HRTech Interview with Omer Molad, Chief Executive Officer at Vervoe

Join the conversation on recruitment with Omer Molad, a leading thinker in the skills-based hiring movement and the CEO and Co-founder of Vervoe.

Vervoe

Please share a few words about yourself and your journey as the CEO of Vervoe.

My friend David Weinberg and I co-founded this company because we believed a better way of hiring was available.

We initially funded everything, then raised money, and along the way had to transition from being two guys trying to build a product, to the CEO and CPO of a company with multiple departments and employees across three continents.

There’s so much to figure out, from what the product should be, who it’s for, and how to get it in front of them, to who you need to be to lead your teams, and what you should and shouldn’t be doing yourself.

We’ve got a lot right, but we’ve got a lot left to figure out, and scaling efficiently is one of our biggest challenges.

At the moment I’m focused on building out my executive team, improving the culture and employee experience, and raising capital to get us to the next stage of growth.

What attracted you to move into the HR technology and talent management space?

I don’t think we were attracted to HR — we’re certainly not hiring practitioners. I think we felt the pain of building teams and helping people realize their potential.

There’s a disconnect when you’re trying to build a team, and you’re continually presented with people who might look good on paper, or can sell themselves well, but don’t turn out to be good performers.

And, conversely, there are hidden gems who might not look like superstars on paper, who may not be confident enough to sell themselves, and who haven’t come from privileged backgrounds.

I think we were obsessed with those two problems and finding a solution for them.

It turns out that this all fits into HR tech and a certain segment of the market. But we think a lot more about how leaders build teams, helping them find the right workers who can perform, and giving great performers a way to showcase their talent and access fulfilling careers.

How exactly do Vervoe’s technology and offerings stand out in the market?

Vervoe is the only platform that truly makes hiring about merit, not background.

Our technology helps employers make hiring decisions based on how well candidates can actually do the job instead of how good they look on paper. Vervoe replaces the traditional hiring process with job simulations and skills assessments, giving every candidate an opportunity to showcase their talent by doing job-related tasks. Then, Vervoe uses machine learning models to automatically rank candidates based on how well they perform.

Companies large and small, all over the world use Vervoe to hire top performers. Our customers don’t spend time reviewing resumes, phone screening or relying on arbitrary data points. Instead, they see people do the job before they get the job with immersive work assessments that simulate environments candidates will be hired in. Vervoe is the most predictive way to assess candidate skills.

Choose from our library of 300+ ready-made (and growing) skills assessments across key roles and industries. Imagine watching an Enterprise Sales Associate give a live pitch from a deck they’ve just helped create, or a Marketing Analyst pull game-changing insights from data in a spreadsheet.

With everything from design to coding and software engineering skills, you can customize an assessment to suit any role. Assessments test a candidate’s job-ready skills and soft skills like communication or attention to detail so you can get a full picture.

Our range of immersive question types including multiple choice, video, audio, code challenges, document uploads, spreadsheets, presentations, and text ensures you’re simulating the tools, tasks, and challenges of a real day in the life of the role. Our growing range of simulation question types, like the customer service, cyber and sales simulations takes candidates to the next level by answering customer support tickets in a live setting.

Can you walk us through how Vervoe’s AI-powered skills testing and candidate ranking system work?

Vervoe is powered by AI to assess, score, and rank candidates for the skills and attributes you require. You’ll get an instant shortlist and individual candidate breakdowns through our set of 3 machine learning models that measure the quality of a candidate’s answer against millions of other similar responses and actions.

Our AI models are blind to anything that could potentially create bias like gender, ethnicity, or background from the assessment process. We also monitor manual grading to ensure data integrity. AI is not just a buzzword, we’ve been trusted to grade millions of responses so
you can hire smarter, faster, and fairer. You can read all about it here.

Kindly share some success stories or case studies of companies that have seen positive results from using Vervoe’s platform.

You can view all our success stories and customer case studies here. Some recent standouts are:

Dentsu: Have materially reduced attrition from 70% to 2%
Seek: Validate jobseeker skills at scale through Vervoe.
Trinet: Have materially increased their quality of hire.
1800-Contacts: Spend materially less time screening candidates. They are interviewing right-fit candidates at scale. The candidates already have a clear view of the role before they get to their first interview.

As a seasoned leader, how do you see the future of HR technology evolving, and how is Vervoe positioned to lead that evolution?

As a company, we’re focused on skills-based hiring, which is now a movement across industries.

When we started the company, skills weren’t part of the conversation. Today, that penny has dropped and people’s ability is key to whether they get the job or not.

However, how organizations assess skills isn’t the same across the board.

Too many hiring decisions are still based on inferred skills — using what someone’s said about themselves, what someone else has said about them, what they’ve studied, or where they’ve worked as proof of certain skills.

We don’t believe in that, and we don’t do that.

At Vervoe, we validate skills in realtime — and that’s the future.

We can assess everyone’s capability and potential in real-time, and for every role we offer assessments and simulations, we have the recipe book for what “good” looks like — that’s our business.

So, we can go here are the skills, here’s the test, and organizations can trust that whoever does well in our test will perform well in their role.

That will help companies hire at the level of performance they expect and deserve. And it will help those candidates unlock rewarding careers that allow them to fulfill their potentia.

How does Vervoe ensure that its platform is unbiased and free from any potential discrimination in the hiring process?

98% of candidates love us, our winning candidate experience allows them to shine while you can level the playing field and give all candidates an equal opportunity to show what they can do. Say goodbye to unconscious bias and create naturally high-performing teams and champion diversity. Employees hired through Vervoe perform 80% better, are promoted 44% faster, and are 80% less likely to leave.

Use Vervoe and say goodbye to unconscious bias. The best way to predict a candidate’s potential success within your company is by giving them tasks, challenges, and tools as close to a real day in the life of your role as possible. You can read more about our job simulation and skills assessment validity here and here. You can read more about our AI here. Vervoe has also recently passed the AI audit review for compliance with NYC law LL 144 making us a compliant automated employment decision tool.

Can you discuss any new features or updates that Vervoe has in the works for the future?

You can view our public roadmap here. This year, we’ve already delivered Cybersecurity Simulations, embedded MS Excel, Lever, iCims integrations and Sales Simulations. Up next, we have Marketing, Business Analyst, Data Science, Quality Assurance and many more simulations coming very soon.

What advice would you give to companies that are looking to streamline their hiring process and improve the quality of their hires?

Improving quality is more important than streamlining. It doesn’t matter how “streamlined” your process is if you hire people who aren’t up to it. If you’re more efficient at getting bad people, that’s not great.

So, the advice I would give is to know what “good” looks like in the role. Then translate it to what the actual skills are that would be needed to perform well in the role. Then find people who exhibit those skills. It’s really that simple.

When the default way is skills-based evaluation rather than resumes and interviews, that’ll be good for us, for you, and for our competitors. But, really getting rid of the buzz and in lay terms articulating what good in the context of the role looks like and breaking that vision down into tangible skills is the best way to hire and improve quality.

Finally, can you share a few qualities that seal the deal in a candidate when it comes to recruiting for C-level positions?

Act like an owner. I think at that level, it’s not just about being good at the functional area — sales, marketing, engineering — it’s about contributing to the company as a whole as an executive.

Acting like an owner, caring, refusing to fail, and dragging the company forward in whatever way, not just in your domain. That’s the number one difference between a team leader and an executive.

Number two is can you be a leader people will rally around — can you get the best out of people? Will they want to join you, will they want to do their best for you, and can you create an environment that sets them up for success?

They’re the two things I think about, and the rest is role-specific.

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Omer Molad
Omer Molad Chief Executive Officer at Vervoe

Omer Molad is CEO and Co-founder of Vervoe, a company that uses skills assessments to replace traditional hiring processes and promote merit-based hiring. He experienced bias in the traditional recruitment process and believes that the best way to predict job performance is to see candidates in action. Omer has become a thought leader in skills-based hiring and Vervoe has become a global leader in HR tech.