(upbeat jazzy music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios today for a CUBE conversation. You know, every place we go, a lot of the conversation is about the future of work. And oftentimes it's really in the context of the tools, whether Slack, or Asana, or Facebook Groups, everybody's trying to get into this. But there's a lot more to the future of work and is really about talent, to getting talent, a hyper-competitive talent space, it's about culture, and ethics, and morals, and especially some of the stuff that we've seen recently, with what happened at Wells Fargo, and obviously what's goin' on at Facebook. There's a much more complicated part of the story in terms of the people side, and we're excited to have somebody who's applying kind of AI, and all the technology that we talk about all the time with the shows to culture, and so for the first time, we'd like to welcome Mitch Gudgeon. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of TalentFit AI. Mitch, great to see you. >> Hey, nice to see you Jeff. Thanks for having me here today. >> Absolutely! So before we get into it, because a lot of fun stuff, just give people kind of the quick overview of what you guys are all about at TalentFit AI. >> Yeah, definitely. So we make it easy to find the right person for your context, so your culture of your organization. Basically we take an evidence-based approach to calibrating your culture, and then quantifying culture fit, so you're actually reduce bias for the hiring process, at least through the phases that we take you through, and then ultimately you end up saving time, energy, money hiring and retaining the right people. >> So it's both the culture at the company, and then then it's the culture for the applicant, and trying to make a match. >> Yeah, basically matching their ideal cultures, so what they want to get, their sort of fundamental values, their needs, the norms that they have, and then matching that to what the company actually has internally, not what's necessarily written on the wall for-- >> Right. (laughs) I was going to say. I would imagine the first big point of conversation, what so you do a culture assessment at a company, do you come at it from the company point of view? Or more from the employee applicant point of view? >> Yeah, so we actually start by calibrating the culture by understanding what the culture is across the organization based on employee feedback. From that, we're able to extract that. We use some validation stuff, based on performance, based on, you know, engagement scores, other things like that. And then from there, anybody's an applicant who's applying, we can actually help them actually, or help the company actually assess, do they actually fit this company culture or not-- >> Right. So I would imagine it's kind of like reputation, right? You think your reputation is not what you say it is, it's what people talk about when you're not in the room. And I would imagine when you're doing kind of a culture assessment, there's one just figuring it out, but I got to guess that there's a lot of times where the culture data that you collect based on real data, doesn't necessarily match what maybe the leadership team of the company thinks it is. >> Yeah, it's actually funny. That's kind of the inspiration for why I even started this company in the first place, is I actually finished my MBA and joined a company, and for me it was like, we went through the hiring process, did all the due diligence, and realized once I joined the team that, my ideal culture wasn't exactly what the culture was in the organization, not saying it was a bad culture, just saying it wasn't the right place for me. >> Right. >> And (mumbles) you know had the right personality traits and what not to do well in the role, at the same time I wasn't able to actually sort of feel that I got what I needed from the company, and then probably from me too, so, you know, it's one of those things. We help you basically not go into the wrong situation where you're not in a good place to succeed too. >> Right. And do you talk about a bunch of things that kind of determine culture, so there's the plaque on the wall, you know, as you walk in the front door, but it's really, and you outline it a bunch on your... it's the norms, it's the behavior, it's how people are rewarded. So there's a bunch of real discrete things that you guys can measure through your process that actually define culture in a way that you can put numbers on it, and you can compare Culture A to Culture B. >> Yeah. >> What do you see as some of the most important things, or where do people usually miss between what they think is the culture and where they execute the culture? >> Yeah, it kind of varies from company to company. So we use a thing called the cultural signature, this is saying that you and I can both sign a check, hopefully both our checks are going to actually pass and they won't bounce, but your signature is no better than mine, mine is no better than yours, it's just unique, right? To your own situation. And sometimes you'll see that leadership especially may not be in touch with what the culture of the organization actually is based on their employees' feedback. And so this is what we kind of do, it's kind of like understanding what the culture is, seeing those gaps between what leadership thinks and what it actually is, and then leadership, if they do care about culture, which most of our customers would, they can start making those appropriate changes to get to their aspirational state if they want to. >> Right. And then when we first started were getting ready to do this interview and I was thinking to myself, well wait, if you're just bringing in people that kind of fit the culture, are you just kind of going birds of a feather, are you missing the opportunity of what's so important right now in terms of diversity, diversity of opinion, diversity of background, diversity of point of view. But you're saying personality fit and culture fit are two very different things. So how do you look at the difference between personality and getting diversity in the company, which is good, versus getting cultural misfit, which is not good? >> Yeah exactly. So yeah they're definitely very different things, and there are some ties to it, but you think of people often associate with culture fit as hey I can sit down and have a beer with you or we talked to a couple of companies like hey, are you a gamer? Then you'll be able to work with us because you fit our culture. But that's not really what it is, right? At the end of the day it's about these fundamental values that you have within your organization. You know, what you actually want out of the organization, and that it's matching your needs. So and we actually have an advisor who's one of the top diversity inclusion people in Canada for a global organization, and she's also helping us through this process of ensuring auditing our algorithm, making sure that we're taking the right steps, and managing and ensuring that the we're tracking demographic data, so that we actually do not have bias in our algorithm at the end of the day. So, it's kind of where were going. >> Yeah, so I'm curious about where the bounds of the culture in terms of number of people, if you will. So, there's obviously, do we fit as an employer and employee? You get along with your boss, you have a culture. There's your group that you're intimately involved with, who you work with with day to day, whether that's, I don't know, six people, 10 people, I'm curious if there's a natural bound, and then maybe you're part of a department, and obviously if you work at a company like Amazon, just to pick a name out of the hat, they have over 600,000 people. So where the limits of culture, or can they successfully span from all the way at the top, all the way down to those little micro groups? >> Yeah, so usually we think of it as there's core culture to the organization, and that's kind of things that are aligned across the entire organization, right? So you think of person organization fit is how they define it in their research. You get into things like person group fit, so this could be the specific team you work on, and there's also cultures with the sub-cultures in the teams, so the way we've built our algorithm is actually taking and being inspired by pieces of research, that actually look at group fit, look at organization fit, and then be able to match people effectively sort of both of those. >> So you try to look at it all. But at the end of the day, is your probability of success within an organization more determined by that kind of close intimate group? Or the bigger group because then maybe you find a different path if that immediate group doesn't work for you. >> Yes. >> What do you find? Yes, so right now we're still pretty early stage, right? So we're going to be tracking stats and seeing how people actually fit to the overall organization, how they fit to the groups. Right now we're doing matching to specific groups and teams, because there are sub-cultures within the organization. Those teams will still have those core values of the organization too, but things like their leader may be a bit different, the way they manage their people, right? So that's kind of what we're looking at right now. >> And do you find that senior leadership really understands the importance of culture? Because you mention it in some of your posts on your website, and some of the articles that you reference that culture can be a great asset, right? Then view Patty McCord with the work she did at Netflix is, you know, kind of legendary, and everyone goes to that deck, it's 127 page slides. I don't like slides, I went through the whole deck, it's amazing. But it can also be a real negative. It can be a real problem, and does leadership understand that to the point where they're making the investments to make sure that culture is a asset and not a liability? >> Yeah, and I think it's changing a lot. I think it used to be leadership kind of set the direction, and you kind of had to listen to what was going on, and you had to abide by the rules of the culture, and if you didn't you're kind of gone. You know, I think that's shifting a lot, because people are more attracted to organizations that they know they fit the culture, they feel they align with the culture. They're more likely to accept job offers, they're likely to actually take a pay cut even, a lot of the research is showing. So I think those are factors that are coming into the equation now, and companies are realizing that if we want to attract the top talent, great. Everyone can pay X amount of money, right, for a candidate to join. Now at the same time, if you're being recruited by five different firms, and they're all offering the same pay, what's your differentiator, right? And so culture can be a differentiator and people, and especially leaders I think are realizing it can be a competitive advantage, right? It's going back to this whole talk of like culture eats strategy for breakfast, right? >> Right. >> And I think that's an important thing to think about is that I think companies are buying into that more than ever now. >> Right. But ultimately it's about execution, right? You got to execute it, you got to walk the walk, and talk the talk. And clearly, when it works well, it works really well, and one of the examples we use around here, just because it's so easy and in your face is the Warriors, right? Perennial losing organization, Lose lose lose lose lose. They get a change at the top, before you know it, they're the premiere kind of brand in the NBA right now, and that's really been top down, driven by Joe Lacob, all the way down to the players. But I wonder, is it more of a stick or more of a carrot? Is it because employers now have to do this, because the employment market is so tight? Is it because they're trying to get the younger kids who are coming out of the school who are much more mission driven than maybe I was when I got out of school? I just wanted to get a job and get going. Or are they really thinking more holistically, kind of lifetime value of that employment relationship with these people? >> I think it's a bit of both, to be honest. I think they obviously see the benefit from the hey we can attract the top people here, but they also see the business benefit of it now too, right? And I think that's the one thing that is often forgotten in the past. And I love the example of the Warriors, right? And I think this is one thing that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts is another... I like using these kind of phrases, right? >> Right. >> But the Warriors is a great example because they have five A players on their team, if you want to call them A players, and they're able to work together for the most part, although earlier in this season they had some issues with their culture, and if you probably look at the winning record there, it was actually pretty low probably during those when they're having issues internally. So I think it's one of those things. You can also help players even level up, so it's like you don't have to recruit that A player every time, you can actually make a B Player on the right team that they fit into turn into this kind of A player in that situation and that context. >> Yeah, last question, before I let you go, because I think it's another interesting thing that's happening is this blurring between professional life and your regular life, and we've seen it with hours, right? Nobody's working eight to five anymore, because you've got meetings with Europe, you've got meetings with Asia Pacific, you've got meetings with the East Coast from here, so people are on and off the meetings all the time, you're on and off your phone, you're getting Slack notifications all through the day. And at the same time, people want their employees to be engaged and feel part of that. They want them to retweet the company line, but they won't necessarily give them the rights to retweet in the name of the company. So how do you see the motivation of people and this blurring between professional and personal life, and yet companies want employees that are bought in, that are kind of emotionally vested, into these mission driven cultures? Do you see more conflict there? Is it working, or what should people be thinking about? >> Yeah I think it really comes down to what people want at the end of the day too, right? If you don't want to be in tapped in all the time, then you probably don't want to fit with that, or you're probably not going to fit with that kind of organizational culture. And there's lots of other companies out there that may be not like that, for instance. So I think it's one of those things. You really just have to understand like what do you value as an individual? What is a company's value? And then, how do those things align for you? And do you want to be on your phone 24/7, or do you want to... and have the flexibility you know to be able to take holidays when you want? Or do you want that nine to five job that's more structured? And so what we're doing is giving that transparency to both the job seeker and the company now, to say like hey is it a fit right up front? And if it is, okay let's start taking you through the hiring process, and then if you don't? That's okay with us, because we're both not going to benefit from this. It's a two-sided street, right? So it's building that transparency and helping people find a place that they'll ideally match with. >> Right, well Mitch it's really an interesting story, and we didn't really talk about deep into the AI, but you guys are using big science and big data to try to basically increase the probability of success, because a miss is expensive for both sides. >> Yes, it's really costly, right? It's, you know some of the estimates can be up to three times salary is what it's costs when you make a bad hire. Companies, I think it was like 85% of companies say they've made a bad hire in the last year. And from the job seekers' side it's like they're more likely to accept job offers, even at lower pay from companies that they feel they align with the values of the organization. It would be pretty nice now to be able to say like hey, you actually align and the data shows this too. This is all based in top tier research too. >> Right Mitch, well thanks for sharing your story. We'll keep an eye as you keep growing and best of luck to you and the team. >> Awesome, thanks Jeff. I really appreciate you having me today. >> Alright. He's Mitch, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at our Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat jazzy music)