Photo courtesy of Work-Bench.com
Photo courtesy of Work-Bench.com

Meet the founder and CEO of Pymetrics

What if those BuzzFeed personality games you spend so many hours on could be used to help your job search? Luckily for you, there is now.

The startup company Pymetrics has developed a way for companies to know all your strengths and weaknesses without even meeting you.

Developed by two neurologists from Harvard, Pymetrics was born with the intent of making the job search easier, more efficient and more successful for both the company and the applicant. It’s also amazingly easy to use. At first, it seems similar to LinkedIn — you create a profile and upload your résumé for companies to see. What is unique about Pymetrics, however, is that you play games. There is a series of 20 games that you play that gauge reaction time, response to failure, aptitude to level of risk, ability to work in a team and competitiveness. The games are so simple, it is impossible to lie or rig them. Once you finish, Pymetrics calculates which career would be best suited for your particular strengths and weaknesses. This, along with your résumé and self-assessments, are all listed on your profile for companies to view.

Another way Pymetrics is unique is that companies can project “ideal results” for the games on Pymetrics. Often companies will have their top performers/employees play these games and report the scores on their company profile. This is extremely useful because Pymetrics then matches you with companies that best utilize your specific strengths. Pymetrics would help the typical college student searching for their first job out of college because it levels the playing field between them and other, older applicants with past work experience on their resume.

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Though it has been a short time, Pymetrics has already been nationally recognized by Forbes magazine, NPR and many other notable sources. Additionally, 60+ companies use Pymetrics for recruitment. Located in Manhattan, Pymetrics has the capability to become extremely successful and useful in the task of successful matching employees with companies, and has an incredible and unique platform that allows them to grow and infiltrate almost every industry.

I was able to interview the founder and CEO of Pymetricss, Frida Polli. Polli has spoken at MIT and Harvard, appeared on CNN, and contributes on career and entrepreneurship to Forbes. She was also named a Robert Kaplan Life Science Fellow by Harvard Business School. Before founding Pymetrics, Frida was an award-winning neuroscientist at Harvard and MIT. Frida has an MBA from Harvard, a PhD from Suffolk and a BA from Dartmouth. In adddition to being CEO of Pymetrcs, Polli is mother to an 8-year-old daughter.

How did you come up with the idea of Pymetrics?

I knew I didn’t want to work in a lab for the rest of my life, so I decided to get my MBA. I realized, while in business school, that cognitive neuroscience has not expanded from the lab, and I wanted to use my experience with neuroscience in the business world. I got the specific idea for pymetics because as I was searching for a new career, I realized it would be helpful to use cognitive neuroscience tests to test what career is the best fit on a physiological level. I got some good reviews from peers in my class, and Pymetrics was created.

What were some challenges you faced when starting up the company?

There were two main challenges in creating the company. First was the challenge of making sure the science behind the company was valid and actually helped the consumer get connected with a company. We spent two years testing and researching which cognitive and emotional traits are the most important to professionals in HR and interviews, and how significant each trait is. After all of that, we started focusing on the business aspect of the company, searching for consumers, investors and companies that would back our idea and fund the company. This was especially difficult because we are such a new and unique company, so it was difficult to market, at times.

How has Pymetrics changed the way people can connect with companies?

Pymetrics is unique because it allows the consumer to be open-minded about job searching. Instead of initially choosing what you want to do and finding a job within that field, Pymetrics helps you discover your ideal career and from there also helps you narrow down different companies for job opportunities. Also, it helps make the interview process less standardized, and allows the company to take account of your personal strengths, rather than qualifiers such as GPA and recommendations.

How did you develop the specific game set?

We chose the games by interviewing many HR professionals and interviewers and deciding which traits were the most significant in the career search. After the traits were decided on, we collected games that test for those specific traits and from the results of these games we can recommend specific careers unique to the consumer’s skill set.

How do you expect the company to change as it grows?

The scientific development behind the career recommendations can always be improved. We can always test different qualities and be more specific within the traits already tested. In the future, we hope to enhance the user process and make it not only easier for the user but also easier to understand the neuroscience behind the games.

Any last comments or statements, specifically to the students of Wake Forest?

The job search is a scary process, but we hope to make it a little less scary and to empower the student with our technology. We are open to any feedback you may have and we hope you visit Pymetrics soon.

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