Starting up: Crosschq helps TA teams check references and make decisions based on ‘quality of hire’

Each week, we get into the weeds with the founders of HR tech startups. Want to tell us about your company? Get in touch here.

As an entrepreneur, Michael Fitzsimmons has done his fair share of hiring. He has even relied on pricey executive search firms to fill top posts in the past, and some of those hiring decisions contributed to negative business outcomes.

“Not getting hiring right is not just bad for companies. It’s bad for talent also,” he said. “It just sucks for everybody.”

So, in 2018, Fitzsimmons got to thinking about designing a tool to help companies make better hiring decisions. Crosschq was originally designed as a tool to disrupt the reference check, taking a time-consuming process that often yields incomplete insights and turning it into a “pre-hire 360.” The platform is intended to help TA pros see how a candidate assesses themselves, in comparison to how their former bosses and colleagues assess them

Fitzsimmons soon realized the issue with good hiring goes beyond reference checks. Talent acquisition teams need ways to judge the “quality of hire”—not simply butts in seats, but assessing if a hiring decision meets a business goal.

“Companies weren’t connecting hiring with outcomes,” he said. “There’s no other part of the business in the world that we don’t look at the ROI of the investment we made, other than hiring.”

Crosschq currently provides more than 400 companies like Deloitte, Pinterest, HubSpot, and Saks Fifth Avenue with insights about hiring: which job boards are yielding the best quality of hires for the roles, what interview teams are IDing the right candidates, or how pre-hire assessments stack up.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What specific issue in HR does your company intend to solve?

[Crosschq] helps talent acquisition teams save time and money while making better hires…It’s an integrated platform [that] brings together data across the recruiting life-cycle to improve hiring outcomes…Now it takes you literally 30 seconds from your ATS to trigger a Crosschq 360, versus the four-to-six hours that would have taken by doing those things manually.

How does Crosschq “disrupt” the reference check process?

In addition to modernizing the technology stack, [we] also [added] this concept of a pre-hire 360. Historically, the way reference checking had worked, [the candidate] would give the company a couple of names and then they’d go call them, and then you get some crappy notes back.

And Crosschq has expanded its offerings beyond the reference check?

Where the rubber meets the road is [the question of], “Did we drive quality of hire…both from the candidate’s perspective and the company’s perspective?”...When we were going in trying to tell our story to our customers and show them that we had driven increases in quality of hire [companies said], “But we don’t measure that.”

We actually [built] an analytics and insights engine that enables companies to start to operationalize quality of hire…and that starts with baseline measuring how [a new hire is] performing.

What are some quality-of-hire insights Crosschq offers?

We can look at interviewing. We look at which of your interview teams and your interview scores are actually correlated. Who should be on the interview team?...[And] we look at assessments.

Once you start connecting that outcome data with your hiring data—this is even before we get into, is [the candidate] right for the job? This is process-level stuff…that companies can take actions on immediately.

Where should companies look to improve “quality of hire”?

We published some data recently on this topic where we found internal referrals within organizations—which most TA teams will tell you is their number-one source—turned out to not be that way at all. [It] actually turns out to be quite the opposite on average, well below the mean in terms of quality of hire. And what happens is companies’ guards are down in terms of the assessment process on that talent. There [are] financial incentives for employees to refer to talent. There [are] all these things about it that we just take for granted.

Want to be featured in an upcoming edition of Starting Up? Click here to introduce yourself.