Clipboard Health's Zack Ganieany on performance-based hiring and why resumes are broken

Yeah, exactly. We'll talk to you soon. Congratulations. Cheers. Uh before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about numeralhq. com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than 5 minutes per month on sales tax. Let n worry about sales tax. Let numero worry about sales tax. Our next guest is in the ream waiting room.

Let's bring him into the TBPN Ultradome. How are you doing, Zach? What's happening? Sorry for keeping you waiting. Thank you so much for joining. All good guys. How's it going? It's great. Uh, give us the news, give us the update, introduce yourself, introduce the company. Yeah. No, happy to.

And and maybe before I jump in, is is uh chief intern Tyler there? Oh, yeah. And we, you know, I think we didn't we Tyler to apply? Yes, we did. Yeah. He was before we told him to drop out of before we were actually taking this show full fulltime like 100% that's all we do.

We were thinking like, oh, like a talent platform would make a bunch of sense. There's a bunch of companies and employees in the audience. You match them. That could be an interesting business that we build. And then we realized like, wait, why do we want to go up against you who's doing it full-time?

Like, that makes no sense. So, we were we were working on building something, but then we were like, this makes no sense to compete with somebody who's going to make it their life. Tyler basically built an MVP of Merit First, I think. So, something along those lines.

never ended up doing anything with because you guys quickly launched it and we were like great there's a standalone company that's going to focus entirely on this. So anyway, give us give us the actual pitch because we've been talking around what the company does. So please explain. Yeah. Yeah.

No, and and uh Tyler came and hung out with us here in Austin for a bit too.

And I think I mean him building an MVP is very much and you know you know an analogy of what we're trying to do in this business which is you know kind of put credentials these poor proxies for evaluating talent uh you know resumes aside and actually evaluate people based on real work product.

Um getting a sense of what someone will actually do in the seat. Um so you can you know really you know better understand and touch reality verify for yourself that the folks that you bring on your team can do the work that they say they can do.

And so you know removing proxies from the the equation as much as possible, getting as close to the metal as you can, you know, work trials, work samples, those are all things that that we're kind of working towards. What's your current view on like the hiring problem?

Is it just finding like the great is the power law getting steep? Yeah, it generates the resume because we're seeing hundred million deals for talent and then we're also seeing high unemployment and is this a matching problem? Uh what's going on? Yeah, it's pretty interesting.

I I mean, we're not playing in the $100 million deals for for talent. I think uh it's kind of this weird position we've gotten to where on one end, the process side of hiring is hyper optimized. You know, actually, you know, moving people through the funnel operationally.

Um but on the other end, we we've just kind of like lost sight of what the core job to be done is, which is, you know, you have a problem within your business, a gap you need to fill. um you know what you should do is go find the best person to fill that gap and and and hire them for your team.

Um I think we've gotten to this this weird place where it's kind of AI generated resumes trying to beat the system that are are you know battling against AI screeners and and no one's happy with the hiring process.

Uh so we're trying to you know really create an efficient sort of system and infrastructure to to take that noise out of the system and uh allow companies and candidates to come together based on what really matters which is you know merit and someone's ability to to be effective in the seat.

My understanding of the the the broader hiring market is like you have uh like big platforms like LinkedIn that are kind of just assembling a whole bunch of resumes loosely talent pools. Then there's recruiters who are working with individuals emailing phone calls meetings. Uh you have applicant tracking systems.

You have evaluation tools like your hacker rank your elite codes and those. Do you have an idea of how much of a point solution you imagine you're building over the short term versus a compound startup?

What areas you think you don't want to play in in the short term versus areas where you think you can build a better solution? Like what's the surface area of how you're tackling the problem? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, the core focus is on the evaluation side today.

Um, you know, the the ATS platforms that are out there are really great at what they do. We don't have an interest in in kind of competing there. Um, we're obviously, you know, kind of anti-credentialism and so, you know, don't have a lot of interest in in kind of competing with LinkedIn as it stands today.

I think where we see us adding value and doing something different is rather than your your kind of check the box assessment, we're looking for where folks are spiky. And so, you know, all of the work that you encounter in the real world isn't black and white. There's no right or wrong answer.

You're, you know, it's much more scenario based. How do you make decisions under pressure? And when do you decide to to double down and walk back those decisions?

Those are the things that LLM actually do a great job of pulling insight out of if you have people submitting real kind of work product as a as a part of the hiring process. What is your honest assessment of the job market for ultra high agency people? I mean I I think the opportunities are there.

You you see all these things on on social media where it's like, you know, people from a great school aren't able to find, you know, opportunities. Like I I think that's either an agency problem or a preference problem. I mean, someone like Tyler is a perfect example of that.

He's, you know, in his soft enough love around here. He's tearing up. I think when I Let's go Tyler Cam. He's tearing up because we're giving him claps. He's a fantastic. No, no. I think I think that the you know, our uh you we start we started Tyler like identified the show incredibly early. He reached out to John.

He started coming we we would uh fly him out to to LA just to he picked up the tab for us at Fog Detroit.

So this is a hilarious story some lore with John we went to lunch with Tyler and both of us forgot like stood up from the show and they wouldn't they wouldn't take Apple Pay and so we we had we were like Tyler we're like extremely sorry but you have to pick up the check and I just remember like when I was in college there were definitely moments where like I just had a debit card you know and there were definitely moments like where it just wouldn't it wouldn't have gone through.

I was like, "We will pay you back immediately. " Um, but but I but I think there's it seems like, you know, especially within startups, there's one uh uh always been a willingness to bet on people super early in their careers before they have any experience. It's like, do are are you likable? Are you intelligent?

Uh do do is there a place that I can see you fitting into the organization? And so it seems like that the hardest thing for young people is going from no experience to some experience and getting that foothold in the job market.

But like we have extreme appetite for people high agency people high agency people because we're a startup and I'm wondering a question for you is uh like can you high agency your way into a job at Google anymore? Like is that possible?

I mean, it it it might be harder at a job at at Google, but with you guys, absolutely. With, you know, most of the startups out there, they're they're more than willing to to to kind of put the arbitrary years experience aside and and let someone show what they can do.

I mean, I think now more than ever, you know, you know, well, historically, universities actually were a pretty good proxy for talent. Then came the internet and then came AI.

So if you have the agency to to figure out I want to go and learn something I mean you know you you can go and do that and and people will give you the shot to show what you can do.

And I mean we we you know we try to practice what we preach and we see those resumes come across where it's like you know maybe you just graduated school you studied something good but your last job was being a bartender. Our approach is we'll open it up wide and give anyone a fair shot to show what they can do.

And you know you're competing against really great people so is it going to work? I mean that that remains to be seen but at least you know if you have the initiative and the agency to go out and learn if it's not this one you're setting yourself up you know better for the next opportunity.

How much do do you expect uh job applications to shift more and more towards just doing a project right a lot of startups started doing this like I've hired this way in the past where you know you meet somebody or they apply for a job and you just say like hey why don't we just pay you to work for a week on this one specific thing and we'll see how it goes.

It's a much better way to filter than just kind of judging someone off of a few conversations. But uh with a lot of uh you know various like new tools that we have, it feels like uh one day's work you can really uh it's becomes a it can be even better assessment of somebody's abilities.

Like how soon uh like what what are you seeing on that side in terms of like is that something you guys want to systematize at all? Um, yeah, I mean 100%. I think that's that's kind of the core of the product, right?

Is like giving employers a real sense of what someone's work product looks like and then, you know, you could get a shortened version of that up front before you spend the, you know, couple days or a week sort of work trial with the individual, too.

And I mean, the the one push back that we hear from candidates is uh, you know, putting in effort, you know, as far as an assessment up front without, you know, getting much ROI on that. I mean, our kind of fix to that is, you know, the tests that we publish as a company, we treat those as a common app.

My view on that is like that's your work product. If you want to take that and get in front of other great companies, that's great. You know, we should make the candidate experience better and give you more bang for your buck as far as like the effort that you're putting into it. Well, give us the fundraising news.

What happened? Yeah. So, $6 million fund raise co-led byation from our our friend of GMO. Oh yeah, nice. Love him. He's coming on soon for series. Great series Z or something like that. We're uh we got a little ways to go before we're we're at that level.