Juan Betancourt, CEO of Humantelligence, emphasizes the importance of understanding the behaviors, motivators, and work styles of employees to improve team dynamics and performance.
Juan Betancourt, CEO of Humantelligence, emphasizes the importance of understanding the behaviors, motivators, and work styles of employees to improve team dynamics and performance. Juan and Claude also discuss recruitment trends, better fit-based hiring practices, and psychometric insights.
Humantelligence provides personalized insights in everyday communication tools to help people connect, communicate, and collaborate more effectively. Humanatelligence was named Best in Class HR Tech for Culture & Collaboration.
"When it comes to sourcing better candidates, I think HR managers need to look at the data of their current candidates, not impairment surveys of who's happy or not, but performance data, most. Companies that are over a thousand employees do know who their high, mid and low performers are. And they have the answer right there. Give a psychometric tool because the answer is not where they go to school because all those, the a hundred people they have in that role with a third doing great, a third doing mid, okay. And a third doing horrible. They went through the great practices that that company has vetted for years on how to hire great. And then they still fail every year. The answer is in, Why don't you look at the behaviors, motivators, and work styles of the high, mid, and low, compare those, and there are tools out there that do that, and you will have, out of like 25 characteristics, the three or four things that will explain performance for individuals, in that role."
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"Where most startups fail is that the CEO is still in the interview process and trying to hire more people like themselves. And many of them on the exit interview for the 999 of 1000 CEOs, Why do you think you failed? They mistakenly say, because we kept growing and we weren't able to maintain the same culture. No, the problem is actually kept the same culture, which was not applicable to the problems and challenges and organizational structure you need when you go. But it's very hard for 10 people who've gotten from zero to 1 million to interview five people and say, Hey, who do we like the most? Well, let's hire the one we like the least. They can do the job. They all have the right skills and resume. Let's all hire the one none of us got along with because we need a different way of thinking. This is a challenge that leads to the failure of all or most startups because they're still hiring for more of the same. Through who they like and subjectivity and not data like ours, it shows them that they're only hiring more of the same."
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"I think the world would be a better place if everybody had a psychometric that's on the back of the resume. The resume is the worst tool for this whole job matching between supply and demand. Every resume, LinkedIn, everywhere, every job board, people should carry around a resume with their psychometric on the other side. It's the duality of a human being."
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00:25 - Quick Hits
03:33 - Juan’s background
04:52 - Humantelligence’s beginning
08:34 - Fixing old problems
12:04 - Advice for HR managers
20:04 - Ensuring retention
28:36 - Creating good managers
39:52 - The alternative to surveys
48:02 - Where to find Juan
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Find Claude on LinkedIn
More about Office Libations
[00:00:00] Claude: Hello and welcome to Office Libations Unwrapped. I'm your host, Claude Burns. I'm here today with Juan Betancourt, the CEO of Humantelligence. I'm super excited about this conversation. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. Juan, welcome to the show.
[00:00:12] Juan: Thanks for having me, Claude.
[00:00:14] Claude: we started off with a quick hit segments, little, little quick things to get you a little comfortable and learn a little bit more about you. And since we're food and beverage related, a lot of them end up being food and beverage related. You ready?
[00:00:26] Juan: Sure.
[00:00:27] Claude: Coffee or tea.
[00:00:28] Juan: Coffee for sure.
[00:00:29] Claude: Okay. Do you have a favorite kind of brand or type of coffee?
[00:00:32] Juan: Yeah. Have you seen the Bustelo brand? It used to be a Cuban brand. It still is, but it was bought by like Nabisco or something, but a big yellow
[00:00:40] Claude: Big yellow tin.
[00:00:41] Juan: with red letters.
[00:00:42] Claude: Yep. Okay. Um, what's your go to work, snack or drink?
[00:00:46] Juan: I don't really do snacks during the day. I sit at my desk at seven and leave at seven with maybe a 30 minute lunch. So no snacking.
[00:00:52] Claude: No snacking at all.
[00:00:53] Juan: No, but there is! There is, there is a product that I use before I go running.
[00:00:58] Claude: Okay.
[00:00:59] Juan: So there's a ketone aid product that I use every once in a while. If I skip lunch, you drink one of these, you don't eat for like 12 hours.
[00:01:05] It's the best thing for ketosis. You're like literally drinking ketosis.
[00:01:08] Claude: Okay. I haven't seen those before.
[00:01:10] Juan: Every team in the Tour de France uses it. It is the future of energy drinks.
[00:01:14] Claude: if it's good enough for Lance Armstrong, it's good enough for me. Um, you're retired. Money's no object. Where do you live?
[00:01:21] Juan: I think I'd still live in Miami.
[00:01:23] Claude: Okay. That makes sense. A
[00:01:25] Juan: Most, most people, most people who have all the money in the world are moving here. So,
[00:01:30] Claude: It's a, it's a great city. I've, I've enjoyed the times I've been there and it's, uh, you know, you can't beat the weather and, uh, just gorgeous down there. Um, what's your, what's your favorite meal?
[00:01:40] Juan: I'm a dinner guy and I often, uh, prefer sushi over anything else. So raw fish somehow just, I love it.
[00:01:47] Claude: Okay. Um, what's the last book you've read?
[00:01:49] Juan: I would say I've read, I read, it's the second time I read it, but I re read it because it had been 10 years, but I re read it recently and it's called, um, The Journey of Souls. And it's by a guy named Dr. Michael Newton.
[00:02:03] Claude: Got it. Okay.
[00:02:04] Juan: it's infinite.
[00:02:05] Claude: All right. So with that, what's your, what's your favorite historical figure dead or alive?
[00:02:11] Juan: Probably Carl Jung, the German philosopher, botanist, and philosopher. He was Albert Einstein's best friend for a reason. Not many people Einstein could go and brainstorm ideas with. This guy was at that level. Um, I even named my son, uh, his middle name Carl after Carl Jung. Uh, so my son is Ashoka Carl. Um, and so Carl Jung came up with the whole concept of archetypes, which my company, Human Intelligence, is based on people's archetypes and profiles.
[00:02:40] Um, and so I kind of wanted to let, help, uh, re, re, introduced Carl Jung to the world, And he also came up with a book called, uh, in a theory around serendipity, um, which I believe in totally, which is basically your, there's no coincidence.
[00:02:56] It's like synchronicity, basically the world and the universe, whether you believe in a God or not, there is a pronoia where the universe is. Always trying to help you out in your life. And there's no coincidence and everything happens for a reason. Um, and you just have to be in the flow to accept those gifts from the universe.
[00:03:15] Claude: One of my favorite courses in college was, uh, about philosophy and ethics and, uh, Carl Jung came up, uh, many times during that, uh, during that semester. So, uh, very, very cool. Um, but let's get to know you a little bit better. Um, tell us a little bit about your background and your company.
[00:03:33] Juan: Yeah. I'm a Cuban American from the Washington DC area, Northeast. Most of my 18 years, um, then college at Harvard and business school, Wharton about my two, three kind of career phases. First career phase was the big corporates, right? Did the whole. You know, hierarchical, big company, do your time, even if you're miserable, uh, learn things because that's what you do.
[00:03:58] And so I worked at Procter Gamble, Reebok, Puma, um, some big companies called Decathlon. They're the largest sports retail in the world, about 200 billion in revenue. In between that, I worked at Siebel Systems, a software company.
[00:04:09] So I got software experience, um, small company at a hundred people a year later were 12, 000, 8 million in revenue to 3 billion in just two years. So, fastest growth of any company in the history of any companies ever. So that was really remarkable to watch and observe. Um, and I truly was just a bystander watching and holding on tight.
[00:04:27] And then second career was, was headhunting. I was a partner at hijack and struggles, uh, for four years and Korn Ferry for four years and ran my own search firm. Learned all about human capital and hiring executives for all types of industries and roles. And then I launched Humantelligence, for the last seven years.
[00:04:43] And that's a company that I'm sure we'll get into around talent management and collaboration.
[00:04:48] Claude: Absolutely. But first I want to know why, why did you start human intelligence?
[00:04:52] Juan: I've been a connector my whole life, and I left the U. S. at 22 for 20 years to live in every country like Germany for 3 or 4 years, France 5 years, Dubai and Abu Dhabi for a couple years, Mexico, China, Argentina, Brazil for, you know, so about 15 to 20 years living completely outside the U. S. And I learned five languages like English and I really learned how to connect and understand people and that made me a better leader.
[00:05:18] It also helped me recruit and hire better to understand fit. And so after my recruiting 15 year career, that second phase of my career, I wanted to find a way of scaling my superpower of hiring for good fit. And so I found a scientist who had a tool that in 10 minutes, this, personality tests, picture your disc or Myers Briggs strength finders, right? In 10 minutes it measured what nobody else could measure in an hour. And so you could give it to large populations of people and get a more predictive understanding of whether you are cloning high performers in any role at a company, like high turnover roles, or if you're guaranteeing diversity of thought for maybe more senior roles, executive roles, where you want different, uh, thinking.
[00:06:05] And so I bought this technology from the scientists and built a software product, um, to do recruiting. And now we did great for the first couple of years, scaled to several million, but then COVID hit, we lost all revenue, um, because nobody was paying for recruiting software. So we pivoted to using the same assessment for understanding each other at work and putting it into workflows like Grammarly, where you could get insights popping up in your email, in your calendar, in virtual meetings like this on how best to understand someone, communicate with someone, write to them, work with them, how teams could collaborate better, how you could be a better leader in your workflow at the moment. And so that's kind of how it all came. It started with recruiting and then went to collaboration and now it's just AI for smarter collaboration.
[00:06:50] Claude: Yeah. I love how kind of your background, like all blended together to sort of come up with this company, right? There's a lot of big company experience that you have. There's a lot of, um, software, right? There's a bunch of assessments and sort of culture and fit and how it kind of combines together and that sort of like founder market, founder product fit.
[00:07:08] Um, really, really interesting and, and I'm really excited to get into sort of what Humantelligence does for companies.
[00:07:15] Juan: to that point you just made, I literally told my friends when I launched the company, because I'm not an entrepreneur, they said, why would you do this? And I've invested a couple million dollars, my own money to do this. And I collect from my, uh, raise from my friends. And I always tell people, I go, this company is literally an extension of who I am.
[00:07:32] I mean, it's like, if you could embody your consciousness into a software plugin, This is the Juan app. I mean, it is crazy how it is me. Any friend from high school or college who hears about this, like, Oh my God, Juan, you created you in software form.
[00:07:47] Claude: That's awesome. We had, this is kind of a side, but we had a guest on earlier in the season and they took their best, uh, like SDR, um, and basically made them into an AI. They're like, what does she do? That's so great. We're going to take her best practices and sort of, you know, turn it into, uh, an AI that all our customers can use because she's so great.
[00:08:07] Um, so it sounds like you've done basically the same thing, but out of a full company and not just sort of a product feature around it. So that's awesome. Um, let's talk about kind of the, the talent acquisition. You have a lot of experience with recruiting, you know, hiring for companies. Uh, I don't think anyone, uh, has, has truly figured it out.
[00:08:26] What are some of the things that companies are doing that are working? And what are some of the things that companies are doing that are kind of lacking and how does Humantelligence fit in there?
[00:08:34] Juan: Yeah. I think 10 years ago, a lot of companies moved to just investing in an applicant tracking system, whether it was a standalone, like a lever and ISIMs or a Taleo, or there was investing in the module within your HRS platform, like Workday, UKG, SuccessFactors. And so that was great and just getting all the data in one place, managing, managing, hundreds, if not thousands of applicants and kind of moving people through the funnel. Um, then they started to focus maybe five years ago, much more on candidate experience. Um, where, you know, it's actually not just assuming they know about your company and want to work there, but it got competitive. So they, you know, did everything from videos to outreach and text messaging, which, you know, right to the person, the way they want to get written to.
[00:09:15] So more equalizing the playing field where you can't just assume people want to work at your company. And I think, with the advent of technology and job boards, um, sourcing has become huge in terms of use of technology. Now, the problem with sourcing is not only does it allow you to find everyone out there. I mean, literally when you do a posting on these job boards, you're getting not a hundred applicants, but thousands. Um, there are tools that help filter those now thousands of applicants, right. And keep track of them. but they're all based really on the skills and the, the what I call the things you can measure that are on LinkedIn or on a resume, you know what you've done, how long you've done it, where you worked, your title, your level, your scores on tests or type of degrees and where you went to school.
[00:10:03] But all of those things are only 30 percent predictive. So they're actually not helping companies retain people longer, you see no improvement in retaining employees or hiring better. Um, and then also the second thing, those, those, so they haven't really improved the quality of hire, but the other thing they've done is create this enormous flood of applicants.
[00:10:24] COVID let now companies and candidates work anywhere remotely or hybrid. So now a candidate in a small town, doesn't just look at the 12 jobs in their city of a hundred thousand people. They could do that job across 2, 000 jobs in America. And so now they're applying to 2, 000 jobs, so it's just kind of like there's more candidates that you have to filter now with technology, there's more companies that you can apply to, so it's kind of like everyone's ghosting everyone and now, you know, everyone's applying and just clicking it with the one button click, that was the worst thing ever that LinkedIn invented because now you don't even read job posts, you just click, click, click, click, click.
[00:10:59] Um, and so it's kind of this, this horrible 25 character Twitter experience, um, where nobody ever feels like they're getting responded to. So I, I think, you know, these sourcing tools are just not making it more efficient. Um, although people think it is, it's still leading to bad hires because of fit.
[00:11:17] Because I mentioned the 30 percent is resume predictive, 70 percent is really the culture fit with the team and the role. Not with the four values companies put on the website, but the actual role someone's working. Um, tools like humantelligence and other, uh, assessment psychometric tools do help with those fit, but a lot of companies, A, don't use them. B, a lot of those tools that are short in five to 10 minutes, um, only measure behaviors. And you actually need to understand motivators or what some become tools called values and work energizers to really find the right fit. And most tools don't do that in a short period.
[00:11:55] Claude: So if you were to give kind of, you know, HR managers sort of one piece of advice on like, how do you better source candidates, what would it be?
[00:12:04] Juan: I think they need to look at the data of their current candidates, not impairment surveys of who's happy or not, but performance data, most. Companies that are over a thousand employees do know who their high, mid and low performers are. And they have the answer right there. Give a psychometric tool because the answer is not where they go to school because all those, the a hundred people they have in that role with a third doing great, a third doing mid, okay. And a third doing horrible. They went through the great practices that that company has vetted for years on how to hire great. And then they still fail every year. The answer is in, Why don't you look at the behaviors, motivators, and work styles of the high, mid, and low, compare those, and there are tools out there that do that, and you will have, out of like 25 characteristics, the three or four things that will explain performance for individuals, in that role.
[00:12:56] Now that's also going to change by geography. Most people don't realize that the high performing barista at Starbucks and the team of baristas at a Starbucks, they could be the best performing team and baristas for Starbucks in Hialeah, Florida, which is a suburb of Miami, which are all Latins from Venezuela and Cuba.
[00:13:16] And they're a great experience for a customer and a great profile for a barista. Assuming they have all the right skills, right, and intelligence for the role, the right performance criteria would be stop and spend 10 minutes with a customer, grab their baby out of their hands and kiss them and squeeze their cheeks and say, Oh my God, I love your, your, your, your baby.
[00:13:37] Where are you going to go to school next year and have a conversation and everyone in line engaged and it's interactive and social and it takes 20 minutes to get your coffee. That high performance experience for the clients of that Starbucks and those baristas, if you were to do the same analogy and put those baristas in New York City where I worked and those same baristas who are high performing in Florida do the same thing in New York City, they would get sued.
[00:14:03] No one would go back. Nobody wants a 10 minute experience. They want their coffee. They don't want to talk to you and they want to move on. And so for the same role at a company, You could have completely different reasons for success and people's profiles in those roles based on the culture of the environment or the geog, geographic location by city or even town.
[00:14:24] Claude: Yeah. I think, I think that leads to kind of a nice segue into, you know, the company onboarding process. How do you know that in, you know, Miami, you want to be a little bit more customer friendly, take a little bit more time and in New York, you want to, you know, get them out the door so they never have to stop walking.
[00:14:39] Um, you know, how do company, how do you think companies see that onboarding experience and where do you see that they're typically lacking that creates a bad kind of employee experience?
[00:14:51] Juan: Yeah. There's three main things that have to happen for onboarding. One, and it's the basic one. It sucks to show up on your job in office or at home and the computer's not working, or you don't have your login, or the passwords, or you don't have your business cards, or all the things where you literally can't operate and you're sitting there waiting for a few days to do your job.
[00:15:12] That sucks. So the logistic onboarding is and is and must be done before the person starts so it's ready. Let's assume that most companies have that done. Worked out already. The second thing is, um, onboarding around training and development about that role. And I think most companies do have the skillset training and onboarding checkbox worked out.
[00:15:35] Um, uh, and then there's the third, which. Companies have attempted but failed miserably, which is how do we connect with this new employee? Most employees quit, already make up their mind to quit their boss or their job within 30 days. And companies have been focused on the wrong thing. I've seen products out there where companies get to understand what baseball team somebody likes and what's their favorite color and if they have dogs and put them in groups with other employees that have same hobbies.
[00:16:03] Nobody's staying at a job because of hobbies and favorite movies and content around books. That is so not the right thing to focus in this third bucket. The third bucket on connecting is The boss and the subordinate sitting down and looking at their profiles in terms of their behaviors, their motivators, and their work styles and saying, Hey, Claude, I'm really deliberate.
[00:16:26] I see that you're really decisive. You know, let's talk about that and how that could like hinder our working relationship. I might as your boss, um, take a long time to approve something. Don't get mad. I'm not trying to stop you and getting your job done. And I see you're really decisive. Oh, uh, I'm your boss and you're the employee. I'm really detail oriented. I see that you're really conceptual. However, when you send me things for approval or for, you know, follow up a new employee, I need that detail. It's that, how do we work better together, which leads to better connection and how does the boss understand the employee better? So he or she can change for the subordinate.
[00:17:05] That's the thing that's missing in this third bucket of figuring out connection and onboarding, not things like favorite hobbies and books and movies and things like that. And that's what's lacking. Tools like human intelligence and others are helping companies onboard better, uh, where you can see side by sides of the manager and then your subordinate of the, of the subordinate and the team.
[00:17:26] Hey, Claude, on this team, there's one person you're only 10 percent like, you're going to butt heads every time with them. But because you think so differently at our company, we like agile teams and diversity of thought. So we're actually going to map you and match you with that person, but you should just know they look at everything differently.
[00:17:42] That will lead to a more, uh, a higher level, higher vibration outcome and problem solving, working together with someone who thinks differently.
[00:17:50] Claude: Yeah, I think, I think some of these tools are just incredibly valuable because well, what's the analog way to get that information, right? It's like, I, you have to have a conversation with somebody, hope that they're not hiding things, right? And they're actually being truthful about what's, what they're telling you and not because they want to lie to you, but they sometimes want to tell you what you want to, they think you want to hear when really it's like, No, I just want to know the truth. So I know how to best work with you. I need to put you in a position to be the most successful. And if I know what that is, I can do that. But if I don't know, how am I going to help you be successful?
[00:18:23] But as an employee, you can see that sort of fear of if I come across as too slow moving, maybe I'm not going to be a good fit here. They're going to, you know, I'm going to lose my job. I'm not going to get opportunities. And so there's a lot of fear, I think, on the employee side of trying to understand, like, how, how's my manager going to react to me kind of telling them the truth?
[00:18:43] Juan: Oh, I think you nailed it. I, Imagine when you join an employee, you don't just sit down with your boss to understand how they like to work and how you like to work, and they need to understand that, right? That brings authenticity and trust, and most people quit jobs because they don't feel that trust, and so imagine you get this trust with your boss, and then with the team, imagine every employee when they start, they get a team mapping, a report or digital version on their app or whatever system they use, where it shows the dynamics of the team, and where they, Plot in the dynamics of the team and where they're similar and where they're different. That breeds trust and authenticity instantly with a team and how they can work better with each person, right? So not just onboarding with the boss and subordinate, but also the team onboarding all that in a day versus six months where the person then quits because they don't feel part of it or included.
[00:19:32] Claude: yeah, and I think that that again segues nicely to employee retention. Most people quit jobs because of who? It's their manager, right? It's not the work that they're doing. It's not, you know, the commute. It's not anything else. The number one reason is always like how well they get along and work with their manager. So how do you think like tools like human intelligence can help that? And can you kind of go into detail? Because I think you guys do some really interesting things around how to communicate in email and Slack. Yeah. Uh, to make sure that you're communicating with the right people. Can you share just a little bit, uh, around that process?
[00:20:04] Juan: Perfect. So by the way, you did make a comment about people quit their boss and here's interesting. Um, they don't quit their job. They don't quit the commute. They, they, they quit their boss. The reason is when you apply to a job, you know, all the factors and none of them change. All the variables don't change.
[00:20:17] The only variable that could change. Is the relationship with someone you've never met before, or at least gotten deep. So human intelligence starts that process of more engagement and employee experience by reducing the variability of that relationship with that boss because you can work better together and there's no surprises.
[00:20:33] It then reduces the friction with the team because you now understand how to work with the team that breeds trust, authenticity with the team. And then where most companies fall short is that employee is now floating in a sea of a company of 10, 000 employees. Where they know nobody and everybody talks about this kind of like social capital where, Oh, well, that's Jimmy.
[00:20:52] Jimmy's worked here 30 years. He knows everyone. Well, we don't have 30 years for all employees to get to know everyone. So imagine a tool like human intelligence, which is given to 10, 000 employees on a Monday morning when they purchase the software. A plugin on Microsoft Teams and Outlook is clicked by the IT admin.
[00:21:12] And now everyone can take a personality test, 10, 000 people, and just like Grammarly that provides insights in your workflows that are surfaced right there about how to write grammar, now you can do four things. One, Every email that's written to that company, you write an email, push a button, and AI will rewrite it for any person in that company that you're trying to get approval for or send an email to, and it will write it the way that person likes to communicate, or the way that recipient likes to behave, what motivates them, and if you're doing training with them, how you should send information for training.
[00:21:47] Okay, this is improved email communication productivity. McKinsey finds that 38 percent of internal emails at companies cause friction, Leading to 12, 000 of lost productivity per month. This solves that. A second feature our tool does is for meetings. Grammarly business came out with a study last month that shows that for every 5, 000 employees, a company loses a hundred thousand, I'm sorry, a hundred million dollars of lost productivity.
[00:22:14] Why? Because when you're in meetings with people, you don't know at a large company, you're scared. There's no trust. There's no authenticity. Um, People are just kind of positioning and you, you don't have any kind of working dynamic that you would get if you've worked well together, like the storming norming type model.
[00:22:30] Imagine if you can get all that before a meeting where you go into a calendar invite, click the button on that calendar and the human intelligence tool shows you the dynamics of that meeting. If they're all deliberate, for example, and only one person's decisive and how to deal with that. If you're Giving training.
[00:22:46] It'll tell you how everyone likes to receive training. And if there's any outliers, it'll tell you if someone's going to butt heads with you. So how to reduce friction in a meeting. Um, and if it tells you if you're going to be working together, training or onboarding somebody, how to share screen and, and, and onboard that person better.
[00:23:02] And then virtual meetings, a third feature. Any meeting that company virtually, you can kind of see the information right there in the workflow of the Microsoft Teams or Zoom or Cisco Webex. And lastly, through Microsoft Teams, every leader of a 10, 000 person company, let's say 3000 leaders, see their team dynamics, see a report on how to manage your team, collaborate better, lead better, um, and how to manage conflict better for that team.
[00:23:28] So, literally in a day, Humantelligence infuses emotional intelligence to 10,000, a hundred thousand, a million employees, whatever it may be. Something that would take a hundred years for any psychometric assessment to do. The old model of psychometrics has been a one and done model where you do a workshop, use it once. Our tool gets used over 300 times a year because it's in the workflow. It's the first AI that all employees use, and it's the first AI that makes work more human.
[00:23:59] Claude: Yeah. I mean, that's, that's, that's amazing. And this is my wife's idea, not mine. So I'm gonna give her full credit for it. Uh, she has this theory, she's in learning and development that managers a lot of times get promoted from individual contributor roles, IC roles, because they're very competent in their job, right? They get promoted, promoted, promoted, and then boom, to keep advancing in your career, you have to be a manager. But the emotional intelligence part of being a manager is not something that is necessarily defined by what they were good at as an IC. So you'll have some managers who are great, uh, have high EQs, you know, very good at that interpersonal relationship, but then you'll have other managers who are not good at that.
[00:24:37] And it hurts them, hurts them as a manager, but you're almost taking somebody out of their strength, right? They're, you put kind of the wrong person in the wrong seat. And you don't really know how to make them better. Is this a interpersonal with one person? Is it the team? Um, can you talk about, um, how, uh, organizations sort of struggle to figure out when they're moving people around to make sure that they're not putting them in a position to fail?
[00:25:02] Juan: Yeah, so we have a module at Humantelligence called Career Mobility, and it attacks this exact problem, the problem of the Peter Principle, where you continually hire an analyst, to a senior analyst, to associate, to a senior associate, to a director, senior director, and then where they're skills, which are usually hard skills that lead them to be very good at that function when they become that leader.
[00:25:23] It's, you know, it's not about the functional expertise, it's about the leadership and and management expertise. And so our tool, what it does is it looks at the profiles, the behaviors, the motivators, the work styles, these 28 characteristics. Of leaders, of managers, mid, senior leaders, and the most, the highest executives.
[00:25:42] And we'll come up with a profile for what a manager looks like at that call center, or what a manager looks like, um, in that product development team, or the manager looks like in that R& D team or in that sales team. And then you, you look at that and now you have that profile so that when you look at all the people who are lower level. You can pick your high potentials with data, not who you like, but who's actually going to be a good leader. Many times the average performers in the lower level roles actually would become the great managers, but they never get the chance. So this allows you to do two things. One, promote the ones who are only average performers, knowing that the data shows they will be great leaders and maybe even better than the higher performers.
[00:26:22] And for those high performers who you still want to promote, because that's what they want, that's the career path and the company really wants to benefit or reward them, you can show them with data where they're lacking and why it's going to be tough to be a manager and a leader, and so you can develop those gaps.
[00:26:38] Within that person that is great at the functional skills, but is not naturally a leader. And then they can get developed through the L& D group, like people like your wife. Um, because right now they're getting promoted. And it's a blind spot and they fall on their face and then they fail and then they get fired, which is the worst for everyone because it might've been better just to keep them that role where they weren't promoted. Now with a tool like ours, you can actually prepare them for that role, knowing where their gaps are going to be and where they're going to fail.
[00:27:07] Claude: Yeah, a lot of the leaders we've talked to are L& D, sort of how you upskill and train your employees. One, it's something that they want, right? They want to advance in their career. So it's a very high sort of value, uh, you know, activity that a companies can do to keep employees engaged and happy.
[00:27:23] Juan: But it's high value for the employee, but it costs so much money. Your wife and anyone in L and D knows that to do workshops and train and develop all these people, not only is it expensive, you got to get certified, bring an IO psychologist, and you can only give it to your creme de la creme. But even when you do all that, it falls on its face because it's used once and never again, when you have a tool like Humantelligence, which does all that without people, where the systems training, developing every workflow, three or four times a day.
[00:27:53] It just becomes part of your experience. And like breathing, you become a better manager.
[00:27:59] Claude: And I think it's easy for companies and managers and leaders to understand when their employees don't have kind of the hard skills to do their job. You know, you can look at the work output and be like, this isn't really up to, up to task, right? Up to par. But when you look at that, Um, managerial sort of pieces, it's much softer.
[00:28:17] It's different. Everyone has sort of different styles. So how do you provide people who that may be their weak area with the right training, the right tools to actually be a good manager and what's that look like? Um, I think that's really an interesting part in developing people is how do you How do you develop them as a manager, not just an IC?
[00:28:36] Juan: Yeah. Imagine with AI, our tool now we're coming up with a version where a manager gets promoted, let's say. They just, they get their team and in, in their Microsoft teams or in the calendar, they can literally just type in, how do I lead this, this meeting better? And it'll tell the answer like a AI bot based on all the psychology and all the way people like to work, Hey, this team do this, this, this, um, start with a very clear agenda and go quickly.
[00:28:59] Do not slow down because these people are all decisive, right? Or Mary is going to give you a lot of pushback. Let her run some of the meeting, right? So you could, you know, you're about to, uh, do a. Performance review. What's the best way to deliver this content on this performance review to Bob? Um, what's the best way to lead the training tomorrow with this team?
[00:29:18] So all these questions you naturally would ask as a new manager. The AI will give you the answer instantly based on the data of those people. That's the future. It's actually happening now. A company called human intelligence, which we've been talking
[00:29:29] Claude: Yeah, that's great. Now I'm gonna ask kind of the elephant in the room question about sort of every psychometric test that's kind of out there. I think we're both fans of them. Uh, other people are not. Um, they think that they don't do as good a job, there's uh, written with errors, you know, they're going to make people make bad decisions. What's your counter for people that may be wary of using sort of psychometric testing, or, uh, I don't know if you like using the word psychometric, it's the one I use, but what's your sort of rebuttal to, to people who may not want to use those tools in kind of the modern workforce?
[00:30:01] Juan: Yeah. So there's two places you can use them. One for recruiting, right? Talent acquisition. Um, there it has been very sensitive, right? The, you know, the whole Amazon story where they created their own and it was biased and, you know, look, some of these tools are accurate. They say they, they measure what they say they measure.
[00:30:19] Um, and they are EEOC compliant, they're GDPR compliant. They don't have any built in bias. And so if you find the right tools, you can use them for recruiting and it's great. Um, you find the wrong tools that haven't been tested, then it's a legal nightmare for you. Uh, thank God human intelligence is validated.
[00:30:34] It is EEOC compliant, uh, and over the two and a half million people have taken it, many for recruiting, uh, no one's ever sued. And even if they did, we'd never, our clients would never lose in court. No. Where we use psychometrics is where most companies are not using them. We're using them for day to day collaboration and meetings and emails.
[00:30:51] Most companies for existing employees are just using them for L& D workshops. On the part of using it with internal employees, um, you make it voluntary, uh, we get, uh, 93 percent of companies employees take it, uh, and when you do that, um, uh, the information is not used, um, like a big brother, it's not used for promotions. It's just used to help people communicate better.
[00:31:15] And so there's never been really a, a back or Um, when someone does a workshop with these psychometric tools and their teams, they love it. They actually find them very fun. The problem is most of these tools only are measuring behaviors. They're not giving insights in a daily, uh, integrated way. And so, um, they're not very effective.
[00:31:32] And so, um, Even the workshop model has proven that 3 billion are spent every year. And it never really leads anywhere. Um, and so imagine a world where, you know, uh, you know, for every 10, 000 people who take the human intelligence assessment, only one voluntarily says, you know what, I don't want it to be shown.
[00:31:49] So, um, with our clients, people love it. We get a lot of usage. There's been no backlash. Um, you know, you always have five to 7%, uh, who don't want to take it because they're just scared of sharing and that's fine. They don't have to, but you know, we really haven't come across any problems. We're also applying the psychometrics for the first time.
[00:32:11] Through collaboration in a, in a workflow manner. Nobody's ever really thought of that or done that. Um, and one, one thing you said is earlier is we all love psychometrics. I actually never was a fan of psychometric and personality tests for the same reasons in that they found, I found them very expensive only for executives.
[00:32:28] Where the last people actually need them. You need it. The people who need it are the masses of companies. Not the executives already know how to manipulate and use, you know, human nature and understanding. So I never thought they were useful. I actually launched human intelligence and pivoted to the collaboration piece so that I could democratize these things and make them useful and, and get value out of them.
[00:32:48] Um, our tool also pipes in the existing tools like disk, predictive index, strain binders. So a company that already has taken those for some employees, they can just pipe it into our platform. Uh, because I, I don't think it should be exclusive. I think whatever tools used, let's all get better ROI out of it.
[00:33:05] Um, I'm not trying to compete. I think, I think the world would be a better place if everybody had a psychometric that's on the back of the resume. Okay. The resume is the worst tool for this whole job matching between supply and demand. Every resume, LinkedIn, everywhere, every job board, people should carry around a resume with their psychometric on the other side.
[00:33:25] It's the duality of a human being.
[00:33:27] Claude: I kind of think that when companies think about they want to hire for fit and culture and like values and work ethic and all these things, the hard skills don't usually matter. Cause usually you're gonna, you're gonna have to learn new ones. The world moves so fast. . Kind of rare that whatever someone did five years ago, they're going to need today, right?
[00:33:43] And what they're going to need in five years, which is really a successful hire for most companies is someone's there for five years, right? But that skill that they've downloaded ten years ago isn't as valuable to them. So you have a lot of a lot of data on a lot of different people. One of the kind of, you know, We'll call it, we'll call it fun. Uh, is sort of generational differences, um, between Gen Z works versus, uh, millennials versus, uh, baby boomers. Do you see kind of any difference in your data and how those sort of different generational groups like to work together?
[00:34:15] Juan: Yeah. So conceptually at a high, high level, every human being is unique. And we try to rejoice in that at human intelligence. And we tell our clients, you use our tools so that you can come to the understanding of every person. Now that said, many of our clients do, uh, Slice the data, the talent analytics module in our tool.
[00:34:36] Once they have everybody take it and they look at different populations, they segment the millennials, the Gen Zers versus some of the older folks. And they do find several differences in that our tool is great because it shows the companies, wow, this is how we have to deal with or manage or lead. Or even communicate with the Gen Z population, our company versus the older population.
[00:34:57] And so, and every leader should manage each employee differently. Um, and we do find really stark difference. Some of the highlights of those differences, I won't go through all of them, um, that are consistent across companies. Um, The younger the person, the more concise and decisive they are. They're just, they're not deliberate. They're not intentional. They're just, they're just somehow very quick to make decisions, to come to conclusions. They also want to be part of something. So this kind of concept of feeling motivated by belonging, um, and, and a a sense of helping, they really feel more of that than some of the older generations, which is, you know, what's in it for me?
[00:35:34] In terms of like my career versus like, I wanna be part of a company that's doing good things. Um, uh, I think most of our clients had us add a, a feature, uh, in the US at least. Um, we can, we can apply it anywhere in the world, but in the U. S. where, where the pronoun of what you want to be referred to, uh, was a big deal, um, by most of these young employees.
[00:35:58] And so we've added that to the email piece. So when you write to somebody, you can actually click a button and see what is the pronoun this person prefers when you address them, uh, right there in the email. So you don't have to go search for it in a directory, but this kind of like wanting to be seen. As an individual, you know, and I'm not everyone else and I'm just, I'm an analyst doesn't mean I'm like all the other analysts, every one of these younger people, they want to feel really special.
[00:36:23] Um, uh, obviously some of the companies see it as these individuals are entitled, but you know, that's, I think through the view of a company, that's always dealt with people just do whatever the company says. And now these people were saying, no, you need to do what I, what I want. And the company sees that as being entitled. I think it's just a, a new dynamic of the power structure between the gig economy and younger employees and, and, and companies.
[00:36:46] Claude: What about geography? Do you see any sort of shifts in geography? They're, uh, you know, us international or sort of, you know, San Francisco Bay area versus maybe Miami.
[00:36:55] Juan: So we pick up behaviors, motivators, or values and work styles, 28 things. When you give this thing to 10, 000 people in the country of Columbia, um, and let's say they all work for Coca Cola, and then you give the same tool to the people at Coca Cola in Atlanta, the U. S., and the same tool to 10, 000 people at Coca Cola in Brazil, you will feel, find stark differences in the culture of those companies by country.
[00:37:23] Um, and let's say Microsoft had offices in Seattle. Miami, New York, Boston, and Texas. You would find stark differences in the cultures of Microsoft in the U. S. in those different offices. So a lot of companies use our culture management module, which is basically a roll up of data to see what the culture is.
[00:37:44] By city, by country, um, because this is not culture through the mistaken, uh, uh, uh, temperament survey, which tells you if people are happy or not. This is truly a bottom up culture, which tells you who are the people we have and how do they tend to work. And is that aligned with our strategy and the way we like to work and what looks like success in that office, in that city, in that state, and in that country.
[00:38:07] We also find differences in culture and function. Imagine this. You know, every fortune 500 says their culture is these four things, right? And Professor Donsell at Harvard and MIT came out and clearly showed that there's no correlation between the four values of websites that the fortune 500 have and what the employees experience at work.
[00:38:25] So the whole, it's been bunk that the four values people put on the website and have people memorize that is not culture at a company. Culture is what we measure, which is a bottom up understanding of who you have your company. And interestingly, if a company had the same culture of how to work and behave and what motivates people in their finance team, as it does in their sales team, as it does in their R& D team, that company would fail miserably.
[00:38:50] The people in finance, supply chain, you know, marketing and R& D should all be very different. Right, so this concept that we're all the same is crazy. Are there certain ways of doing things at a company? Yes, I mean, I worked at Procter Gamble, you know, there's a color you write in, a font size, RL9, font blue.
[00:39:09] There's a way you write that you could train and that is part of a culture of the way of doing things and and the way they analyze the market, the way they do marketing. Those are all part of the P& G culture that's distinctly different than any other company. However, in terms of the way people behave, what motivates them and their work styles, which is palpable, that is something that's bottom up and it is different by function, by city, by state, by country.
[00:39:34] Claude: I want to go to something you've brought up a couple times now, um, is sort of surveys and sort of gauging like employee happiness or employee experience at companies. Can you kind of go into more detail on why you don't think that that's the best, um, best method to sort of track that or measure that?
[00:39:52] Um, cause a lot of HR leaders do rely on sort of those surveys and, and sometimes employees I think get, uh, overwhelmed with them.
[00:39:58] Juan: Yeah, so a lot of employees look at those. They don't even like take him. We, where we get 93 percent voluntary, uh, you know, uh, people take it, employ surveys around, are you happy? And what do you like and don't like? And what do you think about our culture? Those get response like 40 percent and they're mandatory.
[00:40:15] People are terrified of those things because they get nothing out of it. And the company often doesn't do anything until six months later. And by then that person quit the job or already found the new one. Right. Um, and so look, those are great tools. To understand where there's pockets of misery at your company and who's unhappy, but they're purely temperament.
[00:40:32] They're not going to tell you about your culture and whether you have the right people in the right jobs to achieve your strategy and goals. Um, so great to know what's not working, but it's like, you know, someone comes in the ER, it's a diagnostic. Oh my God, it's their arm that's broken, but those tools don't tell you anything on how to make it better.
[00:40:50] Tools like ours is what you would put in play. After you know that people are unhappy or after, you know, you're not getting results and achieving a certain function or geo, what the company wants to achieve because the tools that we have tells you why you're not performing. Oh, you have a restaurant. Um, all this, all the, the franchisee of, um, Dunkin Donuts in California with 3, 000 stores, their net promoters, uh, net promoter scores are really low for clients and they're losing, they're going down in sales.
[00:41:21] The rest of the country is going up. Why is that? Oh, well, all the employees are happy. They're the highest paid Dunkin Donut employees in the country. That's so weird. So that's another fallacy of employee surveys. You could actually have really happy employees, yet performance going down. So in this Dunkin Donuts example, people are getting paid the highest salaries ever.
[00:41:36] But guess what? When you use Humantelligence,, you realize that all the people who got the jobs at those Dunkin Donuts, they applied because of the salary and they're motivated by money, not by belonging, sense of team or service. They're hiring wrong. So even though they have a high engagement survey and people love the company, they're making tons of money.
[00:41:55] The performance is horrible because they're not the right people for the job of a service job, like a restaurant, right? And we find that with all of our clients that they're just, they think that they can just. You know, hire people for something and make them happy, but then the performance drops. Um, another example of why engagement surveys are complete bunk is if you took Microsoft and you took Apple, right?
[00:42:15] These are the two titans of competition. When it comes to the people who work at Microsoft and the people who work at Apple, they are completely, you know, completely different people, right? Microsoft are like more linear, they're structured, um, they're kind of the geeks like that famous ad commercial that was that Apple did once, whereas Apple are like creatives, and you even see it in the products and the way you use their products, right?
[00:42:36] Apple doesn't tell you exactly what you need to do, you gotta go figure it out, it's like a creative solution, where Microsoft is very linear and you know exactly what you're happening, right? Well, guess what? They both do the same engagement survey company product vendor, and they both have 30 percent of employees who are super engaged, love the company, recommend it to a friend.
[00:42:52] They have 50 percent who think, ah, it's just a job. And then there's the 20 percent who are totally disgruntled because they thought they'd get free products and they just joined because of the brand and they want to quit tomorrow. Well, guess what? Microsoft and Apple have the same exact engagement survey results.
[00:43:04] You couldn't have two cultures more different. So this idea that engagement survey actually tells you something about the culture that's leading to your products and services and how you interact with, with society and customers is a complete, it's a complete bunk. I mean, it's, it's a good luck using those things to improve your company's performance.
[00:43:22] Claude: Question for you, Juan. Uh, when you're thinking about, we've talked a lot about big companies, but when you think about SMBs, startups, you know, midsize enterprises, you know, what are the things that leaders should be, be looking at as they grow and what are some, you know, maybe some growth phases that they really need to think about their culture and employee experience, uh, when they're kind of hitting, if you could give maybe like an employee number, uh, so people can have a reference for, for your thoughts.
[00:43:45] Juan: Yeah. So this is a great question and where I think a lot of companies fail. All the research at all the top business schools show that the challenges and therefore the culture and what's needed from those both skills, organizational structure and the types of people you hire, very different when you're launching a product from zero revenue. And it's kind of an idea to get to 1 million, 1 to 2 million, and maybe you have three to 20 employees. And then from 1 million to 10 million, it's a whole nother challenge with a new set of challenges, cultural challenges, skills, challenges, and cross functional work challenges. And then from 10 to a hundred million is another change.
[00:44:27] And, and the companies and leaders need to look at and from a hundred to a billion. I was blessed to have worked with a guy who actually put that into play, Tom Siebel. I was there at 8 million. So I missed the first phase and he had a CFO. And the CFO that got him from one to 8 million. He, he de downloaded, uh, de degraded him whatever from CFO to VP of finance or s VP of Finance and brought in a CFO above him who had gotten a company from 10 to a hundred million, grew to a hundred million, and then that person, he downgraded.
[00:44:57] To an EVP, the other guy stated SVP and they brought a new CFO and that CFO took was then let go when they got to a billion, they brought another CFO. Cause that each of these fit. And he did that with every single functional area. And I find it fascinating because Tom knew because he had done it at Oracle.
[00:45:12] He was employee number four at Oracle and got them to like, you know, 50 billion. Tom knew you needed those changes. Now let's bring in human intelligence and our insights from that into that question. The culture. That succeeds for a CEO and their team when they go from zero to one, one to 10 needs to change.
[00:45:30] And where most startups fail is that the CEO is still in the interview process and trying to hire more people like themselves. And many of them on the exit interview for the 999 of 1000 CEOs, Why do you think you failed? They mistakenly say, because we kept growing and we weren't able to maintain the same culture. No, the problem is actually kept the same culture, which was not applicable to the problems and challenges and organizational structure you need when you go. But it's very hard for 10 people who've gotten from zero to 1 million to interview five people and say, Hey, who do we like the most? Well, let's hire the one we like the least.
[00:46:09] Claude: Yeah.
[00:46:09] Juan: can do the job. They all have the right skills and resume. Let's all hire the one none of us got along with because we need a different way of thinking. This is a challenge that leads to the failure of all or most startups because they're still hiring for more of the same. Through who they like and subjectivity and not data like ours, it shows them that they're only hiring more of the same.
[00:46:28] Hey, you need to have more diversity of thought in this new phase. You need more structure, the creative startup culture of this organization, where everyone's motivated by new things, flexibility and variety, which is great. It's juice as a team. It's really exciting. We'll bring in the process linear.
[00:46:43] Continuous management person at 1 million where they're trying to put structure and process in. It's going to rub everyone the wrong way. They'll get fired within weeks, but no, that's what they need. This is the biggest miss of companies at every phase.
[00:46:56] Claude: Yeah, totally. And it's something that I think, companies, when you watch their, watch their growth trajectories, you see that they find that the people that got them there aren't the people that are going to get them to the next, next level. And it can be very, very challenging, especially for entrepreneurs that have like, you know, that person was there for you, right?
[00:47:14] From zero to one, but they're not going to be there. They're not the right person to get you to 10 or 100.
[00:47:20] Juan: It's hard to do that at work to get rid of people. Now, what helps it if you have data to show, Hey, look, everyone, we've been doing this for five years. We were all the same. Maybe we should hire differently, even if we don't like them in the interviews. The data says we need to.
[00:47:33] Claude: Yeah, you at least know it's like, well, this isn't working. Let's try something else. Um, without data, it's hard to know because you have no baseline for what is different. So you can't even do it if you want it to.
[00:47:44] So thanks so much for joining us, Juan. Really, really enjoyed our conversation. Humantelligence sounds like an amazing company. Um, something, one of the better uses of AI sort of integrated into workflows that I've seen. Um, if people want to connect with you online and learn more, like what's, what's the best place to, to reach out to you?
[00:48:02] Juan: Yeah, then go to the website, uh, www. humantelligence. com. We've cut out the I N of intelligence. Um, and they can write to me directly at my email, Juan, J U A N at humantelligence.com.
[00:48:15] Claude: All right, perfect. Thanks again for joining us and, uh, looking forward to following your journey, uh, here. It's a really amazing product.
[00:48:21] Juan: Thanks so much, Claude, for having me. I feel humbled that I was able to share my story.