A recruitment system that uses behavioural science to match workers with jobs that best suit their personalities hopes to play a part in retraining Australia’s workforce.
Gooroo (ASX:GOO) uses a personality-profiling and strategic marketing tool called ColourGrid to understand more about employees than just their skillset.
The idea is to match them with workplaces that they’ll thrive in not just now — but also as both they and the employer grow.
“It all goes back to my days when I was leading a large multidisciplinary agency — a creative and technology agency — and we were hiring lots of developers and technology people,” Gooroo boss Greg Muller told Stockhead.
“We continually found it difficult to find really good quality talent that fitted within the culture we were trying to create.”
A few years later, Mr Muller decided to start Gooroo — and to initially focus just on IT jobs.
“We chose to start in the technology sector initially because it was large. There’s about 35 to 40 million technology professionals in the world, and there’s about 25 million jobs that get posted or advertised every year, so we knew the demand was there,” he said.
“The market wasn’t really understanding just what they [individuals] were good at, but also what they wanted to do.”
Is HR tech still hot?
Gooroo debuted on the ASX last October and is one of several recruitment technology firms to list in recent years. Others include LiveHire (ASX:LVH), Xref (ASX:XF1) and a new player ELMO (ASX:ELO) which debuted in June.
Mr Muller said there was still plenty of investor appetite for “HR tech”.
“Certainly the conversations I’m having in the market are indicating that there is strong interest in the sector,” he said.
“If you think about it very simply, we as human beings need money and the way we earn money is by having jobs.
“And what the sector understands is that the way it’s happened in the past is not the way it’s going to happen in the future.
“What we’ve seen on the ASX, and globally, is that people understand this transformation is underway and people are out there to grab some land.”
Gooroo was named one of the top technology IPOs of 2016 by OnMarket BookBuilds, however its share price has cooled off since then.
The company’s shares are currently trading at less than half of the initial IPO issue price — 8.4c, compared to the issue price of 20c.
Expanding beyond IT
Mr Muller’s plans for the future of Gooroo include taking the company beyond the IT sector and addressing one of the biggest challenges facing the country — workforce reskilling.
CSIRO chairman David Thodey warned last year that Australia would have to retrain 6 million people to become digitally literate by 2025 to stay internationally competitive.
Mr Muller believes that personality-profiling systems like Gooroo will be able to help companies and employees figure out how to interact with technology in the future.
“The reality is that every human being on the planet at some point or another will relate with some form of technology, either in their personal life or their work life,” he said.
“Over the next 50 years our businesses are going to become technology-driven businesses. They already are starting to become that.
“We as a society need to change the way we think about the people we are bringing into our businesses.
“They don’t all have to be able to code, they don’t all have to be able to worry about how a computer is put together, but they do need to understand how technology can be applied to the business or how the business is need to evolve.”
Mr Muller said the issue was just as important for companies as workers.
“If they don’t have people who can think in a technological way, they are going to be left behind,” he said.
“Gooroo itself will become not just a platform for technologists but for the future technological thinkers. It will become much much broader and it will take into account all the roles that touch and have to apply technology.
“While people see us as an IT-focused business, in fact we think about our business much more broadly.”