Risk Mitigation in Hiring Isn't Just for Pre-Hire Anymore, with Ben Mones, Founder and CEO of Fama

We were talking about eggs before in the green room. And sometimes for my kids, it's breakfast tacos, which are just like dinner tacos. But they think they're breakfast tacos. And that's all that matters, really.

When you're listening to this Brent's kids, they're breakfast tacos. They are breakfast tacos. Yes, indeed. well welcome everybody to this episode of small talk window where the guest and host have a small window of time to dispense with a small talk as quickly as possible and settle into a meaningful conversation around the world of work and today my guest is ben monas who is ceo of fama welcome Ben.

Thank you, Brent, for having me. I appreciate it and looking forward to today's conversation in a small window of time. Wonderful. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And I'm looking forward to today's conversation too, because we're going to be talking about risk mitigation and hiring, which I know is near and dear to Fama's heart and yours. But first, what gets you up in the morning, gets you fired up around the world of work? Yeah, sure. My perspective is really that when you're spending so much time at work, you're spending so much of your waking hours, so much of yourself being dispensed with, right?

So much of yourself is forming, developing relationships, you're creating business that you're doing projects that you're running art, you're making, whatever it might be. So much of our life is spent at work. And, you know, from my perspective, what gets me up in the morning is knowing that FAMA is a tool that helps create spaces at work where people feel that sense of belonging or people feel that sense of connection where, yeah, we can identify people that act threatening or harassing or intolerant towards one another.

And those are the sorts of things at work that make you, you know, not want to be there, an unpleasant place to be. And if we really are, you know, not forced per se, but, you know, we have to work to keep food on the table, keep our families going and making eggs for our kids, like we were talking about earlier. So in any event, you know, what gets me going is knowing that Fama is a tool and a technology that helps create work as a place that people want to be, where they feel that sense of belonging and connection for thousands of companies in 30 different countries.

So that's what gets me going. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And we were talking about eggs before in the green room.

And sometimes for my kids, it's breakfast tacos, which are just like dinner tacos, but they think they're breakfast tacos. And that's all that matters, really. When you're listening to this, Brent's kids, they're breakfast tacos. They are breakfast tacos.

Yes, indeed. You know, I think you get into something right there. There's a nice segue into the topic today. When we create an employer culture, we want our workforce to feel like it's a safe place.

It's a safe place to get work done and be as productive as possible and as excited about it as possible. And when you have the right people there, good people, that makes that aspiration, that objective that much easier to create that environment. One of the things we're thinking of calling this episode end-to-end risk mitigation and hiring, That's the boring part. But the not boring part of the title is it isn't just about pre-hire anymore, which I think is interesting.

We have - why don't we start here? There's been a - we hear the word a lot, democratization, but I love the word. And there has been a democratization of technology for - in the pre-hire process. It used to be that all the technology was really for the talent acquisition professionals, right, the recruiters or whoever else inside the organization to do a better job at finding people or maybe sift through job applications in a somewhat more efficient way, more effective way.

But recently, we've seen a lot more in the way of technology that's really geared toward the job seeker. There's been a lot of democratization there with the advent of - we weren't going to get through a podcast episode without talking about AI, right? Oh, there it is. I'm on my bingo card now.

Yeah, right. Get it out of the way early. Yeah, a ton of tech for sure. Yeah, yeah.

You have lazy apply and these sorts of things where basically - it's already sort of an employer's market right now. There's a lot of folks looking for jobs. And even without this new sort of situation, there would already be a larger influx of inundation of job applications. But now it exacerbated amplified by these tools that job seekers have And so hiring organizations they have from what I understand and maybe you could speak to this they have a much greater challenge now to help ensure that the folks that they're bringing on board are indeed not bad hires.

Because I think the way I've heard it put is, you know, you don't want to have a bad hire and you really don't want to have a really, really bad hire because a lot of this technology, not just pre-hire technology, but just democratization of technology in general for individuals, you know, it could even be an issue after they leave the company, possibly because of termination, because they weren't vetted properly in the beginning. What are your thoughts around all this? Yeah, you know, it's an interesting question.

I think we have, without a doubt, a lot of technology for candidates, for consumers more generally, right? And, you know, the sense that you have to, as a job seeker, use every tool at your disposal to, you know, be able to go out and not just find the job, but make your own way in the world, right? And so I guess I would start by saying that not only do I support those types of technologies, but I welcome them in a free labor market. You know, the job seeker and the employer should have the exact same shot, the exact same access to technology for them to, you know, achieve their respective goals.

But what it does mean is that now, you know, and there could be a whole separate podcast on this idea of technology talking to technology, but the idea of quality becomes a lot harder to discern, right? You know, when we think about people as, oh, are they a reflection of their words on the resume as it relates to the words in the job description. We think about people as it relates to the text that they use in responding to a conversational ATS that asks them why they're interested in the particular role, right?

So hiring is so much more than that, right? Hiring is so much more than the text that someone brings to the table. And by text, again, I don't mean to like try to reduce it down to its bare bones, but at the end of the day, that's what a lot of this artificial intelligence is doing. It might be some video interviewing that's doing transcriptions, but it's really saying, how is this person presenting themselves in text compared to our own textual understanding of what the requirements are?

Now, that's a big piece of it. And there's a lot of technology out there that does that sort of stuff really well. Again, text to text comparison. But humans are so much more than that, right?

They're the how do we, you know, handle the difficult scenario when it is a gray area decision where we're feeding off the information stream in real time and we have to make a call based on incomplete information. How is this person going to perform if I'm in customer service? And, you know, I have a moment where someone is really upset about something that happened with the product that I sell. They have a customer issue.

How is that customer service representative going to be diplomatic? you know, resolve conflict, right? It's so much more than what you say, but how you say it, how you present it, where you listen, where you don't, your body language, all that, right? And so I think that's the area that, you know, employers are now seeing, okay, well, we can figure out who somebody is in text and, you know, candidates who are seeking jobs can say we can actually get a leg up on that piece, right?

But it still leaves employers with this question of, you know, where are the quality candidates? How do I get, again, back to the way I've always done things, an evaluation on someone's behavior. How are they going to act around fellow employees when they join? Are they going to treat them fairly, right?

Are they going to treat it in the same way, no matter what they look like, kind of like you were saying, or, you know, two, how are they going to treat our customers in the same example I was sharing, right? And so we know, our case is just that, you know, companies that, you know, have strong cultures outperform those that don't. productivity actually increases in environments that, you know, are free from toxicity. There's a direct relationship.

This really interesting Harvard study that came out with Cornerstone On Demand. They had a bunch of like before, you know, Cornerstone merged and became Cornerstone. Today, when Seesaw was just like an e-learning company, they had so much data about people and data about performance and surveys, et cetera, you know, on things related to the workforce and help within the workforce that people who are in toxic work environments are 40% more likely to leave, right? So employers know that.

And for years, they've been trying to answer that question again, how is somebody going to act when they join around fellow employees, how are they going to act around the customers that they engage with, right? And so I think what you're seeing now is as this question of, does the person have the experience, do they have the words on their resume, do they type the answers to the question the right way? It exposes almost this other quality question of like, who's this person?

Who is human? What are the intangibles? And I would argue that employers forever have cared about this, right? Employers have always asked the questions in the job interview.

I remember when I was applying to jobs and is Kinko's still a company by the way? I think they finally went away. But I remember even just a few short years ago seeing one Yeah But you remember like when you were applying to a job We used to go to Kinko and print it out like our resume on resume pages it was like thicker and we would get the black folder and we would go in like that was a sign of demonstrating to an employer preparedness attention to detail recognition of the moment etc you know the handshake the eye contact all that employers are still looking at ways that they can answer those sorts of questions about a person's character about their behavior and i think that's where you're starting to see the technology turn to is like okay this like i don't want to to again make it seem like it's a small part of the the the ta tech universe but this is a this is going to quickly become a very mature space this like conversational ats candidate tech leads job like you said that's going to become a mature and commoditized space very very quickly probably some would argue it's already that way right now I wouldn't, but I think we're living through a phase where this technology is very quickly going to be like, oh, OK, this is just a part of how we do work now, leaving employers with these bigger questions.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, that, by the way, thank you for that wonderful sort of, you know, overview of our of our circumstances right now. I mean, you put very well and I guess it begs the question and I'm going to set this up just a little bit. We also have some sort of traditional conventional approaches to figuring out whether somebody is - who they say they are, whether they are an up-and-up individual, ethical, these sorts of things.

all of those were designed for this previous reality that no longer exists. Very few people - this actually occurred to me the other day. I kind of knew it was in the background, but all of a sudden it just kind of like came to me. Yeah, yeah, nobody is printing out a resume anymore on a watermarked, you know, bone white, you know, resume stock.

Like it's not happening anymore. And, you know, in a way that's great because it was always kind of a pain to go over to Kinko's or whatever it was, OfficeMax, another one that no longer exists and do that. It was kind of tough. But you're right.

You brought up something really interesting. In that old calculus, you would go in and you would look them in the eye and they would see that you had a resume on appropriate paper and you were well presented and all these kinds of things. And that was a very useful, probably accurate, or at least partially accurate glimpse into your character. And we don't have that same sort of IRL or old school in-person face-to-face situation anymore.

And so it's a lot easier for folks - in a way, it's a lot easier for folks to sort of, I guess you would say, fake that for lack of a better word or put their best foot forward. it's easier to put your best foot forward in an online environment than in a than an offline environment but i would also say that it might be in a way tougher for folks to to present themselves in that way in the online environment because if you're gen x or older um or older millennials you're you joined facebook about 15 years ago you're still there i i'm a gen x myself and i do go into Facebook and I post photos of my kids and, you know, funny jokes and this sort of stuff.

And, and, um, everybody, a lot of folks. So I guess it's this big setup here. And I, you know, what is the solution now? I know we have behavioral intelligence capabilities that we didn't use to.

We have ways of, of sort of, um, I don't know if this is the word we want to use, but to investigate folks online just to kind of explore, unearth cues or reliable cues as to their behavior and their character. Can you get into that a little bit? Yeah, yeah, sure. And it's a great question, you know, and I'll share one example, too, about the old way.

And I remember I had a job early on in my career where the guy I worked for used to do this thing where when he was late stage, and this was in-person interviews, so late stage interviews, it was an office you had to drive to. I was living outside of New York City on Long Island. And his thing was that when the interview was scheduled, let's say it was a 2 p.m.

interview, you would get a call from him as a candidate at 10 a.m. That said, and it was always something, it was funny. This guy always did something different.

It was like, hey, you know, I know this is kind of a strange request, Brent, but like I got to leave the office and go right, you know, home or I got something that's getting me late. And, you know, my wife asked me to pick up a gallon of milk. My wife asked me to do this or I need to go I forgot to go at the auto parts store which is like right And he would always pick something that wasn too far away Like I need I remember there was one time where he said something like uh you know I need like paper plates for a barbecue.

I'm having this weekend. I don't have time to go. Right. Can you pick them up for me?

And so what he would do was he would ask this question and it was like a toss up 50, 50, the candidates would be like, no, or they would, or they would do it. And, and his thing for him, This guy who ran a small business was like, I want to know if somebody is okay with last minute changes. I want to know if somebody is okay with putting the company first. Right.

So it's this kind of like character check that I think there are employers all over the globe that have their own version of the resume or the milk or whatever it is that, you know, maybe breakfast, they have some breakfast tacos or something like that. In any event, like that way is gone. Like you said, like, even if you're a full time in the office, you've hit RTO, everyone's adopting it like you still want to find the candidates that, you know, you'd have to move out. Right.

The folks like the talent pool has expanded to include everyone everywhere at this point for all employers, which is really exciting. So I think employers now are saying as the dynamic is changing, as the environment is changing, let me just say like simply as the workplace is changing, we need to find ways to answer those same questions in an updated 2025 modeled approach. Right. And I think, as you mentioned, like, you know, I count myself an older millennial, you know, like I was that group who, you know, grew up with a Facebook account I got in 2004 when I got a .

edu email address for college. Right. Like that was when we got Facebook, you know, and check it out. Like right now, this year, Gen Z and millennial makes up 50 percent of the workforce in 2030.

that number is going to be 75%, which is crazy to think about, right? I mean, it makes sense. And in like, you know, boomers aging out of the workforce, Gen X, you know, reaching the next phase of their career. And we've got like Gen Alpha or some other new Gen Alpha.

I think it is that, yeah. Yeah. But in any event, like companies, I think, are adapting their screening technology And these questions are screening approaches to say, how do we adopt our toolkit to, you know, screen our workforce in a way that reflects both the nature of the workplace, where it is, but who's making up that workforce today? And to your point, like looking online and not just things that are risky, like our bread and butter again is is helping you get an approximate intelligence on someone's behavior based on how they treat other people online.

If they hate, you know, troll people on the Internet or if they act hateful towards the people because of what they look like. Like those are things that we know they normalize that they could bring into your workforce. But there's also other cool stuff you can do, like looking at, you know, big five traits that a person brings people based on their online language alone. So I think we're at the beginning of this, like, and it's hard for me as the founder and CEO, it's been 10 years since we started the company.

So we are very much at the beginning of this kind of recognition that, you know, the future of talent technology is going to be quite different and it's going to be a moving target. And I think, you know, you're right. The coolest thing about what we're doing right now is like, like, dude, we're living through history on this stuff. Like the game is changing every year right now for us.

And that's, I think, what makes HR tech so exciting and drawing so much investment and honestly has elevated the field of talent, HR and people, you know, to other types of professions in ways that maybe it wasn't 15 or 20 years ago. Oh, yeah, absolutely. But I will just say that online screening and those big five traits, that definitely sounds like the way forward. And you're absolutely right.

We're living through history right now, just like our great grandparents when they invented automobiles. They're getting rid of horses. And, you know, folks lived through the 1900s, the 20th century, wouldn't recognize 1999 if they, you know, if they'd just been transported from 1915. And I think, folks, this is going to be the same sort of situation in the next 20 years even.

And it is an exciting time to be alive.