INNOVATION COLLABORATION
Czero and jobZology™ showcase the Innosphere ecosystem
The ecosystem of innovation at the Rocky Mountain Innosphere fosters cross-pollination, collaboration and opportunity among its 35+ client companies. “That’s the beauty of the Innosphere,” comments Guy Babbitt, CEO of Czero. “It brings together people fired up about developing and testing new technologies and bringing them to market.”
So with big innovation projects kicking off this fall, Czero enlisted fellow Innosphere client and science-driven software startup jobZology™ for help finding five new right-fit engineers to grow our R&D team.
Founded by human-resources industry experts and veterans, jobZology™ uses online assessments, backed by sophisticated software and analysis, to characterize a company’s culture and help determine how individual job candidates might fit into specific roles and teams at that company.
The jobZology™ process with Czero
jobZology™ first surveyed Czero employees and leadership to assess more than a dozen measures of workplace satisfaction and culture. Next, we asked job applicants to take the 25-30 minute jobZology™ assessments about their values, interests, personalities and workplace preferences. jobZology™ then analyzed and correlated the data from these two sides of the job-fit coin.
The resulting reports indicated how well each candidate’s nature and preferences aligned with open positions at Czero and our company culture, which includes a strong commitment to engineering projects with a positive social and environmental impact.
Additionally, the jobZology™ system assigned a weighted rank, combining position fit and culture fit, to all candidates applying for each given job. We used this information as one of several criteria for determining which well-qualified candidates to interview first.
Finding the right fit
“There’s a lot more to job fit than having the right education, skills and experience. People are complex. Companies are complex,” remarks Eric Leftwich, Co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer of jobZology™. “Having the right job at the wrong place, or vice versa, isn’t a recipe for happiness or success. Neither is having great skills and talent without passion for the work.”
As for the right fit for Czero, Babbitt says, “Early-stage R&D presents unique challenges; innovation projects often start under-defined and evolve quickly.” He continues, “For our team, that means embracing the unknown and working flexibly and collaboratively to coming up with truly novel solutions. Not every engineer likes to work that way. So it’s really important that we find the right people for the type of work we do and for how our team operates day to day.”
Workplace happiness: good for people, good for business
Finding the right two-way fit leads to higher job satisfaction, higher engagement, higher productivity, and lower turnover.
As Shawn Achor reports in his post The Happiness Dividend, on the Harvard Business Review blog, “A decade of research proves that happiness raises nearly every business and educational outcome: raising sales by 37%, productivity by 31%, and accuracy on tasks by 19%, as well as a myriad of health and quality of life improvements.”
That’s the core of jobZology™: work happy, business happy.
Yet while that makes intuitive sense, it’s another thing to see it quantified for your own company. In our case, we were delighted to confirm via the jobZology™ FiSCL assessment that everyone at Czero scored very high on job satisfaction and commitment to Czero.
“As a business owner, that’s great to see,” says Babbitt. “It means we have the right people, the right approach, and the right fuel for innovation.”
Testing new tech in a hub of innovation
“One of the best things about the Innosphere is how easy it is to get top-notch feedback at any stage of development and testing, from concept to prototype to post-launch,” says Travis Hevelone, CEO of jobZology™. “We’re surrounded by entrepreneurial critical thinkers.”
“Our project with Czero is a perfect example,” Hevelone continues. “After Guy’s initial use of our talent-matching system, he sat down with us for an hour to provide detailed insights on ways to improve our product. Having quick access to that kind of fresh, direct feedback is invaluable. Likewise, we make it a priority to offer the same to other Innosphere colleagues.”
Babbitt remarks, “I think everyone in the employment equation would like a way to decrease the pain/return ratio of job hunting and candidate matching. It’s a huge opportunity for innovation that jobZology has taken on using smart science and smart tech, and we love being part of that.”