RD-11.15-16.2022-Claira

KATIE HALL: Hi, everyone. I'm Katie Hall, founder and CEO of Claira and MIT Sloan EMBA 2020-- right when the world was ending. My chief operating officer was a classmate of mine. So we came here to get this business off the ground. Last week, actually, one of my sales leaders brought me a Deloitte research study that said, 82% of companies are trying to move toward the use of skills or competencies to manage their workforce. But 70% of that group is unsure where to begin. That's where our software comes in.

These are the types of questions that our customers are asking themselves-- how do I know everything that all my employees can do? What if they have skills from a previous job being a bartender? What if they were a veteran? Maybe they took care of an elderly grandparent. There's no good way right now to unearth all of those skills and put them to use to maximize your talent if you're a business.

Job descriptions and resumes are on the way out when it comes to hiring, which I'm happy to debate. But they were definitely not engineered to manage an adapting workforce at the speed of the economy of today. What we've built instead is a living, breathing competency dashboard of everything your people can do, updated almost real-time.

Ryan is an actual customer of ours. He's part of a large enterprise. And he manages a site of 1,000 employees. About 70% are manufacturing employees out in the plant. 30% are in the front office. He came to us because in his words, the unknown is really expensive when it comes to your workforce.

So Ryan is using Claira's technology to identify gaps in his people's competencies, opportunities to collaborate, cross-train, cross-utilize, upskill people based on exactly what they need, recruit surgically, not based on what you think you need to hire for, and project future workforce needs.

We are cloud SaaS, and we intentionally built a really light and fast onboard. So it took five hours of Ryan's time to onboard our software at his company. We ingest company data to make sure that our competency library fits the customer. , Then, the employees fill out a 5-minute mobile interface that you see on the screen. What types of work make you happy? What would your friends and family say you're good at? We create a competency profile for them.

When those two things are in, the employees have a dashboard that shows them what they're good at-- growth opportunities within the business. The admin user has a dashboard that shows them a really granular view of each individual, how they match up against their role, opportunities to better use them. And finally, a workforce dashboard of all 1,000 employees at Ryan's company. Gaps, trends, action insights that you can use to drive your business forward.

So employee engagement and retention are the products of engaging people to do the mobile interface-- ask what they're good at. People want to be involved in their career pathways. We know engagement and retention are the name of the game right now. And on the admin or company side, cut costs, cut time, and drive precision in the business.

The magic of Claira is that we've taken competency science-- which has been used all over the world for 30 years-- paired it with machine learning and packaged it up as SaaS. And that's important for a few reasons. Competencies are superior to skills. Skills are one word and task-based-- Python, communication, teamwork. The problem is that these don't give employers enough detail about what someone's actually doing on the job.

Our competencies are full sentences that include knowledge, skill, context, and level. What's a person doing? How are they doing it? Why are they doing it? And to what end? So most skills tech on the market just uses the one-words. We use the big, long sentences which allows us to do much heavier analysis on the back end than keyword matching. And it gives employers that detail they want.

Second important thing here is we become your workforce Netflix, right? Every time you interact with the platform, the insights get smarter. It suggests new offerings every week, and becomes addictive. So if skills tech that we're competing with just ingests company data and spits out-- oh, did I do that? Spits out insights based on that, we ingest employer data, employee data, and you're as smart as all the users of the platform, right? So that's the beauty of SaaS.

The third thing that's important here is that we're creating clean data sets to train our models because we don't want our customers to be handicapped by the job description and resume-training data that has bias in it. So that's more arduous, but it helps keep our customers further ahead.

We're looking for partners who want to take their businesses in this direction. These are some of the industries that we're working with-- working in currently. Come see us at our booth. As everyone else is saying, we have a demo video. We'd love to answer your questions and get your feedback. Thanks.