Can Smarterer and Flock Change Recruiting Forever?
All of this sounds like shameless boasting, but it’s not. These are just my Smarterer scores. Check out my public scorecard, if you don’t believe me.
Smarterer is, at its core, a collection of crowdsourced assessments that “validate anyone’s score in anything in about 10 questions or 120 seconds,” to quote co-founder and CEO Dave Balter. It’s a technology that I’m really excited about, because it adds empirical weight to otherwise vague skill sets that can be hard to articulate or otherwise prove.
Think about it: I was raised in the sort of dutiful American exurb where you did what you were supposed to do and received a hearty handshake in return. You didn’t run around calling yourself an expert. So when it comes to selling myself to employers, I’m pretty bashful: I’m generally more worried about sounding like a braggart than I am about demonstrating competence. But armed with a Smarterer scorecard, I can circumvent all of that anxiety. Per Jay-Z’s instructions: “Numbers don’t lie, check the scoreboard.” (Note: As with most Jay-Z songs, that video is NSFW).
Similarly, this sort of quantified data helps me establish credibility with my colleagues. I’m still a rookie recruiting blogger, and some people are understandably skeptical of me. But I don’t need to spend time convincing any of them that I know what I’m talking about: I’ve got the numbers to back myself up, so I’m just going to focus on building an ever-growing body of good work.
But say I didn’t know what I was talking about. Say I were simply some schlub who bumbled his way into blogging about HR and recruiting. Like any good test, Smarterer would slap me with a bad grade, and my underqualification would be crystal clear. I scored a 195 out of 800 on Smarterer’s Child Safety test, ranking as a “beginner.” So it’s a good thing I don’t blog about children — or have children, for that matter. Did you know you’re supposed to secure your bookshelves to walls with brackets to prevent them from falling and maiming your child?
Of course, a quantified self only merits consideration if the data can be trusted. So I called up Balter to learn more about the ideas behind and applications of Smarterer.
Crowdsourcing Job Currency
“Smarterer.com is an open community of the crowd, which is able to write questions to help us create our assessments for the public market,” says Balter. Founded in 2010, Smarterer is still fairly young, but it boasts some impressive stats thus far: 20 million questions answered, 2 million test sessions conducted, 75 thousand total questions, and roughly 1 thousand assessments.
Now, you may dismiss the results of crowdsourced skills assessments as inaccurate or untrustworthy, and Smarterer understands that, which is why the company thoroughly vets questions before including them in tests. Like the assessments themselves, the vetting is also crowdsourced: in the same way that the SAT includes “experimental” sections where The College Board tries out new questions before committing to them, Smarterer appends optional experimental sections to the tests in order to gather data about questions’ relevance and difficulty before adding them to scored assessments. In a sense, Smarterer has found a way to make a self-correcting crowd.
The whole point of validating your skills through Smarterer assessments is to quantify your “job currency.” Balter explains: “Job currency is what skills you have, what skills you know, because frankly, in today’s economy, skills have become more and more valuable as they relate to getting that job you want.”
Balter’s observation ties nicely into Millenial Branding managing partner Dan Schawbel’s comments on viewing your personal brand as a long-term investment in your skill sets and expertise. The point is, both men have recognized that contemporary employment is less about landing a lifelong gig and more about cultivating a unique skill set that allows you to flexibly move from job to job and project to project. Smarterer hopes to give people a way to make an inventory of their skills, one that’s backed by meaningful validation so that it holds up in the eyes of employers, colleagues, and anyone else looking to judge you.
“With crowdsourcing, we can help people actually identify their skills really efficiently through our system, and that gives you job currency,” Balter says. “You’re able to actually document your skill and do that in a way that is simple and effective, for the higher likelihood of getting that job you’ve always wanted.
Look to the beginning of this post for an example of how Smarterer documents skills: thanks to a few quick assessments, we learned I should stick to writing and probably never go into childcare.
In leveraging the crowd’s expertise to create assessments, Smarterer also found the added benefit of flexibility. People are constantly adding new questions and adapting existing assessments to reflect changes in the field. “Our assessments are always evolving, based on the knowledge of the crowd,” Balter says. “You’re always able to show what your job currency is, because you’re always able to get assessed in what matters today.”
So, if you’re a job seeker, Smarterer is a good way to establish your credentials. And if you’re a contract marketplace, you may be drawn to check out Smarterer’s API, which help contractors validate their skills. But what about employers? What are they getting out of Smarterer?
To answer that, we have to talk about another product, related to Smarterer, but slightly different: Flock.
‘TeamSourcing’ Company Knowledge
For some companies, Smarterer will be enough. Provided you trust the crowd — and, given Smarterer’s dedication to vetting assessments, you probably should for once — seeing a candidate support/fail to support their skills with some sort of data will give you all the insight you need.
But for some companies, Smarterer needs to be more customizable. This is especially true for large enterprises, which often have their own ways of doing things. Enter Flock, Smarterer’s enterprise counterpart. Here, I’ll let Balter tell the story of how Flock came about, because I think it serves as a tidy encapsulation of what the product is:
We’ve had about 2,000 clients use our platform [Smarterer] in the past, many in the recruiting field, and I called one of them, a large travel site and I talked to the manager there, and I said, “You seemed to be using our tool quite a bit. What do you think?”
He said, “Oh, I love your tool, it’s great, crowdsourcing, etc.”
So I said, “I noticed you haven’t used this in the past four months.”
He said to me, “Let me tell you something: your tool doesn’t actually work the way I thought it would.”
I asked,“Why is that?”
And he said, “We can test someone for QA [quality assurance] using your test, but here at this company we do QA differently. What I’m trying to test for is how my people do QA, and the only way to get to that is to actually take the knowledge of my own team and have them help refine that assessment.”
From this conversation, the idea for Flock was born. Balter says that he began to ask, “What if we could take the crowd, and convert it into the team, and have the team do the work?”
“So what we learned pretty quickly was, we can use our crowdsource tools to sort of begin the assessment,” says Balter, “but in order to make it perfect for the enterprise, we need their own teams to engage with it and adapt it.”
Flock calls the process “TeamSourcing”: to help companies create organization-specific skill inventories for use in recruiting, learning and development, knowledge management, etc., Flock obtains the help of company employees to write and create the assessments. This way, organizations can learn what specific skills their employees have and what specific skills new employees will need.
This approach creates “content validity,” which Balter calls “super important in the world of assessments,” and which he defines as the answer to the question, “Does the assessment match the job?” Balter says “the only way to [achieve content validity] is to use the knowledge of the team.”
With Flock, the unnamed large travel site wouldn’t have to test people for someone else’s version of QA; instead, it could create a company-specific assessment that more accurately matches the job.
This TeamSourcing approach has important ramifications for recruiting and hiring because, according to Balter, it addresses two important issues. “Look, in recruiting, you’ve often had people being assessed on specific skills before they get a job,” he says. “The problem with that is really twofold: one, assessments were never really consumer-oriented … and two, the bigger issue is that skills move too quickly and change too often, and you need a form to assess people with what’s current.”
The first issue Balter mentions is the issue that the unnamed large travel site faced: we have an assessment for QA, but it isn’t oriented toward the way we do QA in this organization. The second issue is one Balter touched on when he mentioned the way the crowd adapts Smarterer assessments to changes in the field. TeamSourcing addresses both of these issues in the same way: by producing unique, company-specific assessments that are readily and easily updated according to advances in team knowledge.
Again, I’ll let Balter speak uninterrupted, as he has another example that drives the point home in a way that I’d rather not tamper with:
We work for a large consulting firm. They want to hire 300 Web developers this year.
First thing they actually need to do is figure out what their Web developers’ skills are, because actually many hiring mangers don’t know what a team a needs to know. What we begin with is a skills inventory of their current Web developers, what knowledge they have, what skills are they effective at, etc. And we do that by engaging their own team to create the assessment of their knowledge by writing questions about what they know.
That assessment can then get delivered to the recruiting funnel, where in the funnel they take two subject matter experts out of the interview process and replace them with our assessment, which absolutely matches what the Web developers need to know.
“I don’t want to just assess someone on Web development; I want to assess them on Web development for this very specific company,” Balter says in sum. “And that will change recruiting forever.”
It’s a bold proclamation, and though I wouldn’t want to be the braggart myself, I think Balter may have good reason to make it.