Interview with Rob Symes of The Outside View

Rob Symes of The Outside View is the keynote speaker at our June technology showcase event.   Seeing as we’ll have him getting straight to the business-benefit stuff on the day I thought an interview with him ahead of the event might be good!

What was your inspiration for starting The Outside View?

My recruitment business began in a bedroom on February the 24th 2010. On April the 8th I got my best friend fired. After six months I had sent thousands of emails, made hundreds of phone calls and been involved in one almighty lawsuit. I had made zero sales and my best friend was still fired. Then, I made my first sale. I recruited a computational fluid dynamics engineer. You don’t know what that is? I still don’t.

As my agency grew and I won multi-national clients I was given better assignments. I recruited salespeople and put huge amounts of effort trying to select the best. After making placements I noticed an odd pattern. Sometimes, my candidates would be hugely successful. Sometimes they’d be huge failures. I’d put the same amount of effort into selection and couldn’t understand why. The problem bothered me. So I set out to solve it. Over twelve months I read every book and academic article on decision-making. I travelled all over the world meeting the smartest people of several generations and asked lots of questions.

The truth was that I, and the rest of the recruitment industry, have been trying to solve the wrong problems.The value for the recruitment industry is not in cold calling, candidate attraction or customer relationships. It’s in candidate selection although selection is the wrong word. What is the right word? Prediction.

​Surely there are loads of people doing​ ​predictive analytics,​ ​What makes your business distinctive in its marketplace:

We turn a company’s most undervalued asset, their data, into a competitive advantage. We make companies sales teams more efficient, their recruitment process more selective and their business significantly more efficient, enabling them a competitive edge.

​​What’s the big vision for your business?

To build not a world class but world changing business. The mission is take three separate ideas: Ground-breaking academic research on decision making and human bias, advances in predictive analytics and the explosion of data to create a whole new class of business improvement​ ​based on identifying elite performance.

To define elite performance you must go beyond the results to understand the behaviours and activities that led to this success. Through data science the answers to elite performance are within everyone’s grasp. Companies only use 5% of their data, and most people only achieve 5% of their potential. Achieving your potential isn’t about working harder, it’s about machines working harder, so you can work smarter.
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What does the future hold for recruitment?

Making​ ​data-driven decisions, companies must not just change their mindset, they must change their approach. The most important members of a recruitment company will no longer be the consultants but the data scientists or at least the external company their IT department hires. Because there is no point in oil, if you can’t extract it.

Effective prediction is so much more valuable to clients than candidate attraction. To attract candidates all clients have to do is put up a Linked​I​n ad.

You might also like to check out this article from This is Money: How to make more money, hire the right people, or find a better job, with a lesson from Moneyball and US sports teams