(00:00:05) - Welcome to The HR Tech Spotlight podcast. I'm Deanna Shimota, CEO of GrowthMode Marketing. The HR technology market is crowded, and we know it can be hard to find the best software solutions for your business in the sea of sameness. On this podcast, we shine a spotlight on some of the best up and coming technology options out there. Check it out if you are interested in learning about new, innovative solutions available in the market. And if you are with an HR tech company and interested in being considered for a guest spot. Stay tuned for details at the end of the show.
Hello everybody! In this episode of the HR Tech Spotlight, we are taking a look at Bryq, a talent intelligence platform that helps organizations hire the right people fast and enable existing talent to realize their full potential. Leveraging the latest developments in IO psychology, Bryq offers an AI driven platform that enables HR professionals and leaders to reduce hiring costs, boost employee performance, and manage talent effectively. Joining me to talk about the platform is co-founder and CEO of the company, Markellos Diorinos.
(00:01:26) - Markellos. Thank you for coming on the show.
(00:01:31) - Yeah, thank you so much for having me. And you apparently have Greek roots because you did a great job with my name there.
(00:01:40) - That's good because I was kind of nervous about it. So first question I always ask everybody tell us about your background in the HR tech space.
(00:01:50) - That's the wrong question to ask someone, right? You want me to talk about myself? Sit down.
(00:01:54) - All right. Take a pillow.
(00:01:56) - It's gonna take an hour. But let me try and distill it down to the few things that are interesting about myself. I am an engineer by training, but. I quickly realized that there is a very low ceiling of what you can achieve as an individual contributor, and very early on shifted my focus on teams. How can I do more? How can I expand my reach? And that requires building great teams. And you know what? Later on in life, great companies. So, you know, in my life I spent, oh, I think about a decade with Microsoft.
(00:02:28) - And that teaches you a lot about how to build an organization and what not to do. And then I spent probably a dozen years in startups and scale-ups. And, you know, the funny thing was that I've worked in the US with Microsoft, but I also spent time in Germany as lived for three years in Brazil. And then I've lived a bunch of years in Greece. Once you have that little bit of global perspective, you understand some of the challenges that are typically invisible to the rest of the world, right? Once you try to hire a Brazilian, you know that hiring has challenges and all those things that you take for granted. You know, the cultural bias and the little cues that you pick up. They're no longer there.
(00:03:14) - The so you are a co-founder to Bryq tells the story behind founding the company.
(00:03:24) - Sure I'll be happy to do that. And you know what? My two co-founders, Kee and Hassan, we were working together. I must have been almost 15, maybe 20 years ago.
(00:03:35) - But that's a long time, right? A lifetime ago. We were working together at this scale-up, and we were hiring for people all over the globe. We're hiring. You know, I remember at one point I was hiring in Vietnam, in Brazil and South Africa. Really interesting COBOL. And at some point we started creating a few new roles. And that was really interesting. And we were hiring for people that didn't exist in the market. So once you go and do that and let's give you an example that's going to make it very clear to your audience. Say that you want to hire an AI expert. There are none. Are you going to hire them? So instead, we try to go back and say, what does it take to make these people successful in the job? Let's hire for that because we're never going to find anyone with experience. And, you know, my co-founder has a background in psychology. And he said, don't be. What's. What's the nice word for stupid? Don't be stupid.
(00:04:31) - I think he said you don't have to invent science. There's a whole science in industrial organizational psychology that has dealt with this forever. They're like a hundred years of research on this. And we can find out what matters and hire people for that. And we put together an ad hoc test that works fantastically. Some of the people we hired there ended up being VP's later in the company because we hired them for what matters. But at the same time we said, this is great, let's do this for any role. And there must be tools out there that do this. We don't have to write ad hoc tests because that was very painful, by the way, and we looked at the state of the art. The assessments and it was a sorry, state-of-the-art. We found a lot of tools that were complex, antiquated, expensive, hard to use for candidates, impossible to use for customers, and really no portability of the data, no lifecycle management, nothing. So that's where the opportunity got generated.
(00:05:28) - It took us a few years, but we eventually got together and we said, if we want to leave our mark in this world, this is how we do it. Let's help people find their proper vocation. Let's help them find the role that they're going to be best at. And that was Bryq.
(00:05:45) - Very cool, you know. What do you see as a big challenge or problem facing HR departments today that it can help with?
(00:05:56) - With a twofold of challenges. The first challenge is. How do I hire and keep my people? How do I get people who are going to perform, who are going to stay longer, who fit? The culture of my company. Or who add to the culture of my company if we want to be more exact. And those things are closely interwoven, right? I need to hire people with the right attitude that fit for my company. And by the way, they're going to enjoy the roll that they're doing and therefore they're going to perform. So if you do this right, if you match the right people to the right role, it's going to be fantastic.
(00:06:31) - But the other challenge that we see very often is. People coming and saying. I can find enough candidates for position X or Y or Z, and then they're using sourcing tools, and there are some fabulous sourcing tools out there. But the sourcing tools always got on the same mission. Find me people who can do JNI and there are none. We have to rethink how we hire in a world where skills are changing so rapidly, we can no longer rely on people having experience. We should rely on more basic things. Would people enjoy this kind of vocation? Will they be good at this work? Are they able to learn fast? If that's a requirement for the role and then broaden our horizon, you know, widen the net and bring people that we can easily and quickly train to the role. And, you know, even for Genii, we've had success with that, where we say, how can we hire engineers who have some sort of related background on these skills, and this is what the sourcing systems do.
(00:07:27) - But then from those that come up, which are the ones that are most likely to enjoy the ambiguity that counsel in AI, we're going to be able to pick up fast who have all the traits to work in an environment that's so demanding, and this is how you find the right candidates.
(00:07:45) - What would you say is Bryq's unique point of view, or differentiation in the market compared to the competitors that are out there?
(00:07:54) - We find a lot of everybody. Everybody has the same goal right today. And I think we we are subscribed to the same goal, which is let's build a skills based organization. Let's stop hiring for your experience. Let's stop hiring for your degree. And let's bring the people who can get the job done. And there are beautiful solutions out there, but they all focus on the same hard skills. And that's to an extent correct. And it helps and it's useful. So I'm not discounting those solutions but. I'm going to ask you a question. What are the hard skills that are required for a salesperson? You're shaking your head.
(00:08:37) - I think that you agree with me that there are none. There is no hard skill there. And the same goes for a bunch of other roles. Whether you think, interns or you think SDR or you start thinking about engineers that know a few hard skills, but you really have to pick up new technologies, it's always the same. So we build the skills based organization, but we focus on soft skills. And the other thing that we're doing, and I think we're doing fantastically well. Is that we're honing in on what's important for an organization. A lot of times you're going to find tools that are going to say, I'm going to find you the perfect salesperson. And they have one definition of a salesperson. What we've learned time and time again is that every company has their own definition of a great salesperson. And even if that's not constant, what worked pre-COVID did definitely not work during Covid and is definitely not working, not today. So the environment, the world changes really fast. So being able to combine business KPIs with the people a company has and figuring out what is success and how can we define the successful person, the ideal candidate, the ideal engineer, the ideal salesperson? This is more important than ever.
(00:09:59) - And we actually do that. By the way, this is not something that we invented. You know, if you go to our psychology validation studies have been around forever. But they used to be associated with like six months of effort and probably a couple of hundred thousand dollars. We can now run such validation studies. Literally at the click of a button.
(00:10:22) - What type of companies would you say are the perfect fit for working with your organization?
(00:10:31) - This is one instance where we have to say size matters because small companies benefit from a bunch of the things that we do. But it's really once you hit this threshold of 500 people and above, where you have enough volume for it to make sense. So, you know, some of the medium enterprises and mid-market and definitely a lot of the enterprise space. And there are a few segments where we've seen success repeatedly. So all kinds of professional services, you know, have customers like why, Deloitte and so on, financial services, technology companies, all you all are SAS cohorts and friends, Telecom, healthcare.
(00:11:11) - These are areas where we've repeatedly seen a lot of these problems. People are struggling with churn. They're struggling with performance. They're struggling with talent and we can provide solutions for them.
(00:11:26) - And what would you say is the impact that your organization has helped companies experience when they worked with you?
(00:11:35) - Funny you should ask this, because it's really hard to measure. And what we found is that most HR departments. Are having a hard time looking beyond the traditional metrics. And the traditional metrics are, you know, time to hire, interview to hire. And by the way, we have a profound impact on all of those. We can shorten the duration of the hire. We've taken one of our customers in, you know, an interview to hire ratio of 1 to 10. Now they're down to 1 to 3, which is like a 300% improvement. And these are all important things. But where we really shine is when people start saying, hey. I've reduced churn. What's the business impact of reducing churn? How many hundreds of thousands or millions am I adding to my bottom line by reducing churn? And I'll always talk about performance and churn interchangeably.
(00:12:23) - Not because they are, but because in this context, people who perform tend to stay longer. They're happy with the job, and that reduces churn, that increases performance. But you also have a better performance in the job, so you make more money.
(00:12:38) - What is your team's future vision for Bryq?
(00:12:43) - Are the future. This is something that we love. We see the skills based future ahead of us, and we're building strongly on partnerships. We work very closely with people like SAP and success factors, and we want to make sure that we integrate and we provide a unified platform. We understand that our HR customers no longer want point solutions. So what we're looking for is making sure that they can get into a platform. We can put in our data, we can get data from other systems, and then just give them a smooth experience where we can look at talent from cradle or from hiring to retiring, if you like, and make sure that we enable better decisions at every step of the way. When you hire them, when you place them into a position, when it comes time to move them later.
(00:13:32) - When you're thinking about succession planning, when you're thinking about growing the people and how they can advance their career, this is the vision. And that takes a lot of rethinking also on our candidate, on our customer side. So a lot of times we're working with a maturity model. You cannot affect all changes on day one right. There are things that we can actually deploy within a week or two. And that's a fantastic deployment and onboarding time that we have. But really we're seeing people maturing and organizations maturing as they go towards on the side of talent acquisition. And let's go and build this for internal mobility, for talent management, for learning and development and so on and so forth. So if you ask me, the the future and what we're trying to build is seeing companies make better decisions with data every step of the way.
(00:14:23) - What are some of the biggest hesitations that you see companies have when it comes to implementing a talent intelligence platform like Bryq?
(00:14:37) - It's easy for companies to implement better mousetraps, right? So if you're just going in and you're saying, hey, I'm going to you can keep doing what you're doing, you're just going to do it faster.
(00:14:48) - That's really easy because this is, a known process. So I'd say that the biggest challenge is, inertia. We have to go in and start thinking differently about people. We have to connect talent acquisition with talent management. We have to start thinking about our talent throughout the full lifecycle and make sure that we use them every, every step of the way. So whether you call it inertia or change management. This is the biggest challenge. But also. These are the commons that are going to thrive, right? Once you start thinking about people of no more, as you know, bodies that fill places and they produce work, but as integral parts of the organization, people who contribute and who actually make up your company. That's when you start saying, hey, I need to do right by every one of those people, and I need to make sure that I support them, make the right decisions, and keep them as long as I can with my company because they're productive. Which, by the way, is why we're also called Bryq.
(00:15:53) - And yes, we're pronounced brick, not break even though we're spelled Bryq. And the reason why we call the company Bryq is that we feel that you build a company not with actual Bryqs, but with people, and we provide the building block of companies. We give you the right people so that you can build your company, and that's what matters.
(00:16:17) - What things should someone that is considering purchasing this type of technology take into consideration as they evaluate the options?
(00:16:28) - Oh, okay. I have a laundry list. Let me try and tear it down. The first thing that someone should consider is effectiveness. Do these people have case studies that talk more about and reducing time to hire, but they're talking about affecting churn, predicting performance. Do they have analytics that work? This is. Top of mind for me. But from there, you know you have to cover your basics. Whenever you look at an assessment solution, its validity, reliability, confirm confirmation with roles with sorry. With laws like the recent New York City local law.
(00:17:07) - 144 that talks about adverse impact and bias. Really important that you get a company that has a bias audit and, you know, the upcoming AI act, although those are things that you need to consider. Candidate experience. Sometimes I tell my colleagues and definitely a product. People that are real customers are candidates and employees. We work for them. We are finding them a better job. We just get paid by employers. So candidate experience is paramount for us and one should never forget it. This is your key stakeholder. And last but not least. Ease of use. We need solutions where people can use them and they can be propagated within the organization, whether it's recruiters, hiring managers, managers and they can make make heads or tails. We never provide 20 page reports to people. We want to give them actionable insights to help them. Hey, here's how to manage your team better. Here's whom to hire. Here's how to move along this team. You have a team of 200 people that you need to manage.
(00:18:08) - Here's an inbox that's going to help you make heads or tails of how to deal with the different segments. These are all things that matter, and everybody can promise them. But turning them into really useful tools that people are using there every day. This is what I would be looking out for. You don't need a 12-month implementation period.
(00:18:32) - What final thoughts do you want to leave our audience with?
(00:18:36) - I was discussing this with, a customer the other day, and, I was saying that, man, this is the most exciting HR tech has been ever. I've been following this place for 20 years. I've been active in it for the past 15 years or so. And I cannot remember a time where there was so much change as there is now. And looking back at what we do, we couldn't be doing the things we do today five years ago. It's just, you know, the right combination of technology and people and processes and everything. So it's an exciting time and. We are literally building the future of work.
(00:19:18) - And for me, if you ask me, the future of work is true meritocracy, where we enable every individual to maximize their potential. And you know what? I think we're closer to that than we've ever been.
(00:19:33) - Excellent. So my final question where can listeners go to learn more about Bryq?
(00:19:40) - There is no better place on the internet than our website. Dub dub dub.com. And that is spelled Bryq. So you're going to find a ton of information case studies. We're on LinkedIn. We're on pretty much everything else. But do reach out. Find me on LinkedIn, Markellos Diorinos, or simply drop me a line at Markellos with two L's. [email protected].
(00:20:09) - Excellent. Markellos, thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about Bryq today.
(00:20:15) - It's been a pleasure, Deanna. Thank you so much for having me. And, you know, I'm really excited to talk about this. And I love talking with people who share my passion for the future of work.
(00:20:26) - Yeah I agree.
(00:20:27) - So for those of you listening, that does it for today's show. Be sure to tune in again next time. And also check out Bryq. We'll leave the links in the show notes below. Thanks for listening to this episode of The HR Tech Spotlight podcast, where we showcase some of the best up and coming HR technology options in the market. If you are an HR tech company leader who would like to be considered for a guest spot on this program, please contact me via GrowthMode Marketing.Com. Reach out to me Deanna Shimota on LinkedIn. And if you found this show informative, subscribe. Follow on social media and leave a review.
(00:21:14) - This is Deanna with GrowthMode Marketing signing off. Thanks for listening. We hope you'll tune in again next time.