Sid’s Update–May 2019
May was a big month for Sike Insights. Learn about our AI development milestones, Sike’s newest personality product, our pilot companies, and more.
State-of-the-art AI. Personality just got a lot more powerful.
After months of intense research and development, we’ve completed our own proprietary AI algorithm. That means we’re able to generate personality profiles from text with extraordinary accuracy in seconds. We’re giving our deep learning team a breather; thanks to their hard work we’re finally ready to move onto product testing.
What does it do?
Our models analyze text to generate a personality profile along the Five Factor Model. Research has shown that an individual’s writing style has a strong correlation to their personality traits — our AI can find that correlation.
How did we do this?
We trained our model using a massive dataset of emails and the personalities of the authors. After multiple rounds of testing and improvement, we have created a model that can identify personality with remarkable accuracy.
Meet Sike Onboarding.
That first handshake has high stakes. 86% of new hires decide to quit within the first six months, while turnover costs average a whopping $57,000 per person. Every company handles onboarding differently, but the most successful create a personalized process, involve the whole team, and start well before the first day. This difference pays: they retain more employees and nearly double their profit margin. Onboarding is important. Really important. Sike Insights wants to make sure your team isn’t going into it blind.
Introducing Sike Onboarding, a personality-based onboarding tool to guide your new hire’s early days. Don’t worry, we won’t add more paperwork to their list of to-dos. Detailed personality insights load in just ten seconds — no tests or paperwork required. It’s easier than signing up to Slack and you’ll get accurate personality reports, compatibility recommendations, actionable insights, and more. These features are geared to help you increase engagement, navigate difficult conversations, and show new hires you care.
How does it work?
- A team lead creates a team workspace and invites everyone. Name your workspace, put down your teammates’ emails and whether they’re new or existing. Then you’ll see your team dashboard.
- Teammates sign in with Google. We replace traditional bubble-in personality tests with a machine learning algorithm trained on text. It takes text from emails, encrypts it, and passes it through the model.
- Everyone sees reports and actionable insights. In ten seconds or less, everyone in the workspace can see actionable insights, accurate personality reports, and compatibility measurements. These metrics detail learning styles, communication preferences, work habits, and more to help everyone make the best first impression.
This May, we brainstormed, conducted a lot of customer research, and built the product. It works and combined with our algorithm, it works fast. We’re happy to report that we’re gaining a lot of interest. We’re running free pilots now, so if you’re interested, fill out this form to get on our list!
We’re growing fast.
Cisco’s Alex Rosen joins the advisory board.
Alex Rosen, Global Manager at Cisco, has an incredible amount of experience under her belt. She’s marketed products and services at Google, developed the first strategy for Cisco’s mobile and tablet paid media, and manages a major strategic partnership in music, after driving innovation programs and global employee engagement for the Rio 2016 Olympic games. She’s also advised startups for several years at the Silicon Valley incubator UpWest Labs and the UCLA Anderson Venture Accelerator. We’re lucky to have her and honored to welcome Alex to our advisory board!
We’ve added three new Sike-o’s!
We’ve added three new Sike-o’s to our team! (Also, we’ve officially named ourselves the Sike-o’s. We’ll see if it sticks.)
- Ben Limpanukorn (Backend Engineer): Ben is a second-year Computer Science major at UCLA.
- Corine Tan (Marketing Lead): Corine is a second-year English major, minoring in Entrepreneurship at UCLA.
- Andrew Zhou (Design Lead): Andrew is a first-year Computer Science major at UCLA.
Pilots. Lots of ‘em.
Sike Insights will be piloting with the UCLA Anderson School of Management to help them leverage personality to optimize team formation for MBA group projects in their Fully Employed MBA program.
We’re also working with a number of large and small LA startups including Heal, Witsmo, Saffron and more. Again, we’re running free pilots for a limited time only, so if you’re interested, fill out this form to get on our list!
The plan for June.
The simple answer — pilots! Now that we’ve built out the actual tool, we’re really ready to take on some pilot customers. If you or anyone you know would be interested in a free pilot with us, fill out this form here. Participants will receive full personality reports and actionable insights on how to improve productivity, engagement, and retention in their teams.
What we need from you.
We’re looking to connect with other HR SaaS tools that deal with other parts of the onboarding process — we think we’d learn a lot from their experiences, with the goal of eventually creating mutually beneficial partnerships. Please reach out to me at sid@sikeinsights.com or find me on LinkedIn. I’d really appreciate any connections you might have with startups in this space!
