught English in China for a year and came back. And my very first job was starting this social enterprise from scratch. And, you know, I was really lucky that my boss, really, you know, he was there for the sales and the finance. But other than that, he trusted me to build this business from scratch. And I studied international development, I did not know I was an entrepreneur, I did not know that that was my skill set. And I just kind of was thrown into it. And there was never a glass ceiling, I was just, you know, the sky was the limit in terms of what I could take on. And what that actually happened is I started developing some really bad habits early in my career, I really was playing the role of a martyr, if I got hit by a boss, the whole company would have fallen apart. And at 26-27 years old, that’s really empowering, you know, to be that important, and to have that much success. But it’s not healthy. And I was just getting married. And you know, I put in a bit of time for the getting ready for this six month engagement to wedding. And the second that I was, I was married, I went back to being a workaholic. And my husband kind of was like this, this is not what I signed up for. I never see you you working all the time. And we had a friend that was doing their master’s in psychology, and he said, you know, and he had come out of the tech boom, at 18, he had started a tech company and, you know, had success and then completely failed. And he saw kind of my unhealthy being a workaholic, impacting my life. And he says, Caitlin, you know, I, I love you, I love your husband, this is not going to work unless you get help. And I have a professor that is, you know, has a clinical practice of executive coaching. And so I started seeing an executive coach at 27, which is super early.
Chris Hoyt, CXR 7:24
That is really early.
Caitlin McGregor, Plum 7:26
Yeah, yeah. And I realized that I was making all these mistakes that were getting in my way that weren’t helping me have a healthy life weren’t allowing the company to have a healthy future. And it was through seeing this executive coach, that I started being exposed to the importance of basically going that layer deep to really diagnose what’s going on. And then I had the opportunity to go down to the US and build this educational technology company from scratch in the US. And I went to make my first hire, and my executive coach said, you know, Caitlin, if you mess up that first hire, it’s going to be a loss of $300,000 on the business,
Chris Hoyt, CXR 8:02
No, no pressure.
Caitlin McGregor, Plum 8:04
Sure, no pressure whatsoever. So not wanting to make a mistake. He was like, Look, I developed this psychometric assessment while I was at Harvard for extra income, you know, I could be this super expensive consultant. And you know, do all these manual calculations and hold your hand and you could use this to help you hire. And so we ended up using this assessment for two and a half years. And we kept finding time and time again, these incredible diamonds in the rough people you just never would have interviewed, let alone hired if you didn’t have this data. And you know, the very first time we used it, we had 80 people apply for this first employee position. And two candidates stood out for totally different reasons. So it’s an edtech company, there was a guy who had a master’s in education, five years of relevant work experience. My CEO in Canada was drooling. He was the Golden Boy by every measure. But the assessment said that he had mediocre work ethic. And then there was this other woman who, you know, she was just in the top 3% of the workforce for overall productivity. My executive coach said, She’s one in 1000, you’d be an idiot not to hire her. We got permission to hire both. And within three months, the guy had fantasy football team was doing really well. But he was only doing 10% of his work. So he was fired and the woman within five months, she was taking over the entire operations of the company. And within a year and a half. When I went on mat leave, she ended up replacing me as acting president. And the thing is that, you know, she had two art degrees and seven years of waitressing experience. She literally had never used Excel when I hired her. And we just never would have had that opportunity if it wasn’t for this assessment, saying that this person was really smart when it came to abstract reasoning really smart when it came to solving people problems and had the different personality strengths that we needed at the time. That kept happening, we hired a 17 year old high school student that redid our entire website, and part time, and his only other experience was cutting grass. And we had somebody that had dropped out of college and joined the circus, literally, that we had hired in customer success. And so, you know, I started my family, and I really wanted to come back to Canada. And I’d already built two businesses for other people. And so, you know, we we saw this opportunity to democratize access to this highly predictive data, we saw the field of industrial organizational psychology, and specifically psychometric assessments. And we saw that there were all of these academics that were over engineering the science, so that they were totally missing the power of technology and user experience. And then we saw these new players that had really fancy UI UX, fancy technology, and they were just, you know, absolutely sacrificing the science and didn’t have something that you could trust. And that was delivering results. And so we, we wanted to be that solution that could bridge best in class science with best in class, user experience and scalability. And so, we started with this really, you know, we want to provide a better data sets and resumes. And just this passion of wanting to make sure that, you know, I fundamentally believe that we can change the backbone of the economy, if we can get beyond the pattern matching of relying on historical data. You know, when we look at a resume and cover letter, we’re really taking a rearview mirror, look at where someone has come from and what they’ve done. But it can’t predict that if you gave them an opportunity where they could best thrive, but looking at human potential data, industrial organizational psychology is the science for predicting how well someone can adapt to a new role and whether or not you know, somebody that has spent their whole life doing being an underwriter at an insurance company, could they actually thrive as a product manager. And that’s the example I given in the webinar that we did earlier, where it’s not all underwriters will make to be good at all product management roles, it’s really of does this person have the behaviors that are required in that role, and in this case, as an example, that’s a real life example, you know, this person had, you know, a natural, amazing drive at being innovative and adapting and executing. And those were the behaviors required for a product manager. And so we can predict that if you give them the opportunity, and the upscaling, they will have, like, massive success in this new role.
Chris Hoyt, CXR 12:43
Yeah,
Caitlin McGregor, Plum 12:43
And you need io technology to do that.
Chris Hoyt, CXR 12:45
Well, I think it’s interesting, too, because I think it raises a really, really fun debate around hiring people based on their experience or for their, their learning, agility, their potential. And if and your Excel worksheet piece gave me goosebumps, because I mean, I just I remember being a recruiter, and if they didn’t have, if they weren’t, you know, efficient in this or efficient that hiring manager didn’t even want to see him. And so it’s really interesting that if you’re not, if you’re not just checking boxes, you have the opportunity to truly hire and I hate the diamond in the rough phrase, but yet you truly have the opportunity to hire somebody with some incredible potential Caitlin. Is there, Is there any standout for you with results that are with with respect to like reducing bias in hiring on this? Is it Are we sort of in the same vein there? Does that get you just as fired up?
Caitlin McGregor, Plum 13:35
Yeah, I mean, I mean, that’s ultimately when we’re talking about allowing people to fulfill their full potential at work, we’re talking about removing the barriers that have prevented that, you know, when you look at, you know, where some the resume is embedded with systemic barriers and biases that dictate access to education, access to you know, what jobs because even how quickly they’ve progressed in their career, if you’ve taken time to start a family, you’re going to progress at a lower rate, which means that when you’re looking at your peers, they may be one or two steps ahead of you, just because of some of those life choices. And so it’s really about removing those barriers. We work with Scotiabank, for example. And they’ve completely eliminated resumes for all their campus hires for all their early entry roles. And instead you apply with their Plum profile. In any year, they’ve seen an increase of hiring people with with hiring people of color go from 4% to 10% of new hires. They have seen an increase in visible minorities go to 60% when other banks are just pledging 40%. They’ve seen even just the schools they used to only hire from a small handful of schools and now they’re hiring from 33 universities and colleges, and they used only hire from business and finance backgrounds. And now they’re hiring 40% from STEAM backgrounds, science, technology, engineering, arts and math. So huge impacts, but I think it goes beyond just the hiring and I think that’s the big lesson. What I’ve learned on this road is that, you know, we saw psychometric assessments being used as pre employment assessments, top of the funnel, large volume, but the real opportunity, which COVID is made more important than ever, is how do you discover those people inside your organization and unleash their full potential? How do you retain people by giving them new opportunities to develop and grow with in, you know, and retain that institutional knowledge. And that’s where the biggest opportunity is not just using the pattern matching, to now solve for internal mobility. And using all of that historical data, we have to see where there’s new pathways, and so you need new data, to find those new pathways to really grow, develop and retain your people. And I think that’s the biggest opportunity. And that’s what I’m excited every day to to be tackling, which I think is the first time in our industry to have that one data set across the entire life cycle. I think that’s the future that that we’re striving for. And I think we’ve been able to really make a big dent in that direction.
Chris Hoyt, CXR 15:59
Well, I think he definitely changed some minds, in certainly alter a little bit of the way people think about how they hire talent, even if they’re not going after a particular platform as a solution, really the way that they think about resumes and matching people to skills and potential. Caitlin, thank you so much. It is always fun to chat with you.
Caitlin McGregor, Plum 16:17
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
Chris Hoyt, CXR 16:20
Now, as I said before, this podcast, we connect with talent leaders and practitioners almost weekly to talk about everything ranging from what’s keeping them up at night to their favorite wine, or the most embarrassing professional experience. But we do also deliver hundreds, yes, hundreds of other meetings and content. So for instance, July 30, I think in August 13, we have a book club meeting for anybody that would like to join, we’re reading our friend Steve Chechen’s new book WorkQuake, which is actually about creating a better work model post pandemic. Now a lot of you might remember Steve as LinkedIn first Chief HR officer, that’s when I met him way back in the day. He’s, he’s actually going to be joining us, I think, to chat with the readers in our final meeting of the two August 10. We have another tech showcase coming up, we’re going to be streaming live some demos and q&a with both Bryq and Modern Hire, we’re focused on assessment tech, so you won’t want to miss that August 25. We have over 50 companies already set up together for our second cohort meeting on the topic of talent and people analytics. And I think September I’m going to get all these September 15 our second leadership community meeting takes place where we’ve already got a handful of topics selected by heads of talent looking forward to collaborating with their colleagues now that’s dozen more ahead of that on the calendar you can check them out cxr.works/events and lastly, if you’re interested in connecting with myself or Gerry or any member of our team head over to the new contact us page on the website where you can believe it or not with just a few clicks book a phone call or a virtual meeting or if we’re local real live cup of coffee or real live glass of wine you heard me right so get on our calendars we really excited to see you guys live until then we will see you online in the CXR community at CXR.works
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