One screen shows five colored discs on three pegs, ready for the user to manipulate. Another presents faces and a word bank of possible emotions.
Using 12 games that assess character traits based on neuroscience and data, Pymetrics is a recruiting and job placement website that founders Frida Polli ’94 and Julie Yoo hope will improve traditional hiring processes. The website produces social, emotional and cognitive profiles for each user, which partnering companies can access to find the best candidates for open positions.
Polli, an award-winning neuroscientist, and Yoo, a data scientist, founded Pymetrics as an alternative to questionnaires typically used during recruitment, like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Users play games that ask them to match emotions with facial expressions or remember increasingly long sequences of numbers.
Pymetrics student ambassador Alexandra Schoenberger ’15, one of seven Pymetrics representatives at Dartmouth, said companies can use Pymetrics to identify candidates who might not otherwise get interviews. Polli’s research has shown that Pymetrics users are five to seven times more likely to get an interview, Schoenberger said.
Student ambassador Adam Frank ’15 said Pymetrics is an effective job placement tool because it removes the self-bias inherent to other tests. Unlike the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which allows people to answer questions based on self-perception, Pymetrics bases its results on games.
“You really can’t cheat the system,” Frank said.
Yishen Xu Tu’15, one of two Tuck students working with Pymetrics, said students can use the site for purposes other than job placement. Feedback from the games can help users better understand their strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, students unsure about their future interests can use Pymetrics to indicate potential career paths.
Student ambassador Anna Pasternak ’14 said that, by identifying employees’ strengths and weaknesses, Pymetrics can also provide data for companies to use in internal restructuring.
After creating accounts and playing the games themselves, the ambassadors each said that they have found the results helpful.
“The fact that they can test little personality quirks and accurately display them, I thought was very interesting,” Schoenberger said.
Schoenberger said she thought her results were “spot-on,” while Pasternak said receiving feedback about her unwillingness to take risks has made her rethink her natural reactions to situations.
After her Pymetrics results revealed her project management skills, Xu said she has expanded her future plans to accommodate her strengths and is no longer looking only at jobs in finance.
Frank, Pasternak and Schoenberger said they would encourage students to use Pymetrics to inform themselves in similar ways.
While the games and profiles have been available online since the company was founded, Pymetrics relaunched its website three weeks ago. The company’s aims to attract as many people as possible to the program’s games before this winter’s corporate recruiting season in order to collect results and job-placement data for next year, Schoenberger said.
