The way companies match candidates to jobs is long overdue for a revolution. For decades, hiring has relied primarily on resumes, interviews and gut feelings to make important people decisions. But as the world of work rapidly evolves, this approach is no longer sufficient.
Brandon Hall Group™ Chief Strategy Officer and Principal Analyst Michael Rochelle and I had a thorough analyst briefing with Caitlin McGregor, Plum’s Chief Executive Officer and co-founder, and Michelle Meehan, VP of Marketing at Plum, the innovative Canadian start-up paving the way in next-generation psychometric assessment. Founded by experienced entrepreneurs who are passionate about helping employers make informed decisions about job candidates, Plum is leveraging recent technological advancements to create an efficient, comprehensive solution that takes candidate selection into the future.
“I created Plum to democratize access to psychometric data so that no one would have to rely on luck for someone to realize their superpower,” McGregor states on the company’s website. “Everyone deserves the same opportunity to do great things, and that’s exactly what Plum gives them.”
Through modern machine learning algorithms, Plum helps employers provide detailed data-driven insights into each potential hire, with key indicators including cognitive abilities, personality attributes and technical skills — allowing companies to find their ideal match faster than ever before.
Plum then uses this data to power its matching algorithms. Through an automated 8-minute job analysis, the platform understands the behavioral indicators required for success in any given role. It can then evaluate millions of profiles to identify top matches between people and opportunities.
Plum measures personality, problem-solving skills and social intelligence in every applicant with one 25-minute online assessment, allowing organizations to quantify job fit by comparing individual profiles against the needs of the job.
Early adopters like Manulife, Citibank and Whirlpool are already seeing significant benefits. Plum consistently delivers a 90% quality-of-hire rating from managers and increases retention by up to 77%. HR shouldn’t be a cost center — and Plum can prove it.
Plum also improves diversity hiring by screening overlooked candidates. Plum Talents encapsulate the thoughts, feelings and behaviors that drive candidates. These Talents help uncover what drives — and drains — them and where they’ll find the most success in their careers. Plum realizes that talents live on a spectrum and being high or low in a talent is not a measure of good versus bad. Instead, Plum Talents surface what innate behaviors energize you and which ones deplete you. Understanding the difference means you can advocate for your needs at work and focus on growth over survival.
Perhaps most impressively, Plum has managed to achieve this at scale. Where traditional assessments can take over 100 hours per role, Plum streamlines the process while maintaining a predictive accuracy that is 4x better than resume screening alone. That’s why it’s used in 144 countries and across 20 languages.
As the future of work brings more change and uncertainty, having the right talent in place will be critical for business success. Plum is paving the way for a new paradigm — one where companies can truly understand and optimize their human capital. It’s a revolution that can’t come soon enough.
