Evidently Me Weekly Issue #8

AI Evidence Questioning in Talent Intelligence, and Insights on Building the Future in HR-technology from a veteran HR Founder

Feb 12, 2025

Hello everyone!

Hope you’re all having a great week! This week we are demoing a new feature that is in development, as well as sharing an insight into our go-to-market strategy.

TLDR
1) Evidently Me’s Talent Intelligence Tool is releasing end of March. We are planning to add a feature where our AI asks the candidate technical questions about the evidence they upload.

2) Thomas shares insights about the HR-tech market from a podcast session he listened to about Parker Conrad, CEO of Rippling.

3) Thomas eludes to Evidently Me’s go-to-market strategy focusing on early point-solutions which form part of a wider compound software eco-system.

[Demo] Evidence Questioning in our Talent Intelligence Tool

Check out the video demo here 👇 Or read on for an explanation:

Following on from when a candidate submits evidence in our email tool, candidates will have the option to answer a series of questions about their evidence submissions, in order to verify skill sets and gain an insight into how they like to solve problems. The aim here is to find demonstration of proactiveness, technical ability and subject knowledge. Ultimately, this will help to make decisions on which candidates to bring through the assessment or interview process.

Below is an example of a question Evidently Me has generated to verify a candidate’s basic mechanical engineering ability. Since the questions are in relation to the candidate’s own work, it will help a candidate feel more empowered without the formality of a full technical assessment. The answers themselves are not assessed, but stored for the recruiter or hiring manager to review.

Please explain your answer by leaving a comment!

Point Solutions vs Compound Software

Case Study: Rippling HRIS

I recently listened to a podcast session with the co-founder and CEO of Rippling, Parker Conrad. Rippling is an “all-in-one” HR, Finance and IT software company valued at $13.5bn. After founding a company called “Zenefits” (later acquired by TriNet), which Parker grew from $200k in revenue to $20m in revenue in it’s first 2 years, Parker went back into the HR-tech space with certainty about what people wanted - The elusive “all-in-one” system HR leaders have been wanting.

Around that time, enterprise HR leaders were struggling to make quick decisions and using dozens of tools to get the job done. However, none of these tools worked particularly well with each other and data was on the most part, contained to each tool.

Point Solutions and Product Market Fit

Parker’s realisation was that HR-tech was a lucrative market for point solutions - niche tools that solve a single problem for teams. The great thing about point solutions for founders is that they’re quicker to build, and as a tool, should be fairly easy to get early-pilots.

❌ The disadvantages were that point solutions cater to an existing demand, and trends move quickly in recruitment, no one wants to login to yet another tool, and when resources are tight, those tools are almost certainly the first ones to go.

Compound Solutions are the answer? Not quite.

So the hypothesis Parker proposed was compound software - a suite of products that can cope with changing demands, and a stronger value proposition to customers looking to minimise their tech-stack. The point being, that the HR business function is a complex system of interrelated problems in business process management, decision making, relationship management, performance optimisation, outreach, inbound management and coordination.

A compound solution which can speak to all these areas, and is seamlessly interoperable, generates a “more robust product market fit”, and can capture more of the budget companies have set aside for HR, even if they only solve all of these problems to an average level. A key example of this being Workday - extremely complex, covers many different areas, but is a public company with great success.

❌The obvious disadvantage is, unless you’ve been funded tens of millions right from day-one, building such software is expensive, time consuming, and going to market is difficult. The other disadvantage is that there’s only a certain number of spots in the starting five, if you’re not a big player with a great brand, you’re probably going to be benched.

How it influences our Go-To-Market Strategy

The good news is, we firmly believe that now is a massively opportune time to build HR software. Data and AI is a powerful combination that could potentially cause a huge change in the HR-tech market and generate huge value for employers. The reality is that with this new capability, business functions within HR can begin to crossover, and become interoperable, with well-executed data mapping and stakeholder management.

Evidently Me has a long way to go, but hearing this from a veteran in the industry, we believe that by beginning as a point solution, we can build strong product-market fit by keeping in mind the future infrastructure that we can add to our eco-system.

Think, Apple. You can buy an iPad. It works well by itself. But works even better if you have an iPhone and Airpods.

Thanks for reading. I hope this week’s newsletter was exciting and insightful.
Have a great week, and don’t forget to comment, like and subscribe!