Founders in Focus: Mike Fitzsimmons of Crosschq

Welcome to our Founders in Focus series, where each month we highlight one of the founders of Okta Ventures’ portfolio companies. You’ll get to know more about them and learn how they work with Okta. This month we’re speaking with Mike Fitzsimmons, CEO of Crosschq.

What is Crosschq and what is your mission?

Crosschq is a technology platform that helps companies make better hiring decisions by using human intelligence and predictive data. Our mission is to help the world build diverse, winning teams. 

What were you doing prior to Crosschq that led you to this moment?

Prior to Crosschq, I was a 3X CEO of venture-backed technology companies. I started Crosschq purely out of frustration with legacy recruiting processes which I found to be bias-ridden and fundamentally broken. 

What is the Crosschq solution? What challenges does it solve? 

The Crosschq solution begins and ends with data. We have pioneered the Talent Intelligence Cloud that enables companies to connect pre-hire data with business outcomes to measure and evaluate the quality of their hiring decisions. We then provide a suite of tools that help companies optimize hiring decisions for quality and diversity through advanced sourcing and assessment solutions.

Traditional reference checks take recruiters nine hours on average per candidate. Crosschq 360 reinvents the reference check by providing reliable, objective insight to help talent acquisition professionals make data-driven hiring decisions, fast. By using standardized questions developed by leading psychologists, 360 reduces unconscious bias and has helped our customers increase hiring from underrepresented groups by 32%. 

Crosschq Recruit automatically builds talent pools of highly-qualified candidates, sending a notification the instant they’re added and provides more thorough insights to evaluate prospective candidates. Our Analytics product identifies the skills and attributes associated with top performers and uses AI-driven analytics to identify those traits in candidates and predict quality of hire. 

Why did Crosschq want to work with Okta?

Okta has been a great innovator in the talent space bringing identity management and HRM together into a unified system to help organizations work more efficiently to bridge the employee lifecycle gap. We see powerful opportunities to leverage these solutions as input into our Talent Intelligence Cloud to help companies optimize their quality of hire.

How is Crosschq working with Okta? What support do you look for in a corporate partner?

Initially we began working with Okta to implement their SSO solution, as we have over 50% crossover in our existing customers. Going forward our primary goal is to leverage the Okta data platform as an input into our predictive engine. As that further develops, we see tremendous opportunities for Okta and Crosschq to co-market our solutions. 

What trends do you expect to see in the HR industry? 

That is a huge question, and our point of view is maybe a bit controversial, but fundamentally we see a seismic shift coming where our companies shift their mindsets from hiring for speed and quantity vs hiring for quality. For all of the great work our companies are doing in regards to issues like diverse hiring and remote work, we are fundamentally failing when it comes to hiring for quality and our turnover metrics are showing it. We expect to see more companies focusing on quality of hire and using data to make better hiring decisions.

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