With one new start-up, job recruitment actually can be all fun and games.
Pymetrics is a company that seeks to revolutionize the job recruitment process for undergraduates and MBA students through neuroscience games. Co-founder Frida Polli spoke at Huntsman Hall on Monday at a talk presented by the Technology Entrepreneurship Club and the MedX Program.
“The idea for Pymetrics came when I was at [Harvard Business School] watching the recruiting process. There are a lot of inefficiencies in the system … There are a lot of candidates that get missed by recruiters,” Polli said.
Job seekers can opt to have reports sent to recruiters if they are considered to be a top fit for them. Pymetrics also functions as a tool for recruiters to obtain information on top fits that they might have otherwise missed.
“What research suggests is that resume metrics don’t really predict success at a job,” Polli said. “These games are much more objective. It’s really about discovery and figuring out your true strengths and weaknesses.”
The start-up offers 12 games designed to measure a job applicant’s emotional, cognitive and social traits. The games include a facial expression recognition test, a memorization test and a puzzle-solving test.
After completing each game, the job seeker receives an “insight” into how he or she performed. These insights are the basis of each player’s personalized industry fit score and strengths and weaknesses report. The reports are unlocked after the player completes all 12 games.
Related: Choosing a job: it’s more than just a location
The industry fit score gives the job seeker his or her top three industry matches as assessed by the games, as well as their percentage match for several other industries. The industries include finance, healthcare, education and marketing.
The strengths and weaknesses report gives the job seeker a list of the traits and skills measured by the games and a description of how he or she did overall. The games assess 49 different key cognitive and emotional traits.
Pymetrics currently only matches job seekers to business-related roles, but Polli says she hopes to expand to other fields like medicine in the future.
College junior Sophia Dominguez Perez had not heard of Pymetrics before attending Polli’s talk, but said she was very interested in how “jobs require certain cognitive abilities and not just overall intelligence or great resumes.”
“I would definitely want to use the service out of curiosity,” Dominguez Perez said.
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