Ray Marcy, CEO of Guru.com

The following is the transcript of a conversation between Ray Marcy, CEO of Guru.com, and Charles Handler, president of Rocket-Hire.com (Portions of the actual interview have been edited for compatibility with the present format).

Mr. Marcy has brought many years of recruiting and staffing expertise to Guru and over the past 18 months he has led the development of a unique and innovative system for matching people with jobs. We at Rocket-Hire believe that this type of system is where the future lies so we asked Mr. Marcy to talk about his vision for Guru and how systems such as the one he has created will impact the future of online hiring.

Rocket-Hire (RH):
When you took over at Guru as you made some big changes in the strategic direction of the business and I was just curious about your rational for that and why or what made you think about starting to use assessment as a core offering for your business?

Ray Marcy (RM): The foundation of Guru was to really be a job board for the knowledge worker, predominantly in the I.T. space and I think the board as well as James and John Slavens, the co-founders, recognized that they were having a difficult time monetizing that. My passion has always been about how can we help companies source talent more effectively than they have ever done before, so that was really the genesis of my joining Guru.

I was excited about taking a platform that has great matching technology and adding an assessment piece to that to create something that was very unique. So the goal a little over a year ago was to revolutionize the way companies could source talent and we have done that via the product that we put together. It took almost a year to build and was completed last February and we’ve taken it to market since then. If you are looking for talent electronically then I’d argue that our system will allow you to source that talent better than any other organization in the world.

RH: What role does screening and assessment play in the way your system sources talent?

RM: Well I would say that our screening and assessment is at the epicenter of what makes us unique. We’ve used a very unique blend of internet technology, I.O. psychology, and artificial intelligence (which powers our search engine) to create a system that can, in a couple of hours, search or touch about a 100,000 resumes. The system can bring back in a rough cut format 5,000 resumes that are in a general family and then use very advanced assessment and artificial intelligence to say to our recruiters “Out of these 5,000 tell me who the best 30 are”. With most systems recruiters spend 90% of their time working with unqualified candidates, looking for the few candidates who are qualified. What our system does through technology and assessment is say “here’s 30 highly qualified candidates” and that’s where our people begin, so It’s quite unique. So we’ve not eliminated, nor do we want to eliminate, human interaction because that is important; but we want human interaction to be working with diamonds instead of tons of coal.

RH: How does your system accomplish this?

RM: We have deeper richer information on our candidates than any other electronic medium that exists on the planet. We not only take your resume and parse it, we’ve got an exhaustive skills taxonomy that gives us about, oh, 2-3 times the skill information that exists on your resume. We then ask a series of questions about what someone wants to do in their next job, and then we take them through a cultural assessment which gives us a great understanding of the kind of environment they want to work in. So, we have great artificial intelligence that’s based on our search engine, but that’s only half the equation because the search engine, which is far more sophisticated than something like keyword search, is searching on very, very rich data. This means we’ve got, as I said, more information about a potential job candidate than certainly exists anywhere else on the planet.

As you know from your IO psychology background, 20-40% of whether someone is going to be successful at their job is based on cultural fit. There are very few firms that are doing anything more than gut feel when it comes to that 20-40% and that’s crazy; it’s got to change. So the search that we’re doing today, again, is based on a parsed resume rich skill data, truly understanding your experiences, and understanding from a cultural fit standpoint what’s the right environment for you. What’s interesting is 81% of candidates who begin the process with us complete the process with us. I would guess that’s that probably the best online percentage completion that you could imagine, and that’s because we give the candidates great feedback, it’s a learning experience for them.

RH: The role of the job board seems to be changing slowly. What do you see as the future for online job searching? Do you think it will be different than it is today and do you think the addition of assessment will be a key differentiator?

RM: They (the job boards) will figure it out sooner or later, but their DNA isn’t really about assessment matching, their DNA really is about processing. So while the easy answer would be “Yeah, eventually they’ll get it”, but I’m not sure that they won’t come to it kicking, dragging, screaming. I wish they would be more forthcoming with it because I think it’s the great key to the next wave of productivity. If you look at what happened from 1991 to ’01, we saw the largest gain in productivity, especially with American companies, in history, which obviously led to a very strong economic market. Almost all of that gain in productivity happened because of improvements from the manufacturing sector or improvements through technology. None of it happened by sourcing talent more effectively, and I’d argue that the next great wave of productivity gains, since human capital is the #1 or #2 expense of 95% of all companies, will come on the human capital side, and that certainly begins with sourcing and assessing and matching talent more efficiently than has ever been done before.

RH: What role do you see assessment playing in the integration of recruiting, job searching and screening? I think integration is really where a lot of this stuff is headed in that the linkages between candidate management, recruiting and assessment all need to be tightened. How you see what you guys are doing helping in this process?

RM: Well, again, we’re fairly early on, in the sense that we’ve only taken the product to market since we really completed the programming in February. But what we’re finding in the marketplace and today we’ve got oh, probably 30 companies in the fortune 500 who have signed to do business with us. What we’re finding is a fairly high degree of frustration over applicant tracking systems and vendor management systems in the sense that they once again are managing a process, but when you talk to companies about “Can I assess, find, source talent better than I could two years ago?”, the answer’s overwhelmingly “No”. So what they like about what we bring to the party is our ability to assess, match, and say internally or externally here’s the best candidate for this given position. Again it’s the blend of I.O. psychology and A.I. and the right amount of human intervention that allows us to get this done.

So if you’re GE today and you’ve got a job opening, chances are there’s somebody among 100s’ of thousands of employees who would love to have that given position that’s open and nobody knows it, so what’s a GE recruiter doing there? Posting the job on Monster or Dice?. So, what we can do is tell you: here’s the best 30 candidates that exist externally. Here’s the best 30 candidates that exist in your own database, here’s the best current employees who are right for the job. The ability to do this is what really drives productivity gains, that’s what really drives talent, it’s what really drives time to fill, cost per hire and ultimately turnover and retention.

RH: I know you have a long history in recruiting and recruiters don’t usually deal with formalized screening and assessment and often more rely on their gut feelings or what they need to do to sell specific a person on a specific job. Do you see this as a problem for the widespread adoption of more sophisticated online screening technology like we’ve been talking about?

RM: Yeah, I think it’s very problematic. You know, history tends to repeat itself most of the time and you’ve got a lot of recruiters who are used to doing business one way, and they’ve done it that way for the last 30 years, so why not do it for the next 30 and I think the standard methodology is a dinosaur and we are headed, through evolution probably not revolution, we’re headed for different times. I think that’s part of the world we’re willing to change by saying you know again, once electronically and through the use of logic and really smart artificial intelligence, let’s go look at a hundred thousand resumes not fifty seven.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with CEOs in the fortune 500 over the last decade and working with some of the largest corporations in the world and when you start talking about assessment of talent, finding talent, sourcing talent and you’re talking to these major leaders, they recognize that when it comes to talent and assessment of talent, there are no benchmarks, no standards, no protocol, no metrics. They’re hiring people in L.A. differently than they are hire people in N.Y., and they can’t even tell you why. So, it’s the number 1 or #2 expense of all companies and they’ve got to address it. We fundamentally hire people today the same way we did in 1945. We get 200 hits off Monster rather than 200 resumes in the mail but after that, there’s not much difference.

RH: Right now it seems the benefits of online screening are largely ignored or misunderstood. What do you feel needs to happen to help online assessment and screening catch on and do you think it eventually will catch on?

I think it will catch on. As I’ve said before, I think it’s going to be more of an evolution than a revolution. We’ve only been going to market since February and as I said we’ve already got 25 very significant clients who understand that the key to their future is to be able to source and assess talent better than their competition. So I think what’s going to happen is there’s going to be a few companies who get it, understand it, adopt it-they’ll be the early adopters and as a result of that they’re going to see improved talent, better time to fill, better retention rates, as that begins to happen they’re going to create a competitive advantage for themselves vis a vis their competition. And, that’s what’s really going to pull the competition along kicking, dragging and screaming. We’ve got to get there too. So, I think it’s going to be a couple more years of plowing territory, plowing new fields. I think it will be some early adopters that kick in and realize the competitive advantage, but it’s probably you know ‘04, ‘05 before companies really begin to totally adapt to the fact that we’ve got to change the way we’ve been doing business for the last 50 years.

RH: Thanks for your time, good luck

RM: Thanks.