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. Welcome to another episode of the HR. Tech spotlight. Today we are shining a spotlight on Humantelligence, an HR enterprise software solution like Grammarly. But instead of tips for writing, they surface tips for improved team, collaboration, email communication, and meeting effectiveness.
My guest is Juan Betancourt. Not only is he CEO of Humantelligence, he was also recently named a Top 30 HR Tech influencer by Recooti and a Top 100 HR Tech influencer by HR Executive. It's great to have you on the show, Juan.
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
So, let's start out with the basics. Tell us about your background and how you got into the HR Tech space.
Yes. So I'm a Cuban American from Maryland area, grew up that region mid Atlantic, and then went to Harvard, went to Wharton, 15 years doing general management leadership stuff with Procter and Gamble. Reebok, Puma, worked in software at Siebel Systems and the big sports retailer, kind of like Dick's Sporting Goods. But a company much bigger than Dick's called Decathlon out of France. Spent probably 14 years outside the US. I speak five languages like English, managed over 30,000 people in France, was CEO of a 500 million dollar company or division of a larger group.
And then my second career was purely in Human Capital Management Advisory. I was the youngest partner at Hydrogen Struggles and then became a partner at Corn Ferry and then launched my own search firm where I was focused on private equity firms, helping them find executives in their portfolio companies. That was about 25 years and in the last seven years have been launching Humantelligence, an HR Tech solution.
And let's talk about Humantelligence. What does your company do, what does the platform do, how does it work for organizations?
Yeah, so everyone knows personality tests, right? They've been around for 40 years and many companies use them, especially large ones, for development, talent management, development. But they're usually a one and done, right? You give it and you do a workshop, cost $20,000. But three months later that executive and that executive team or that group probably doesn't remember more than 10%. And maybe they put colors on their wall, but now they're distributed or hybrid, so you're not seeing the physical colors on the wall.
So we took that concept where there's definitely value in personality tests that every major company with 1,000 employees or more knows. But with COVID when there was this challenge of people going remote and hybrid, how do you manage teams that are distributed, all these knowledge workers that don't see each other with generational differences. And so we thought, wow, all those tips and things that are great in a meeting if you can now surface them and combine some neat AI, which helps kind of filter all the tips into the ones that are specific for you and surface them like Grammarly in your email, when you're writing an email or in a calendar.
Invite to make the meeting more effective and give everybody an insight as the team dynamics and what the leader or the person who you're trying to influence likes to work. As well as in Microsoft teams and Slack. If you can do that, then you really do improve human connection effectiveness and email communication. So imagine Accenture is our client, 700,000 people. Imagine pulling up an email to somebody at Accenture that you're welcoming to the team and you click on our button in your email and right there it says how to motivate this person.
They want real detail on what expectations you have. So maybe put in the five deliverables and specifics. You're about to send an email at Coca Cola, another client of ours, to someone for a major proposal that you want them to approve. And your job and your career you think depends on it. And so you click on our button and in that case and it'll tell you that this person doesn't like a lot of information, just put a couple of bullet points.
It says that this person doesn't like an authoritarian attitude. So instead of telling them you'd like their feedback by Friday, ask them by when the next generative AI version of that email tool is. You write your email and generative AI, you push our button, it rewrites it for you. And if you have five people on the distribution list, five versions go out to those people to optimize how they read that email.
Most people don't know that 32% emails are misunderstood at a company and that costs about $12,000 per employee per year.
Wow. So I looked at videos on your website and I think it is a pretty cool technology to be able to understand people's different personalities. I mean, I know like, for me, I'm a very direct person. That doesn't come across really well for someone that's on the opposite end of the spectrum and being able to understand. Like, this is a person who wants a lot of detail and this is a person that just needs the high level synopsis.
I can imagine how powerful that is if at your fingertips, no matter who in the company you're communicating with or about to meet with, that you can have that perspective to kind of change your approach and adjust it so that you don't cause unintentional friction because your approach doesn't jive with other people out there. Right?
Correct. And that reduction of friction is actually, it's funny you say that. That's how we present it to our clients, constant friction. Because of personality styles, we reduce that throughout a company. And every company that buys today a behavioral tool like Predictive Index or Strength Finders or MBTI or Disk, they all understand that these tools are powerful, but they're not really realizing the effect or what could happen with those tools because they're not integrated into current workflows. And nobody's going to take time to go look up something in the middle of an email. Nobody's going to take time to look up something right before they jump on Microsoft Teams or go into Slack, we deliver it right in those profiles motivators or Values, which is like Hogan or Lomminger, those are usually 45 minutes to an hour with 40 page output. You're not going to get that insight at employees other than the top ten execs or top hundred of a 500,000 person company.
We are able to deliver insights around BMW. That's the framework behaviors, which is 90% of tools, motivators, which is the other 10%. But unlike other assessment tools, we even measure more in our short ten minutes, we measure work styles, which is how does the and work energizers, how does the environment and the people around you give energy or take it away. And so in ten minutes, we measure what nobody can do in an hour and we deliver it. Like Grammarly in your workflow. There's no tool on the planet that does that.
And it really does unleash more human Connection, better team collaboration and performance at scale in like a couple of days that would take Disk or Predictive Index or any other existing tool 100 years to get 5000 people using it that way every day.
Right. It helps you be more likable with your coworkers.
Right, it does. All the surveys we do in our tool and our platform, 90% of people believe that their boss subordinate relationship improves, that their team collaboration improves, and that engagement for that team and for the company, when you aggregate, it improves. So once you have an engagement survey and it shows there's issues, come use this to improve it all. This is the solution to making engagement surveys actionable.
Yeah. So you have a very cool technology. What is the story behind founding Humantelligence? Like, what was the catalyst that made you think this is the route we want to go?
Yeah. So I spent these 15 years working in different countries across multiple offices. So at Procter & Gamble I was working in Puerto Rico, in the US. And as a brand manager, you're constantly sending your results and your advertising campaign summaries around the world and also people, you're asking people for help. And so there's this kind of best case approach of learning that I was instantly, at the age of 22 to 26, exposed to how different cultures were around the world and communication styles and what it was actually. And PNG Procter & Gamble did a great job in exposing you to that.
And there wasn't really a tool to help you. Right. They did culture training. Where you're going to talk to France. This is the way French people are you're going to talk to China? Looking back, it's a joke. I mean, to say that all French people think and work the same way is like saying all Americans think and work the same way. You got to be kidding me, right? So that was the first kind of cross distributed experience.
And then working at Puma in Germany, and then around the world, same thing. Then decathalon working around the world. I worked in Brazil. I worked in Dubai. I worked in Germany, France. Five languages. I realized, oh, my gosh, all these major companies, communication and collaboration across offices is really tough. Right? And that was my first half of my career. And then I became a headhunter. Where I realized that my magic. And I became one of the top recruiters in the country. I was even invited onto The Apprentice with Donald Trump to replace George and to tell Donald Trump who to hire and fire.
Who would have known this guy would have been president? But at the time, back in 2010, I was seen as the best recruiter in the country. Right? And my magic wasn't so much finding resumes and matching skills. It was understanding where will there be friction between candidate and CEO or candidate and rest of team? That understanding that I just had it in an innate way. I knew you can't train. So are there tools out there? And that second half of my career, at the end of that 15 years as an Ed hunter, I was, like, looking for a tool that could help scale me.
How can I scale that match so I could do it en masse? And so the first iteration of Humantelligence was actually I found a psychometric tool that measured all these things in the shortest time. So quickly, I could get hundreds, thousands of people to take it. Companies wouldn't worry about giving it because it wasn't too cumbersome. And then we would use it to hire better for executive teams. And the masses at scale did that for three, four years. It was great. The tool proved out to be the best in the market.
However, COVID came and COVID demolished any products that were about recruiting. Nobody was going to recruit, so we lost all of our revenue. But then all the clients had, juan, can you use that psychometric tool? All the interview questions and all the insights you guys provide that would be great for actually existing employees to just work better together. And so I thought about all those years of all the distributed work I had done across countries and offices and I'm like, oh my gosh, COVID's great for this business if I can build the tool and morph it into a collaboration tool that solves this problem of distributed collaboration. So I don't really say remote or hybrid anymore.
I think you could be back to work across 15 offices and 1000 employees. If you don't know those people, it doesn't matter that you're quote back to work, you're distributed. And so I looked up into it and there's a million, 1.2 million companies that have 1000 employees across offices and or countries. That is where my experience came from, where I knew I could develop a solution to really crack that bezel. And it's been great.
Yeah. So what would you say is the big challenge or problem that you see HR departments facing today?
Well, a lot of them talk about engagement, right? Engagement for several reasons. One, the whole COVID going remote and then asking people to go hybrid and now back to work. I mean, how do you get people engaged when they just experience 12 hours of life again every week, right? The 1 hour commute each way, five days a week, that's 10 hours plus another two or 3 hours that they were wasting. They can now do all their same work and have more of a life. To tell them to give that up is hard once you've taken a bite out of the apple. So engagement has gone down for that reason.
Engagement has gone down because of generational differences, right? The 55 year old, I'm almost 55, the 55 year old and the 22 year old, they use different tools to communicate, different styles of communicate. Employees are no longer feeling like an assembly line resource. The balance of power between company employee is no longer one way. It should be an equal thing and that is really putting a strain on engagement.
So that's hurting collaboration. For about two years, team collaboration was the number one search on SEO when you did the research and Google by heads of HR because how do you get and this is for larger companies, but you get to a thousand people and more. The critical success of that company is how do you get the middle management and how do you get teams to work cross functionally? Because it becomes less about the individual when you're 1000 people or more and becomes more about teams and multiple teams and getting the most out of those teams quickly.
And so that is a real challenge when people are in different offices and companies becoming much more cross functional, much more cross office, more complex. And so having teams on demand and managing those teams and leading those teams is not easy. And so those are the things. The biggest elephant in the room is sourcing candidates, right? Today everybody wants to get paid a ton of money, people can get a job anywhere.
So I'm no longer restricted in my own city. To get a job. I can get a job anywhere. So it makes it harder for companies to find the candidate. You would think it's easier because they can search anywhere in the country, but the people that they had working for them now can go and find a job anywhere. So there's this revolving door which is just hard for both companies and candidates. It's kind of like the New York dating scene. There's so much opportunity out there.
Nobody ever gets married in New York. And today 75% of New Yorkers in Manhattan are single. Northern city has more than 21% single that live alone. So the job world of sourcing candidates finding a match is like the New York dating scene, which is really miserable after the age of 40.
That's a great analogy and I think it's a tough time to be in HR. There's been a lot of challenges, especially in the last few years that have been thrown at them that's like, hey, can you make sure our employees are happy? Can you make sure that they stay for a long term? Can you make sure that we're not spending so much on new employees coming in that we can't afford to take care of our existing employees?
It's a challenging time.
I would say the HR function is the most complex function of all the functions. The only other one that's gone through massive change is marketing. Marketing used to be about branding and over the last 15 years it's become demand gen. But everyone's so overwhelmed with digital marketing that now how do you cut through that? So I think marketing is also really tough. How do you get in front of someone these days that has no time for anything and can block any message they don't want to hear? So I think HR and marketing are the two most complex functions.
Finance, I used to place finance executives. Finance hasn't changed tremendously, right. Supply chain changed a ton when tech hit in the 2000 2010. But a lot of those systems now do everything for you. And now generative AI is going to make it even easier. Whereas I think generative AI makes HR really complicated.
Yeah, for sure. And it's definitely a rising star. I mean, the AI is kind of popping up in a lot of technologies now. So as you think about Humantelligence, what would you say is your company's unique point of view in the market?
Like our differentiator versus other products?
Yeah, I mean there's a lot of solutions out there right. That one could argue are created for collaboration and engaging employees, things like that. And whether you're a direct competitor with them or not, oftentimes HR leaders and finance leaders are evaluating your solution against those other options. Like how do you position it, why choose Humantelligence versus someone else?
Yeah, so I won't name it, but there's only one other company that does exactly what we do and we've never lost to them. They don't have their own assessment so they can't integrate to the workflow of the employee. So when I say where an assessment meets Grammarly in the workflows now meets generative AI, they don't have the Grammarly workflow component and they definitely don't have the generative AI component. They never can do those two.
But they have a lot more marketing money than us, so they're probably more well known than us. So I can do about that. But there is the whole elf in the room assessment. So every company of 1000 employees or more do use personality assessments and they've probably gone through the really painful process of getting certified, of doing programs and workshops and all that heavy investment over the last ten years.
A lot of them probably feel scared to give that up because that's what they put so much of their self worth into. For those people, I say, hey, go with the next generation product, stay with those but for a fraction of the price. Instead of just using those products for five or 10% of your employees, also use our tool for the other 95% of employees. So we have many companies that use predictive index for let's say 500 execs and then for the other 5000 people they use our tool.
So assessment tools in general aren't going to disappear. But if you find value in what they do, then you'll find infinite incredible value in what we do. Because what we do, what they do, we do faster and can scale to all employees. And it's used every day and every week in every meeting. And so that's a big differentiator. Where there's value on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, none of the other assessment tools have that value.
I think general collaboration tools. I mean, there is the big line item budget of we bought Microsoft Teams, we bought Cisco Webex, we bought Slack. These are all collaboration tools. So people might think, oh, why should I listen to Juan Bettencourt and Humantelligence? We already have a collaboration tool. We are a plugin that sits on top of all of your tools. So for those people who are thinking we already checked that box, no, we make your tools better. So just like the BASF commercial from the 80s, they didn't make products you use, they made them better.
We don't make the collaboration platforms you use and that you've already invested a lot of money in. We just make them better and more useful so you get your return on your investment. Because what's the purpose of getting a Microsoft Teams meeting if everyone's pissed off at each other and the meeting's not effective? Our tool goes right into that during the meeting and it guarantees that that meeting is more effective. So it's really kind of getting the most out of your existing tools. That's something else that none of our competing products can do.
So I've heard you say a few times now companies with 1000 employees. Tell us who is the perfect fit for your solution?
Companies that have knowledge workers that are working cross functionally, that are distributed in either multiple offices or multiple floors. We basically don't see everybody and don't know everybody. Companies that invest in their people, that already understand the importance of talent development, where they want their people to grow, where they want teams to collaborate better, where they have a head of talent management or head of talent development. Right.
Those are the bullseye. So professional Services. We've already signed Accenture. We have meetings with Bouzon and Hamilton, with BCG and several other consulting firms. Healthcare. We've signed UnitedHealthcare signed Baptist. Health chen Med. These are all companies that are fast growing and quite successful software engineers. Imagine all the software engineers in distributed countries all over the world.
So that's a bullseye. Financial services, Fortune 500 that believe in diversity, equity and inclusion and belonging. Because our tool also helps everyone understand each other better, reduce the friction in work styles and how people like to collaborate, it actually changes the mindset so that people do become more open and more sensitive to race and gender as well. If they're already taking into account anyone in the way they work, they'll also be more open to gender and race differences.
So those are kind of like the companies. Company less than 500 because we charge on an annual basis, less value is under 500. There's less cross functional work, there's less complexity where you need different people from different perspectives and you're probably not growing and hiring a lot. So where there's a lot of change in the membership of the composition of teams is where we play a lot.
Got you. And what impact have you seen organizations that work with Humantelligence experience?
Yeah, so we measure lots of different things. So some of the impact that we've measured in terms of email communication efficiency, we've improved it by 34% in meeting productivity, 27%. And improvement in the team's overall productivity, 22%. So those are some of the measured results that we've had from our tool. Some adoption numbers we get about 80% of people take the assessment to get onboarded with a couple more emails, it gets up to 89%.
So usually 89% are using the tool. We see over the course of a quarter, it stabilizes. At about 80% of people are using our tool and they use it every month an average of 15 to 20 times. So it's kind of a usage like LinkedIn, where if you're at a big company, you're not going to LinkedIn for every single email you write. But if there's an email where there's three VPs and you're going to ask them for approval for something, you've never met them, you will go to LinkedIn to see their profile, to get some kind of angle on any connection. Oh, you know, someone I know well, imagine understanding how they like to receive information.
Same if you're presenting in a meeting on Microsoft Teams, you're going to a meeting on Zoom, and there's a calendar invite, and there's two people in that meeting. One's a decision maker. You're going to go to LinkedIn to see their info. You'll click that Humantelligence button in that case. So people use LinkedIn 15 to 20 times a month for their own internal employees. That's about the same usage you'll see with our tool as well, and for the same reason.
Okay. And that makes sense because obviously, if I'm working with Sandy on a daily basis, after I kind of learn her personality, I don't need to check it every time.
Right. That's why small companies under 400 people, you're basically working with the same seven or eight people every day, and you never so our tool is not as powerful. For the first month it is, but then why would they pay us a monthly fee per we charge between one dollars and $5 per person per month. So the smaller the company, the more expensive that becomes.
Totally makes sense. So what is the future vision for Humantelligence?
Yeah, future vision is this generative AI, at least in the short term, you don't even have to read tips. Imagine you just write the way you want to write, and boom, it changes when you push our button, gets rewritten based on the engineering prompting we've done on the filter of how that person likes to receive information. It's akin to when you go to a foreign country. Now, there are these ear pods you can put in your ears when you go to that foreign country. The way you do it now is you take your translation book, right? Or you have them talking to your phone and translate it right there, and then you read it. Well, that's the way it is today for both language when you travel. But now with travel, you put an EarPod in, and when the person speaks you in Chinese in Beijing, you're hearing English.
I know it sounds crazy. There were millions of people who learned Chinese so that they could go and communicate and become closer and more human connection with Chinese people from the US. Let's say. Now no one needs to learn Chinese. It sounds kind of lazy and very millennial and gen z. But now you just go to China, put this thing in, and it just translates for you. That is going to happen with all communication and collaboration at companies.
There will be tools like ours where, yes, I would love for everyone to become more emotionally intelligent and for everyone to learn about Deanna Shimota and everyone to learn about Juan Betancourt. Everybody to learn. But at the end of the day, that's a lot of learning. And what if we live in a world where you just write the way you like to write, and it gets rewritten and sent out the way the person likes to receive it. You go into a meeting, instead of you guessing how to run the meeting, you're getting tips that are saying, hey, Juan, Shannon hasn't spoken and she's very shy.
You might want to call on her, but she hasn't spoken. And everybody else has spoken an average of three times. So tips that make every meeting leader a better meeting leader makes every meeting more inclusive. So all of this real time, without even having to think, is the future where it will, like you said, reduce friction and make every meeting better. Make every team more agile, make every team perform better, make every company more agile.
Accenture calls our tool the Healthy Team Toolkit, because every team has a sense of well being and everybody understands each other. Just like an individual needs well being, so does the team. And that's one of the reasons why Accenture is looking to resell our platform. They believe every team in the world needs a product like this. So, yes, the future is LinkedIn is not just what you've done, but it's also who you are.
So this is a tool that everyone will have on the back of the resume, right? Everybody should know each other's behaviors, motives and work styles. Somebody says, Deanna, who are you? You don't read your LinkedIn. You're more likely to say, I'm somebody who's very direct, who's very open and transparent. You're talking about how you are and how you like to resonate with others. Not, here are my statistics and my graduate degree and my GPA.
Today, the world's too focused on the LinkedIn content. What lets people succeed and be happy at work and in life is the psychology of how we can all connect. And so this will be a standard product on LinkedIn around the world. So today our product is only for internal because we actually have to have people take it. We're working on a product called My Guru for college and career. It's a free app. You can go to the App Store or Android and download it.
No marketing. We're getting 500 downloads a day. It basically gives the assessment to young high school kids and college kids to help them with their careers and help them understand themselves and social dynamics and their friends. We believe, and we give that out for free. Everyone should already have. I mean, it's part of a person's, right? A self awareness tool that everybody gets. And that tool, then all that data is going to flow between companies. So right now it's only internal. But down the road, you'll be able to use this tool for any interaction with anybody at any company.
Imagine on dating sites. One day you find someone you're really interested in. Instead of guessing on how to write, it tells you how to land the best to communicate with them. What do you do when you get married? And when you date someone? You learn how that person likes to. Connect. And I've been married five years, and boy, have I changed how I present information and connect to my wife, because I want to optimize that relationship.
Some people I've heard someone say, oh, well, that's fake. No, it's called adapting to others. And everyone coming to the middle. That's what relationships are. We do it in our personal life. This tool allow everyone to do it in their professional life. Imagine going to a doctor's office. They pull up your insurance information and then it pulls up your personality, and it matches with the one nurse who's going to connect with you. If you're a chatterbox, they'll give you the nurse that's a chatterbox.
If you don't want to connect with a nurse and you don't want to speak, they'll bring you somebody who's very reflective and not speak. Same with an Uber driver. You'll be able to pick Uber drivers based on you connect with insurance companies will be able to figure out who's higher risk because of their personality. Personalization of learning. All the LMS systems will be better at companies because now you don't just train everybody a company one way.
Some people like group learning. Some people like self study. Some people like lots of information. Some people like cliff notes, right? A tool like ours allows everyone to understand who learns better and how. Same with schools and universities. They'll be able to accept students that will succeed in this. So instead of just applying to schools that look good on your resume, you'll apply to schools where other people learn like you and that you'll fit in and you'll be successful reducing attrition rates and turnover rates. So imagine if psychometrics become part of the everyday flow in everyday life. Everyone will find jobs and happiness much faster. Everyone will be learned faster and better, and everybody will have better relationships, be less firings, less divorces.
Everybody much more happy. I call our HR tool the happiness app. I mean, it really does lead to ultimate happiness of employees and employers because their companies outperform the competition. That does not use our tool.
Yeah, wow. I mean, the application sound like it's pretty endless. And it'll be so interesting to see over the next ten to 20 years how all of this plays out. As we wrap up this episode, what final thoughts do you want to leave our audience with.
In HR technology is becoming key to success for every HR buyer out there. And in the past, HR could rely on a few vendors that they knew and brands that they knew. Today, there are so many best of breed over 20,000 software companies. In HR tech, there are so many best of breed products that they might not ever have heard of. They should either hire someone to focus on going through all the options or just spend a lot more time themselves.
But to just go with the big three workday success factors. UK would be the biggest disservice to your company because there are so many amazing technologies, including Humantelligence, but many, many that are not Humantelligence in so many realms that will make their companies better places to work and make their more engaged employees and higher performing and save more money. And those companies often don't have $100 million in funding, but they're there and their products work and they're scalable. And it doesn't have to be a big software company and it can scale to 5000 employees.
Software is scalable. You don't have to have the same number of employees in a software vendor to say, oh, we're this big, so we can service you. We're a small company, we're servicing a 700,000 person company, 30,000 person company. So just give the smaller, best of breed HR tech vendors a chance. I mean, there's a reason why Accenture picked us. There's a reason why Coca Cola did. There's a reason why HRO today called us the most innovative culture and team collaboration product out.
That's that's probably the biggest advice I'd give know there's some great technology, but it just takes time to find them.
Well said and I totally agree. Juan Betancourt, thanks for sharing your time with us on the HR Tech Spotlight. For those listening, don't forget to check out Humantelligence's website to learn more about them. And we hope you'll tune in again to learn about more innovative HR technology companies and the stories behind them in our future episodes.
Thanks so much. Deanna.
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 growthmodemarketing.com or reach out to me, Deanna Shimota on LinkedIn. And if you found this show informative subscribe, connect with us on social media and leave a review.
This is Deanna with GrowthMode Marketing signing off. Thanks for listening. We hope you'll tune in again next time.