This Startup Knows How to Build Teams that Deliver

In every startup, people are everything. No matter how good your product is, the future of its success will fall on the shoulders of your team. As practice shows, the success of a new business often depends on the ability of the founder to attract a great team around him or her. How do you attract the best performing team? You can start by creating a team culture that empowers connection and growth, and design hiring processes based on team wishes and goals. And, you can use big data to figure out how a particular candidate will fit in your company.

Big data and culture fit

Teamscope, an Estonian startup, is developing a software application that utilizes big data analytics to understand the collaborative potential of professional teams and evaluates how different candidates fit in with the team culture. According to Teamscope co-founder Tõnis Arro, developing an understanding of this is one of the biggest challenges in recruitment today:

The organization of the future is built around teams, and work performance is highly dependent on how well team members work together. Unfortunately, most companies hire based on experience and self-reported skills alone; and until now there have been no reliable methods to help evaluate how well different candidates would fit within the existing team.

Although larger companies use sophisticated hiring methods running several interview rounds and testing their candidates on different psychometric capabilities, success rates remain relatively low. Over 25% of new employees leave within their first months, often due to a lack of fit with the team and/or supervisors. Teamscope software promises to reduce the risk with their app.

Team vs Group

What differentiates a good team from a group of people working in the same building? You guessed it right! A purpose that drives people towards a common goal. Several studies have shown that candidates who share similar values to the team are up to four times more likely to stay with the company long-term.

Teamscope is going to use algorithms to scan people’s Facebook data and Twitter feed to get a better understanding of their values, personality and attitudes. They already tested an early version of their product on more than 2,000 users from tech startups, professional recruitment agencies, and some large corporations in Estonia, and plans to bring their public beta to life in October 2017. Teamscope was chosen to participate in the Techstars SAP.iO program in Berlin, which comes with an investment of $120,000. In addition to that, the company raised over $100,000 in investments from Estonian investors with Siena Capital Partners leading the round.

We are prompt believers that strong teams are the brick and mortar of every company and are looking forward to seeing how Teamscope is going to change the future of work for the better with Techstars SAP behind them.