Evidently Me Weekly Issue #3
This Week: How Our Design Advisor Community Has Shaped Evidently Me
Hello everyone,
I hope this week finds you well! As we move into a new year, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on how your feedback has influenced the evolution of Evidently Me over the past 12 months. Your insights as design advisors have been invaluable, helping us navigate some pivotal decisions, and we’re excited to share our top 5 reflections with you.
5: A focus on skills, and AI won’t do that. Only you can.
With thanks to: Andrew Esson, Bethan McAulay, Becky Read, Chi Nguyen, Jen Schneider, Christine Ng
“…companies need to take responsibility for upskilling and developing their own talent.”
Skills wasn’t a hard one for us to see. The symptoms were everywhere. But we felt as recent grads, no one cared or understood these problems. Especially academia. However, talking to talent leaders such as yourselves, helped us to understand that these problems are real, and they do need a solution. Whether it’s for satellites, biotech, electric vehicles or climate change, all industries are affected by the skills market. With Thomas’ work with students, and our interests in emerging technology, we knew we wanted Evidently Me to target skills gaps from day one.
We heard your suggestions for things like skills mapping, market data, reporting, hiring manager tools, internal mobility, workforce planning and development. With this new era of AI tools in recruitment, it’s up to you, the users and companies to ensure that the adoption of the tools bring a focus towards real and tangible value, most of the time that’s the candidate themselves.
4: The only way forward is DE&I (+Belonging)
With thanks to: Kate Parkyn, Desiree Goldey, Sally Kennard
“…we need to recognise that we are not assessing their skills to get the job done, but something that has almost nothing to do with the work that’s being done everyday… we’re the experts to make change, otherwise, this stays the same.”
Well, I’m going to be honest, DE&I isn’t something I ever understood early on. But the more conversations I had, the more I began to understand just how powerful and necessary it is. In particular, how we should approach talent for their ability and potential to get the job done, and nothing else. Being able to demonstrate that, helps candidates feel like they belong to an organisation, and are safe to speak up, knowing their voice is valued. When we are talking about what exists currently, the narrative is still very much where you went to university and how much experience you have. People also have subconscious bias, whether that’s during interviewing, or even as early as seeing a name on a CV.
As we move forwards with Evidently Me, and find our place in 2025, DE&I will take up a larger part of our development, to do justice to our mission to empower candidates.
3: Meet the market
With thanks to: Carl Sim, Mike Tonks, Richard Wyatt, Ashley Hazell, Karina Amirgamzaeva, Aida Alonso, James Edgar
“A lack of understanding when working with hiring managers, attitudes towards recruitment is something that needs to change. (It’s not a search, one-click buy situation). People and skills move. Certain skills just don’t exist currently, and there needs to be a compromise.”
There are a lot of difficulties navigating the HR-tech market, it’s filled with legacy software, annual contracts, many many tools, applicant tracking systems, and recruitment companies. This makes everything extremely sticky. Try to throw new infrastructure into the mix, and well, that makes for a very messy dessert.
What we’ve learned is that ultimately, the companies and decision makers in the organisation have to go through a number of diligence steps in order to adopt a new product or system. Regardless of how much the users love it, we have to make it make sense from an adoption perspective. The easier we can make that process, the better it is for us. At it’s core, this means ensuring we target a real pain-point for that customer, not a “nice-to-have” problem.
The classic start-up analogy is, if you’re locked in a burning apartment, what could I sell you in the 30 seconds you have to make a decision and survive? If you’re an Apple, or Microsoft, that would be a fire-extinguisher or a bucket of water. But, if you’re a start-up, it’s probably something like a brick. What you do with that brick is either break a window, smother the fire with it, or bash the door to get out! Regardless, the solution isn’t the qualifying step, it’s the intensity of the problem which dictates willingness to buy.
2: Story Telling
With thanks to: Sophie Theen, Alice Eadle, Martin Burkitt
“Educate the market that there is a better way to do things. The industry are going to heavily use CVs still. It’s going to be a hard sell. We have to do a lot of education to build confidence.”
We did a lot of discovery calls. In these meetings James and I heard about your backgrounds, how you got into recruitment and what motivates you to keep going. Firstly, it isn’t easy sending emails. But what motivates us to keep doing so is hearing more about your problems, and that helps us steer the ship. We aren’t sure what Evidently Me’s story is going to be just yet. But, we know what we care about, and what we want to solve.
1: Start-ups are always simpler than you think, but take longer than you think.
With thanks to: Sophie Theen, Hung Lee, Ash Rust
“HR-tech is a tough industry. Recruitment has been broken for a LONG time. But hey, you might be the guys to do it.”
Before we worked on Evidently Me, we were building something called HiveSpace. Among VCs, the only thing “worse” than HR-tech is Ed-tech, and that’s what HiveSpace was. It took probably 6 months longer than it should’ve for us to realise we needed to pivot. Starting out, it’s easy to formulate a plan, build a sexy website, think of a cool logo or company name. But very quickly, after the “honey moon” phase, realities set in. You realise that those things aren’t what pushes your start-up forwards. Certain mentors were extremely pivotal in helping us focus on what is important. Once we got stuck in with discovery, trying to find customers, users, and obsessing over the problem we’re trying to solve, we were able to “denoise” the process and it became a lot more simple. That’s not without saying that ultimately the problem we’re solving became more complex, but the roadmap of the business and what we needed to do was clear. The hard part was establishing how long we’d spend in-between checkpoints, running into bugs, disputes, running out of money, all these things extend or delay our progression, but are ultimately the things which make start-ups even more difficult.
We’re extremely glad to be on this learning path, and have the opportunity to do hard things.
Shameless plug, but we still need feedback on our last demo! 👇 Please leave your feedback as comments!
Enjoy your Christmas break and wishing you all a happy new year!
Thomas and James
- Evidently Me