Angela Antony is the Founder and CEO of Scoutible, the world’s first game-based hiring platform, which uses machine learning to track soft skills through gameplay and uncover the best candidates for a job. Angela spent nine years at Harvard, focusing her psychology, business, and law degrees on labor market issues across society. After Harvard, she worked at the White House under Obama as part of the National Economic Council.
During that time, she was writing a book about her Harvard research titled Invisible Handcuffs, which ultimately became the primary research underlying Scoutible. Scoutible was recently named one of Inc Magazine’s 8 Most Innovative Startups of the Year, and Angela was named to Inc’s Female Founders 100 list.
This Episode’s Heavy-hitter’s:
Before she started Scoutable, Angela launched a startup called Beanstockd Media, which taught her “invaluable lessons on what NOT to do in a startup.” Although she felt it was a failure at the time, she now looks back at it as a huge accelerator for what she’s doing at Scoutable.
Angela met Mark Cuban while working with the National Economic Council at the White House. He convinced her to create a company to solve the problems she was studying in the labor market instead of finishing the book she was writing on the subject.
Part of what motivated Angela’s work with Scoutible and removing bias from the hiring process was a study in which identical resumes were presented to hiring managers, with only the names changed. The African American names performed 50% worse than their white counterparts, even though all other information and qualifications were exactly the same.
Scoutible develops a predictive model to choose who to hire and for what role by having an entire organization complete its games and surveys. This process helps to remove the typical biases that might limit opportunities for some while overpromoting others that might not actually be the best fit.
Besides eliminating bias, Angela sees Scoutible to be of utmost importance because more people than ever are searching for purpose within their jobs. With this tool, there’s a much more streamlined process to find your correct fit.
To learn more, please visit https://www.scoutible.com/
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2:25 - Early lessons from the first company
5:24 - Frame a project as a Failure
6:18 - Experience at Virgin and Goldman Sachs / Tough Lessons
9:19 - Working at the White House (The Culture)
17:25 - Mark Cuban and Research
19:40 - Working Relationship with Mark
21:12 - Lesson learned from Mark Cuban
22:08 - Unconscious Bias
25:58 - Scalable Assessment
29:40 - Utilization and Backfire
34:23 - Next Milestone
37:28 - Hot take on the labor market
39:04 - The greatest piece of advice
40:37 - Angela's North Star