SAN FRANCISCO, June 06, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Crosschq, Inc., a new company focused on eliminating the problem of bad hires, today unveiled a revolutionary new platform that transforms human insights from a candidate’s references into predictive data to ensure they are well matched with a company.

Through its proprietary technology, the company is reinventing the traditional reference check by expanding and automating the process, allowing for faster turn-around; more authentic responses with insights from an expanded reference graph; and real, consistent feedback that can be measured and qualified to ensure the best fit for a company. By pioneering a new software category called Human Intelligence Hiring™, Crosschq’s mission is to help businesses hire the right fit for the position, the company and the culture.

Crosschq was founded in 2018 by Silicon Valley veterans Mike Fitzsimmons and Pete Goettner, whose first-hand experience with bad hires inspired them to develop a better solution. Studies show that references – a crucial but often overlooked part of the hiring process – are twice as accurate in assessing a candidate’s fit for a position than the candidate. However, current referencing processes are limited, time-consuming, opinion-driven, and do not provide data-driven feedback that can be analyzed in a meaningful way. Crosschq’s platform enhances the process of gathering actionable insights by expanding the reference graph and comparing responses from a company-specific survey, an individual’s self-assessment, and the hiring company’s culture. The resulting information is converted into predictive data that minimizes bias, enabling the company and individual to make a fully informed hiring decision.

“As leaders of organizations, we have first-hand experience of what bad hires can do. They cost money, time and can impact a business for years to come,” said Fitzsimmons, CEO of Crosschq. “Fifty percent of new hires don’t make it eighteen months and close to 20 percent don’t make it even six months. We firmly believe that the shift to Human Intelligence Hiring will fix this issue, for the company and talent, once and for all.”

Backed by Bessemer Ventures’ 15 Angels, Inner Loop Capital and other Silicon Valley angel investors, Crosschq has secured seed funding and has been developing its core technology in stealth mode for more than a year. David Cowan from Bessemer Ventures commented, “Over my decades investing in startups, I have learned that, just as great hires can make companies, bad hires can destroy them. I am excited to support Crosschq in their quest to help companies eliminate bad hires.”

Crosschq has been working with more than 25 companies during its beta phase and is now officially live in production. During this period, the company has seen a 99 percent candidate satisfaction rate with 94 percent of reference requests completed in less than 40 hours and an average of more than 4.2 references per candidate, twice the industry average.

Crosschq’s self-service, cloud-based SaaS solution has fully integrated management dashboards and includes the following features:

• Self-Assessment: Survey for candidates to establish a comprehensive view of themselves to act as a baseline for analysis
• Digital Referencing: Primary and secondary references evaluations that can be completed in less than 10 minutes
• Culture Match: Custom survey capabilities that enable the hiring company to personalize the survey to reflect their unique culture
• People Analytics: Integrates with performance management data to close the loop and conduct employee lifecycle analysis and predictive analytics 
• Systems Integration: Custom integrations with leading recruiting, ATS and HRIS systems to ensure minimal disruption to workflows
• Candidate Locker: Personalized candidate account that stores profile, self-assessment and reference information driving transparency through the process and enabling future sharing of reference data

The company also announced the formation of its advisory board. Tony Scott, former CIO of the U.S. Government and President Obama appointee, CIO at Microsoft and Disney, and noted HR expert, Rusty Rueff, have joined the board. Rueff was the first independent board member at Glassdoor, has held senior HR leadership roles at Electronic Arts and PepsiCo, and is the author of Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business.

“We can easily and have historically quantified the impact of a bad hire on a business. There is a financial or progress hit to a company.  We know that.  But it’s harder and traditionally unexplored to understand what not fitting into a new job does to the employee both in the short term and long term as they grapple to overcome having failed or misread what seemed so sure. This is what makes Crosschq so revolutionary – the company is focused on caring about both sides of the equation to make sure the employee and the business are the right fit for each other, setting both up for success,” noted Rueff. 

For more information, visit www.Crosschq.com.