Hiring the right talent and fostering a success-centered workplace culture can have a great impact on the business outcomes and overall health of an organization.
Fortay — a Digital Transformation Award nominee in the SME Enterprise or Sector Transformation category — is on a mission to transform, using science, how companies hire the right talent for their organizations. To that end, they have developed a patent pending culture-first platform that helps companies build and retain successful teams and cultures.
“Scaling culture is the biggest challenge facing leadership teams,” Fortay Co-founder Marlina Kinnersley writes in her nomination form. “Bad hires cost organizations two to three times an employee’s salary, resulting in massive losses in productivity.”
“Our platform solves the problem of poor talent-to-company fits by measuring people’s values against a company’s cultural fingerprint,” she continues. “This results in a huge increase in hiring efficiency, improved performance and retention, and more team diversity.”
Fortay’s platform empowers managers to nurture culture-first teams with analytics.
“With our platform, a company’s culture can be measured — hiring can then happen against that, which in the end means longer retention,” she writes. “In five to eight minutes, up front in the recruiting process, our cultural algorithm identifies strongly aligned talent who will add to an organization’s culture, be highly engaged, and remain happy and productive longer. All of this while maximizing diversity in all forms.”
Fortay’s founders have developed a way of emulating the interview-based cultural alignment process: the company uses a machine learning algorithm that determines a business’s unique cultural fingerprint based on data supplied by the company’s best employees, Kinnersley writes. Once that fingerprint is determined, Fortay uses the results to assess potential candidates, producing cultural-alignment scores based on the information provided.
“Our Culture Analytics component is based on a recurring SaaS model based on employee size for mid-market and enterprise customers,” she writes. “After analyzing the ‘culture fingerprints’ of numerous companies for tens of thousands of candidates, we have determined that every company is a “cultural snowflake.’ This creates the potential for a culture-first marketplace where candidates are actively matched on a basis of relative cultural alignment.”
Fortay’s customers have one or both of the following attributes, Kinnersley writes:
- A vibrant culture that they don’t want to dilute or destroy via the rapid growth of their employee base;
- A dissonant culture, with pockets of ideal behaviours and values, that needs to be encouraged and nurtured through a curated cultural profile.
The company’s secret sauce is that its platform can support both situations, however disparate they may seem.
“We offer the first holistic platform that enables companies to scale and evolve their cultures based on its most effective team members,” Kinnsersley writes. “We can demonstrably reduce turnover by up to 50 per cent, which creates a paradigm that leads to dramatic increases in productivity — over 20 per cent — improved financial metrics, and overall company growth.”
Fortay has been (and is being) used by growing companies to double or even triple their people growth, she adds.