You're exploring deep space on an excursion to an alien planet. The engine on your scout ship fails and another crew will arrive in five days to fix it. What are you most likely to do while you wait?
PLUS: Weirdly chief executive Dale Clareburt t
Click the NBR Radio box for on-demand special feature audio to hear Dale Clareburt talking about GridAKL
You’re exploring deep space on an excursion to an alien planet. The engine on your scout ship fails and another crew will arrive in five days to fix it. What are you most likely to do while you wait?
A: Create a safe base for you and your team, then contact your captain to gain further instructions on next steps.
B: Create a safe base for you and your team, then use extra time to continue to collect samples from the planet.
That was part of a recruitment quiz Auckland start-up Weirdly put together for one of its clients, Xero.
To have a shot at working for Rod Drury, applicants would have had to answer “B” – for Xero was looking for a candidate with initiative and leadership potential.
Such psychometric testing isn’t new. It’s been a mainstay of the corporate hiring process for decades.
Weirdly’s twist is that it puts an online quiz at the front of the recruitment process. A Weirdly quiz might be the first thing you fill in after responding to a job ad, or seeing a role promoted on social media.
There can be a psycho-analysis element, but overall it’s lighter and more fun; the aim of a Weirdly quiz is usually to gauge if a person is a good fit for your company’s culture.
Weirdly began life two years ago as a tool used in a small recruitment agency. Now it’s a company and a cloud-based service in its own right, sold by monthly subscription (from $39 for small companies to $399 for large).
As of Monday this week it had 734 customers, including marquee names like BNZ, Fletcher Building, Spark and Vend.
Earlier this year, Lance Wiggs’ Punakaiki fund became the first outside investor, tipping $250,000 into Weirdly for an 18.6% stake.
ABOVE: Weirdly co-founders: Dale Clareburt, Simon Martin, Keren Phillips and Hayden Raw
Weirdly’s four founders own most of the balance: Dale Clareburt (chief executive), Simon Martin (chief sales officer), Keren Phillips (chief marketing officer) and Hayden Raw (chief product officer). Ms Clareburt and Mr Martin have almost 30 years’ recruitment experience between them, and can advise companies on setting the right questions for a Weirdly quiz. The company also offers banks of pre-written questions, matched to the candidate traits you’re seeking (Ms Phillips is a fount of information herself about left-field questions that could be revealing. Do you chew your nails? Or walk fast? Both are traits of good salespeople, in the Weirdly crew’s experience.)
But Weirdly is principally about the technology side of things, from making it easy to create a quiz and get it out there on the internet, to managing and comparing responses and interacting with candidates.
Where does it fit into the recruitment eco-system? Does it complement or compete with recruitment companies?
“We complement them generally,” Ms Phillips says. “We’re used by a lot of inhouse recruiters at big companies and we’re also used by a few small recruiters with their own client network to help complement their service
“That said, the reality of life is New Zealand is a nation of small businesses, and most small businesses can’t afford the services of a recruitment professional so some of our users are using Weirdly as a replacement. And for them we’re a cheap, fast option.”
Fletcher Building’s brave campaign
One of Weirdly’s hero campaigns – still under way – is being run by Fletcher Building.
The company has adopted strict key performance indicators around equal opportunity employment.
It asked Weirdly to create an entirely blind recruitment campaign for a number of positions across its organisation suited to recent graduates.
Weirdly created a quiz that was featured on iPads at a roadshow. It didn’t capture name or address or faces or gender or any identifying information about those candidates (or at least Weirdly collected that information but Fletcher Building’s recruitment team couldn’t see it). About 2000 grads took the quiz.
Fletcher then whittled that down to 100 and used psychometric testing to reduce it again to 50. Those 50 were asked to submit a quick video answering a question about their skills, with morphing technology used to mask their identity. They were then culled to 30 who will go forward to traditional job interviews, their full identities finally revealed.
The idea of the blind quiz was to remove any unconscious bias.
“It’s a big, brave move from quite a conservative company in a conservative industry,” Ms Phillips says.
Fletcher has been really happy with the response, she says, both in terms of the quality of the candidates and the flood of applicants in the initial wave, which was far higher than previous campaigns.
On a more everyday level, Weirdly offers a place to file potential employees.
“The good people you want to hire are popping up in your inbox all the time,” Ms Phillips says.
“They might be a really clever, outgoing charismatics student who jumps in and says ‘I’m just about to finish my degree and I’m looking for an opportunity to intern’ or ‘I’m coming back to the country after six years in the UK and I love what you guys are doing and I want to work with you.’ We all get hit up a lot by people like that and we never really know what to do with them. Then when a role comes up three months later you find them in your inbox.”
The idea is you get them to all take a Weirdly quiz, then file their responses ready for the next time a position comes up.
Some companies are also using Weirdly as a marketing tool, spraying quizzes on to Twitter and Facebook in part to look for recruits, and in part just to make a statement about their company culture. Vend is a classic example (and, not uncoincidentally, also until recently home of social media recruitment pioneer and Weirdly investor Kirsti Grant).
What’s next?
Weirdly should reach break-even by April next year, Ms Phillips says. At that point, it will look to raise its first serious money with a Series A investment round.
“We’ll be looking overseas for funding,” the CMO says.
“That’s not to say we’ll be edging New Zealand investors out. It’s just that we’re expanding into international markets physically so it’s logical to have some investors in that market as well.”
Although Weirdly subscriptions are sold through the cloud, the company wants boots on the ground as it expands offshore.
Ms Phillips recently returned from a scouting trip to the US, where she sees San Francisco and Austin as possible locations for an office. The UK and Canada are also on Weirdly’s radar, purely because some early customers have come from those countries (most are New Zealand companies at this point).
Weirdly – current staff seven – will also use the new funds to hire more staff, mainly in software development and marketing. And, yes, it will be eating its own dogfood.
Click the NBR Radio box for on-demand special feature audio to hear Dale Clareburt talking about GridAKL. BELOW: inside GridAKL
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