2090 – Transform Hiring Strategy Through AI in Recruitment with Quintela’s Joel Quintela

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1:05With us right now, Joel Contella. Joel, you are the founder and CEO of Contella. Your last name, which I love. Your website. No ego here, right? What's that again? I said no ego right here, right? No. Hey, listen, it's a unique name. It's a unique enough name that you were able to get a good domain name. Your website is Contella.io. It's great to have you. Joel, I'd love to learn a little bit more about what Contella is. Yeah. So my background is I'm a business psychologist, essentially. Yeah, that just means that we build HR technology for large companies, Fortune 500 companies. And specifically, we do a lot of HR assessment work in the hiring space.

1:49So we're talking about personality assessments, role plays, and especially structured interviews, because, you know, informal interviews, you might as well just flip a coin. You know, you can't, you know, it's a 50-50 maybe, right, at best. So what we do is because a selection is a probability game, right? You don't know if somebody is going to do well in six months or nine months, but there is a way to increase that probability. I'm all ears, Joel. Keep on talking. Yeah. And the first thing you have to do, I know this is weird, but you have to identify the skills or competencies that are required for that job.

2:35It sounds weird, but that's not going to be in a typical job description. And what we do typically is go out to experts that know the performance for that particular job. I mean, it could be customers. It could be the manager. But in essence, we come back with, let's say, a five or eight competencies that are required for that job. And then you decide which assessments you want to use to tap into those competencies. And sometimes it's a personality test, sometimes integrity, and sometimes it's better to assess that in an interview, like communication. You can't really get at that in personality assessment.

3:15It's better to talk with them. So you have to be very deliberate. What are the competencies that are required? It's not rocket science. Everybody, if you ask them, they'll know exactly what it is. And then you decide what kind of assessment am I going to use during that hiring process to make sure that I'm hiring the people who have those competencies and skills. Yeah. Well, give us a lay of the land of what's going on, like, trend-wise. I mean, obviously, this is your world. You know, a lot of folks that listen to this program, they're founders, and they've got successful companies, and they're on their way up.

3:55And they probably can identify with some of the frustrations that we're touching on here. But I'm really curious about you. Obviously, again, you have your ear to the track. You've obviously seen some of the big movements over the past couple of years and probably have some perspective on what's coming up. From your lips to our ears, what should we be aware of what's going on in your world? There are actually two things, two big movements. One is we're moving from, I guess, basic requirements like, you know, degrees, GPAs, which school did you go to, to more of a skills-based hiring. So what are the things that you have to do to do well in this job?

4:41It's the same thing that when I was talking about that profile, you have to identify what skills are required. So it has nothing to do with which school you went to. has nothing to do with what grades you made, essentially. It's kind of like, so everybody's moving to that role, that movement. So they're sort of ditching all the other stuff. And I think you've heard some of the universities doing the same thing. Now, companies are doing exactly the same thing, moving to a skills-based organization. And that's a lot easier said than done. So we're finding, and again, we work with Fortune 500s, We're finding that it's quite difficult to do that, moving a huge organization from what they were doing before to now skills-based.

5:28It's a huge change management project, but it's moving along. The other one is AI in hiring, and it's being used in different ways. mainly it's being used for replacing some of those repetitive tasks that recruiters have to do recruiting is a hiring is a very administrative heavy process because you have candidates going to through eight nine different steps and if you if you think about candidate experience communication is the the number one thing you have to do to get with candidates you have to tell them exactly what's happening through the process. Now, companies are using AI to do that, especially a general AI, so you have an avatar talking to you and moving you through the pipeline.

6:23So that's working well. Like even scheduling interviews, that's a crazy mess. But, you know, so AI can do it very quickly. And then also we're starting to see AI coming to the assessments themselves to help. For example, we do a lot of structured interviewing. So that's just the competency-based interviews. Maybe you've heard questions like, tell me about a time that you were working in a team. Two people didn't get along. What did you do? We do that. We set up those structured interviews for huge companies. And one of the trends is to actually use AI during the conversation itself. So if you're using structured interviews, your hiring managers and interviewers are writing notes frantically, you know, based on what the candidate is talking about.

7:15So it's very note heavy. So the AI were being used for transcribing that conversation so that they don't have to do that. And more so, it's actually summarizing that information so that, you know, the big key for interviews, not necessarily the questions themselves, it's the hire manager. Those are the people who are going to make that decision. So this AI is helping them by not having to take notes, summarize the notes so that when you're scoring somebody on communication, or building relationships, you already have that list of this is what the candidate said. So I know from a five point scale, this is probably where I want to rate that candidate.

8:04Again, increase the probability of you making a good decision. Like every interviewer, hire manager thinks they make great decisions. Don't. Wow. That's fascinating, the gap in perception. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But another thing is at some point I talk about perception of reality. Everybody says perception is reality, but that's not true. It's your reality. So you as a hiring manager, you might think that you're the greatest interviewer in the world, but the reality is something else. Oh, don't I know. Data is going to show, hey, look, you hired 50 people last year and 40 left in three months. Well, OK, something has gone wrong.

8:49And the way we do that is to follow this structured format. So it's not only fair for the candidates because you do the same exact thing for candidates, but it just as an interviewer and hire manager, it allows you to follow a very clear structure. These are the instructions you should say. These are the questions you should ask. This is how you take notes. This is how you use a five-point scale to decide exactly where that candidate is. So you're comparing apples to apples or candidate to candidate kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, let's talk a little bit specifically about how Contella works.

9:28Yeah, so again, I talked about we're an HR assessment company, essentially. And our platform allows clients to use all of those assessments in the process. special interviews if you're using competency-based interviews this this way of increase in probability of success there are things you have to do at some point somebody has to identify those competencies so you need a system to do that you don't want to if you have 10 experts you don't want to do that excel spreadsheets or or you know a sharepoint whatever our system actually sends out a list of competencies, the experts, and they rate and rank the competencies so that there's kind of an aggregate says this is what the expert said.

10:18And then our system allows them to take that list of competencies and then select questions that are specifically designed for each of those competencies. And then they get to write their own competencies. And then they click a button and they get a nice, sometimes it's a PDF document. A lot of our clients are going to what we call eGuides is an electronic version of that structure in every guide. So when they're going through that guide, they can type notes into the actual document. And that's a huge time saver for them, because now we can store that information, the data, and then we can actually do that.

10:53We can actually come back and say, well, you actually did not make great hires, and this is exactly what you did. This is how you rated individuals. These are the kind of notes you did to allow them to capture. So our system allows them to do that specific sequence. Identify the profile that you need. That's key. You got to be correct. And then we have to identify the questions that you should be asking for each of those competencies. And then we need to give you something very simple for you to actually have that conversation with the candidate. And we call it an e-guide. and now what we're adding now is this ai is now going to come in and do all of the transcriptions you know and and harmonious because they also type in their own notes of course but in the end they get a summary essentially and they can take that summary and still do the same thing the key is to make a right decision and for us that means there's a five point scale based on what that candidate said this is where they are they're one three or five So we essentially allow companies to increase that probability of success.

12:03So there's a method to the madness, and we prove this over and over and over, that, again, if you're using an informal conversation, that probability is, you know, and everybody uses informal conversation, right? They think, you know, they can spot, you know, whatever to make good decisions, but they can't. They need this structure. You got to know what's required. You have to ask the right questions and you have to take the notes correctly and you have to use a five point scale, let's say, to make the right decision. Yeah. Well, who is this platform for? I don't know. I guess the better question, Joel, I want to ask this is I'm curious about the economics of, OK, so there's an investment in this platform.

12:50It's probably going to be suited more for this type of client, this type of, you know, use case. But then, obviously, I think what we've been talking about are a lot of opportunities for efficiency and not making costly mistakes. Because, yeah, I think right at the very beginning of our conversation, I think I audibly groaned, you know, when we talked about, you know, just how painful that is, is bringing someone in that's just thinking about. Oh, gosh, yeah. Yeah, it's frustrating. Yeah, it's a huge impact, especially if you're a small company. You make a bad decision. You know, Walmart can make 100 ,000 bad decisions, but if they make 200 ,000 good decisions, that's a lot of money for them.

13:34Now, we do work with Fortune 500s, but we go even deeper than Fortune 5000. So Fortune 500s maybe need a little bit of customization, so they take the platform and they make it their own, essentially. As we get down a little further, it's a bit more of a plug and play. You get the standard platform and you're off and running and you can create these things. You get your competencies, your questions, and it's a plug and play for you. And it's a monthly or yearly subscription. Out of the gate, you can just plug and play. You're off and running and you get everything that I was talking about. Again, Fortune 500s, they tend to customize a little bit.

14:15It's the same exact thing. they just kind of maybe they have their own structure in every guide for example their own competencies but exactly the same platform uh it's just more of a is it a custom versus a plug and play it's it's pretty easy i mean create the competencies pick your question pick a button and you got an e-guide and you're off and running yeah well share with me just uh we just have a few minutes left but um share with me i don't know if you have like a case study or something like that that could illustrate before and after? Yeah. Let me give you, I can't necessarily say what it is or who it is, but let's say it's a Fortune 500 or five and under, right?

15:00I know who it is. I know who it is. No, I'm just joking. You got five. So they and we came up and we actually are their executive selection platform. And for executives, that's a really bad mistake if you do something. So all executives that apply to this role or this company go through our platform where go from beginning to taking five assessments. We integrate those because there are a lot of assessments in different publishers. So the company has decided these are the ones I need to assess. And once they pass those five assessments, they go on to the interview. And then after the interview, all that is consolidated so that the people who are making decisions have the scores for the assessments, have the scores for the interviews, have the feedback.

15:53They can all make a good decision. So that conversation with the executive team that interviewed them. And then even beyond that, they do feedback, which these are executives. So especially the internal folks, you want to, if you're not being selected, you probably should give feedback. So before us, that was all done manually. And it was a crazy mess. You know, spreadsheets, Outlook, you know, it was nuts. And we just took, you know, 50 steps or clicks. We always talk about number of clicks. We took 50 clicks and they went down to 10 clicks. That was a huge, huge efficiency for them. And then we just started adding more and more as they go through.

16:42But again, it's a Fortune 5 and below. Yep. We all know who you're talking about. We're all, it sounds like. Yeah. Well, congratulations on being able to engage at that level and be able to, you know, be able to have that impact in the workplaces. So Joel, next steps. Your website, Kintela.io, that's Q-U-I-N-T-E-L-A.io. And someone who wants to either schedule a demo or they want to learn more about it, where do they go from here? Yeah, you can send an email directly to me, and it's Joel, J-O-E-L, at Q-U-I-N-T-E-L-A.io. We're pretty simple. Yeah. You can find me on LinkedIn as well. And then we can start a conversation that, you know, schedule a day and I can show you this thing.

17:37It's pretty simple. Yeah. The number of clicks, how do you reduce clicks? It's pretty easy to get started. Yeah, fantastic. Joel Contilla, founder, CEO of Contilla. your website, Kintilla.io. Joel, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.

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