Meet the ATC2023 Innovation Lab Finalists

It’s one of the most highly anticipated sessions of every ATC event. Sponsored by Hays, the Innovation Lab lets the Australian Talent community see and explore the emerging and game-changing Talent Technology set to impact how you hire.

Hays is delighted to be sponsoring ATC’s Innovation Lab competition for the third year in succession. Helping to discover and nurture the very best new talent tech products is part of our commitment to enable our numerous RPO, MSP and agency clients, and the ANZ talent sector in general, to stay at the cutting edge of innovation. – Richard Barnett, MSP Director – ANZ, Hays

With previous winners including equidi, Flow of Work Co, Video My Job, Hiretual, Curious Thing, and WePloy, the Innovation Lab highlights the very best in the Australian Talent Tech start-up space.

Let’s meet the 5 finalists who’ll go head-to-head in the pitch-off in 2023.

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Finalist #1: Interview Ready™ by GetMee

Pitching in 2023 is: Bala Thavarajah, Founder & CEO

 

What’s your innovation?

Interview Ready™ (a GetMee.ai product) is the world’s first AI-powered Interview Coach, to help job seekers Improve their Interview performance. Using GetMee’s patented AI, the App can coach a job-seeker not only on their communication style, but also help them improve their answers to technical and behavioural questions – all linked to any job family at any level. This combination of coaching content gives users of the app access to amazing coaching previously unavailable to anyone without the means to engage with a human coach.

What problem does it solve?

It solves the job-seeker issue of performing to their best ability at Interview.

Interview Ready™ also supports the D&I hiring targets, levelling the playing field by making Interview Coaching to everyone and anyone, regardless of their socio-economic background.

It also Improves enterprise brand value by giving every applicant, whether successful or not, access to an amazing tool to help them with their job search.

What are the most similar products in the market?

Elsa Speak

How does it differentiate?

Your response: Interview Ready™ is different to all other ‘interview practice tools’ in that Interview Ready™ is a true “coach” – giving personalised feedback and curated learning content to each user. In addition, Interview Ready™ is the only App that can coach a job seekers across the 3 core components:

1. Communication style
2. Technical Job Questions (for any job)
3. Behavioural Interview questions

Where did the idea for your product/innovation come from?

The product was born out of the lived experience of our founder Bala, who is an immigrant from Sri Lanka. Bala found it hard to get the right level job due to his lack of English communication skills, so created this App to solve that problem at scale.

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Finalist #2: Monash Talent

Pitching in 2023 is: Nicola Harrison, Executive Director

 

How would you best describe your innovation?

Monash Talent is a dual sided marketplace solution that uses unique data and insights to match students to industry opportunities via intelligent matching.

What  problem does it solve?

It solves a variety or frustrations for industry, students, and universities.

For industry:

• To engage students and graduates, organisations typically have to navigate a complex path through a university, which is often time consuming, costly, and frustrating.
• Graduate and early career talent hiring is expensive, inefficient and often ineffective
• Engaging students via traditional recruitment channels is costly and inefficient, and primarily provides awareness of opportunities but cannot provide the deep matching that is possible through University collated data and insights.

For students and graduates:

• The process for finding employment while studying and upon graduation is fragmented and confusing.

For universities:

• Employment outcomes are a high priority. Universities with the highest employment outcomes will attract more students and form deeper industry relationships.

What are the most like-minded product/s in the market?

Ripplematch, Hatch, GradConnection, GradAustralia

How does it differentiate?

Universities build data and insights on all students from day one of their studies, continually adding rich data points that provide an opportunity for a much deeper, intelligent match for industry than any currently comparable offering. This will lead to improved hiring outcomes through a more effective and efficient solution.

Our solution has profiles on 100% of students, leverages much deeper data for more effective and efficient matching, and is able to help organisations engage and build a relationship with target talent sooner (through industry experiences) than any current offering.

Where did the idea for your product/innovation come from?

The desire to solve the challenge of making it simpler for students The richness and completeness of University student data, plus the growth in popularity of marketplaces and convergence of technologies such as generative AI and elastic search.

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Finalist #3: Polinode

Pitching in 2023 is: Andrew Pitts, Founder & CEO

 

How would you best describe your product/innovation?

At Polinode we have built a SaaS solution for visualising and analysing network or connected data. Recently we have developed the ability to input a few seed LinkedIn profiles and then use the People Also Viewed data from LinkedIn to create an interactive network of relationships that can be used to map and understand a particular area / market segment. For example, Machine Learning engineers in Australia.

What problem does it solve?

These Talent Networks can be used by Talent Professionals to:

1. Find potential candidates given a small set of similar individuals;
2. Find influencers in a particular market so that they can be targeted / nurtured; and
3. Understand how current employees are positioned and connected to external talent.

In essence, we give unprecedented insights into the talent ecosystem – significantly reducing research and sourcing time and effort.

What is the most like-minded product/s in the market?

There isn’t really a product on the market at the moment that empowers Talent Professionals with network insights at scale. The closest category is probably Talent Intelligence and products like eightfold.ai.

How does it differentiate?

The key differentiator is the network analysis and visualisation functionality that Polinode enables – to be able to find central individuals, brokers and distinct communities.

Where did the idea for your product/innovation come from? 

We were exhibiting our core Organisational Network Analysis product at the Unleash America conference in Las Vegas in April 2023 and started to wonder how the other exhibitors were connected to each other as well as the numerous speakers at the conference. The idea came to us that we could use LinkedIn data to create a network to better understand those relationships and, once we did so, the applications in the Talent space were immediately clear.

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Finalist #4: seeHR by Talent Tech Solutions

Pitching in 2023 is: Scott Allan, Founder & Director

 

How would you best describe your product/innovation? 

seeHR is the new gold standard for AI powered People Analytics. seeHR is a managed service combining market leading analytics technology and highly skilled data analytics experts to get you up and running quickly and at a fraction of the cost of doing it yourself.

What frustration / problem does it solve? 

Everyone in the business is using data to prove their point. Everyone except the People function. Anecdotes and intuition aren’t enabling the evolution of the People function towards trusted C-suite advisors.  Most companies are unable to perform sophisticated People Analytics because their data is sitting in silos everywhere. State of the art data analytics platforms are expensive, time consuming to design and implement, and; it’s too difficult and expensive to secure the highly skilled resources required.

What is the most like-minded product/s in the market?

Visier, ChartHop and One Model are pure play SaaS offerings and BI tools like Tableau and Looker can do the job but lack the depth of professional services support required to turn your People Analytics aspiration to reality. They also rarely turn out as visually appealing and user friendly to a busy audience.

How does it differentiate? 

seeHR is not just another analytics platform. seeHR is a managed service combining premier, AI powered analytics technology with highly skilled data analytics experts who partner with you to continually review, adapt and improve your People Analytics. With seeHR you get beautiful, presentation ready dashboards which are easy to understand, easy to action and tell the hidden story about the health of your People function.

Where did the idea for your product/innovation come from?

seeHR co-founders Scott Allan and ZiChuan Lim have been focussed on People Analytics since their early careers in Talent. Through our HR Tech Consulting and Talent Operations firm, Talent Tech Solutions, we’ve delivered consulting and services to dozens of businesses. On the topic of Reporting and Analytics, the same problem statements were flagged time and again. People Analytics is wanted but is unachievable: high cost, high complexity, high time input. With our understanding of the problem and deep experience in technology and professional services we knew we could solve each of those problems and this is how seeHR was born.

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Finalist #5: TALY

Pitching in 2023 is: Peter Treloar, CEO & Founder

 

How would you best describe your innovation?

TALY is a personality profiling and talent intelligence solution that brings to life the valuable insights from personality data through technology and AI. Built on a foundation of valid psychometric tools that capture five-factor personality, emotional intelligence and a range of other traits, the insights from TALY profiling give users clear direction around recruitment, team engagement and culture.

The value in TALY is unlocking the insights from personality profiling to help you make better people decisions across the employee lifecycle – not only providing guidance through the recruitment process, but then tapping into the same data to build and maintain engagement for new employees from Day 1.

What problem does it solve?

Leaders and HR professionals need to make great decisions on their team, whether it’s in recruitment or in team engagement and culture, and they need access to the right data that is delivered in a relevant way to their business to be able to do this. Personality insights can support leaders with accurate data, but accessing this information in a timely, cost effective and relevant way that empowers their decision making is an ongoing frustration

What is the most like-minded product/s in the market?

There are a wide range of profiling tools in the market. In the traditional market, TALY delivers quality, science-backed and insightful profiling in a simple and cost effective way, so a core solution similar to Hogans or Saville. However, the technology and AI that engages the candidate and builds in bespoke insights for users is more in the territory of Predictive Index or Humanico, and using AI links to sapia.ai

How does it differentiate?

We start with a scientifically-proven approach to measuring personality holistically. Over the top we build insights through the platform that bring the data to life for users. The AI tools then help turn the personality insights into a capability tool for leaders, feeding them information relevant to their needs, candidates, culture and business at any point across the employee lifecycle.

They can literally “AskTALY” and get insights into how to connect and how to make better team decisions, customised to their specific need.

Where did the idea for your product/innovation come from?

After working in the brand, research and HR space for many years, I couldn’t understand why recruitment decision makers and team leaders just weren’t using good data to inform their decisions. Once digging into it a little further, I quickly realised that personality data can play an important role in lifting this capability – but it just wasn’t being delivered with the right quality, in the right way, that aligned with how business today needs to use this data.

Anything else you want us to know?

TALY is an established profiling business, but in 2023 we’re relaunched and reimagined the business with the focus on platform and AI. It’s early days, with a few of the solutions now active in market, but the feedback is wonderful. Leaders are telling us they now feel confident about their decision making, and are making better decisions, now they are empowered with simple insights.

Because the best people decisions start with the best data.

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Want to see the Innovation Lab live? Join us at ATC2023, 22nd & 23rd November at Luna Park Sydney.