Stop Trusting the Resume: The Behavioral Science That Predicts Success

Most hiring still starts with a resume. Jason P. Carroll says that's the problem, not the solution.

Jason grew a company from $20M to $80M before building Aptive Index, a behavioral intelligence platform that replaces resume screening with validated science. In this episode, he and Josh break down why formal education and work history predict almost nothing about job performance, what behavioral data actually reveals, and how one CEO used Jason's AI to resolve a team conflict in five minutes that management couldn't crack for months.

Key takeaways:

• Why DISC and MBTI lack scientific rigor and what assessments actually predict performance
• What behavioral descriptive interview questions are and why they outperform everything else
• How Aptiv Index writes job descriptions that repel the wrong candidates and surface hidden talent
• Why your best candidate already applied and you probably said no
• The real cost of a bad hire and why avoiding one pays for the platform for five to ten years
• How HR teams are using this to finally have a concrete AI initiative they can own

Guest: Jason P. Carroll, Founder, Aptive Index. aptiveindex.com
Consumer version launching soon: askaria.com

The Hiring Edge explores hiring strategy, leadership, and the systems companies use to build exceptional teams. Follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Why Resumes Feel Useless Now

Jason Carroll 0:00

Who wrote every resume that comes across your desk nowadays? ChatGPT. And even before that existed, though, what is a resume? It's just a snapshot, self-glorifying snapshot, full of exaggerations and sometimes outright lies.

What Active Index Actually Does

Josh Matthews 0:18

Welcome to the Hiring Edge, the podcast helping leaders navigate the age of AI, create teams that thrive, and build a workplace people never want to leave. Today on The Hiring Edge, we're going to uh we're going straight to the heart of why you keep hiring A players on paper who underperform in the seat. And that's a problem. Like everybody's seen it. It's a serious problem. I'm joined by Jason P. Carroll, the founder of Active Index, who scaled the company from 800 people to 2,500 employees over seven years. And then he built the science to fix hiring and team performance for the rest of us. And it's not just what I thought originally, which was like, hey, take this test. Let's see if you fit into our culture or if you're going to be successful. It's actually scientifically backed AI software that communicates with the team, communicates with the managers. Right. So, Jason, why don't you go ahead and talk? By the way, I love this stuff. I think I just did a little post and it was like hiring, behavioral analysis, and AI. Yes, sign me up. I'm all about that, right? So like let's go. Tell us about, tell us about your company, tell us about your team, and more importantly, tell us what problem you're solving. I think that's what people really want to know.

Jason Carroll 1:30

Sure. Yeah. Gosh, what order to go in? Yeah, the the team is still small at this point, maybe 10 people or so. You know, from software development to marketing to uh a lot of like advisors. So, you know, we've got these full-time advisors that work with our clients to have the human element. Yes, we rely heavily on AI. We've got advisors that have been CEOs, they've hired, they've fired, and so they work with our clients to make sure that there's still that human judgment as part of what we're doing. But yeah, like you said, it's a behavioral assessment. We're we're calling our category behavioral intelligence, and we're the only ones really doing it. It's assessment meets AI. So the AI doesn't actually play any role in the assessment, right? That's all been scientifically validated. The algorithms, the factors that we're measuring, and the AI picks up from there. And so it's been trained.

Josh Matthews 2:24

It's not a floating rubric that's going to bend as the LLMs adjust. Correct. Yeah.

ARIA As A Daily Coaching Tool

Jason Carroll 2:30

Okay. Yeah. So the assessment is its own engine. Uh then there's the software layer, which has charts and teams and org charts and graphs and all that kind of fun stuff. Yeah. Uh there's there's a mobile app for that as well. And then ARIA is our AI, and ARIA is really where everything kind of comes to life and shines. So this isn't some PDF you get and it sits in your inbox and collects dust. It's something that our clients are using every day, which frankly shocked me. I I knew it would make it more useful. I didn't realize that I was going to have business owners logging in from their phone every single day, being like, I'm walking into a meeting with at Josh Matthews, give me tips, you know, or these two people are having conflict, or help. My marriage sucks. I mean, literally, I have CEOs who's whose spouses have taken the assessment and they're using it for romantic purposes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, why wouldn't they? Right? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Which Assessments Build Real Awareness

Josh Matthews 3:28

Yeah. So there's a part that I'm I'm kind of interested in, which is this it almost sounds like you decided to approach behavioral assessment from the ground up with some sort of foundational core, right? There's going to be a model that it leans on more, sort of this Jungian MBTI stuff, or some of the newer models. Was there one? Because you you said, hey, this stuff got really exciting for you. You want to live in that space. And trust me, man, I get it because I love that. I love that shit. What was the model that you were like that kind of caught you? That was like, oh, you bit that hook and you're like, oh, wow, this is exciting. Because that totally makes sense. Now I can understand myself differently. I can understand these employees differently. And then you're actually using it, and it's almost like magic, like NLP stuff.

Jason Carroll 4:21

You know, yeah, my first like my first foray was back in 2016, uh with two primary tools, uh uh what's it called? Strengths finder or Clifton Strengths and Culture Index, which is a similar kind of like free choice assessment style like ours. And I that opened my eyes to just how much self-awareness I lacked. I was gonna tell you. Thank you. I appreciate that. And then from self-awareness came others' awareness. I mean, just simple stuff, like more than half the population prefers that you tell them what to do. Not in a way that strips their autonomy, but like they want direction. They want clarity. And for me, like everything inside of me rails against that. Like if you tell me what to do and how to do it, like you're enemy number one now. And I'm gonna revolt. And I just thought everybody must be the same way. Nobody wants to be told what to do. It couldn't have been more wrong. And so that was the Are you?

Josh Matthews 5:23

What are you, an ENTJ? I want to know your MBTI, and I'm sure you know it, right? You must know it. Shoot. ESTP, I think. ESTP. Oh, that's interesting. Okay.

Jason Carroll 5:34

I think so. It's it's been a minute. It's okay.

Josh Matthews 5:37

Don't worry about it.

Jason Carroll 5:38

Yeah, often called the entrepreneur or doer. Yeah. So I'm looking that up here real quick. But yeah, uh it was a big game changer. Then a couple years later, I went and met Brene Brown and uh I got to be like I became certified uh dare to lead facilitator. Like got to sit with her for three days getting trained. That was mind-blowingly good. That's awesome, man. Yeah. Good for you.

Josh Matthews 6:01

Yeah.

Jason Carroll 6:02

And yeah, just just really uh awakened to my own inner world and being able to take the perspective of others. Uh so yeah, that was that was the initial intro into it. Uh that's a good thing.

Josh Matthews 6:15

I want to take this moment right now, and because some people who are going to listen to this, many people have taken an assessment test, but as you mentioned, it's sitting in a drawer somewhere.

Speaker 2 6:25

Yeah.

Josh Matthews 6:26

When I ask people, hey, what's your MBTI? or they're like, oh, I don't know. I thought it was like an EFFP. And it's like, well, that doesn't exist, so you don't remember, and that's okay. You know, so normal. But if there's one assessment that you would say, hey, look, like I've got my favorite. I like the Myers Briggs. I just do. It's I've been working on it for 35 years, right? But if you were going to say, hey, you want to go learn about yourself, right? It's not inside of this enterprise software system that you've built. Like, where would you tell people to go so that they can kind of get real?

Jason Carroll 6:56

That's a good question. I mean, and disk are both pretty good. Enneagram's fun and interesting. We're measuring some additional layers. And it's hard to kind of step out of my world, of course, because I see what's lacking still. Like there's so much about our emotional world, our interactivation, what we call affective chronometry, uh you know, our abstraction and like kind of cognitive styles. Like those other tests don't even touch on those and and they're just invaluable. So I'm trying to remove myself from that and think what might have similarities. But yeah, so I think, yeah, M E T I, it's free. Disc. I think it's you can't.

Josh Matthews 7:37

Yeah, it's free, and you can do it in five minutes or 10 minutes nowadays. I am kind of curious. And and look, there's a big difference between these things, right? Like I'm I'm an E N T J. I'm barely an E. I'm barely a T, right? So I'm not gonna be like a Napoleon, right? Who's pinging high on on both of those things, right? Or at least high on the T. So where you scale inside of these these sort of 16 profiles, that's not gonna cut it. There's eight billion of us.

Speaker 2 8:06

Yeah.

Language That Avoids Labeling People

Josh Matthews 8:07

You know, there's more than just 16 types. So I'm I'm glad that you mentioned that. I'm I am really curious about how people in organizations that you service, and you can start with your own, like, what started to change? Like, what was a palpable change that you saw once leadership started to utilize this stuff? What was there resistance of like, oh, I know what you're doing? You're trying to talk to me like that thing because you're using that program. Because we'll see smart people do that. Smart, smart, uh, rebellious people like you, Jason. Skeptical. Will do that. You'll see it. Right. Did you do companies experience that at all? Or is it sort of like this quiet peacefulness that gets things just get better?

Jason Carroll 8:55

I think the language matters. There's a way to take this behavioral data and present it in a way that feels really kind of destructive and disempowering. And then there's a way to take it in and say, hey, look, there's no good or bad or right or wrong answers. There's just kind of who you are. And we were very, very intentional and continue to be as we update and tweak about language. I want everybody who comes across this to feel empowered, to feel like they uh see a reflection of themselves and and like that they just go, oh my gosh, this thing gets me. And I and I feel so like free because of it. And I get to see that happen all the time. Now, are there people in organization, I mean so many clients now, some people probably have more of a visceral reaction. I don't encounter that, which is great, but that's not to say it doesn't exist. So yeah, I mean who knows.

Josh Matthews 9:48

So what do you what are your clients saying now? And where are they leaning into it the most? So kind of two questions. I guess that let's start with the leaning into it the most. Are they leaning into it more up front in their hiring determination and decision making around who to bring on? Or does it matter less because now they can kind of be variable? It's a depend to who they've got.

The Resume Has Near Zero Power

Jason Carroll 10:12

Yeah. Like right people, right seat is kind of the first line of defense. And so the hiring part really does matter. Are there a wide variety of different types of people who can succeed in certain roles? Yeah. But there's there are things that give us energy and there are things that drain us. And when we can get put in the right seat where most of what we do actually brings us energy instead of drains us, it's all around better for everybody. We're more engaged, there's higher trust, there's better performance, et cetera. So it starts on the hiring side. And you you asked a minute ago, and I didn't even answer your question, but what problem are we solving on that side? Like who wrote every resume that comes across your desk nowadays? Chat GPT. And even before that existed, though, what is a resume? It's just a snapshot, self-glorifying snapshot full of exaggerations and sometimes outright lies about what I've done before now. So essentially experience. Not even skills, because you can write skills and they don't have to be true, but experience. Well, and sometimes formal education. We have studies from the 80s and 90s that tell us that formal education and experience have almost zero predictive power to tell us if somebody's going to succeed in a role. Like formal education might as well throw it out the window, unless you need it, like you're a surgeon.

Josh Matthews 11:49

There's a handful of those types of roles. I think we're going to see, in fact, I think I have a guest in two weeks or four weeks, and we're going to talk about that because it's like the death of the university, especially liberal arts. Yep.

Jason Carroll 12:02

And then experience. If you've done this thing for 20 years, but you've done it poorly, now you're bringing 20 years of shit experience into my organization. And that doesn't help me at all. And so this whole system is broken and it has been for decades, where we're looking at a resume as the first line of defense to figure out if somebody is a good fit for a role. And it just garbage. It doesn't actually give us anything other than how well does somebody present themselves and what they've done in the past.

Better Alternatives To Resume Screening

Josh Matthews 12:39

But come on, Jason. I mean, I'm just going to push back a little bit. First of all, yeah, I totally agree. You know, thousands and thousands and thousands of resumes that I look at, not in my life, every year, look at. Every year. Sure. And so there's, and it is, it's uh there's so much AI garbage now. I have to use AI just to get rid of the AI garbage. Right. It's just like, first there was email and everybody loved it. And it's like, you've got mail. Oh my God, I got an email. And now it's like, you've got spam, 400 messages. So now we have spam filters. And the same thing's happening with resumes and AI written resumes. It's a battle. Right. And eventually, and I was talking about this with someone the other day. It's like, well, what's going to eventually happen? Eventually, some alternative is going to get squeezed in the middle because people are just going to be like, you know what, I'm sick of this. Boom. And some idea is going to take hold and it's going to, you know, put it into, it's going to make it obsolete. Right. The whole idea of resumes. Platforms are starting to do that with LinkedIn, but it's still just a resume, a digital resume. So I've got to ask you, I mean, okay, I'm hiring a Salesforce architect. They have to know some pretty serious stuff. They have to have a certain amount of experience. I need to start somewhere, right? I need to look at something that certifies or verifies that this person can do that thing. So when you talk about the sort of the obsolescence of the resume, what's the alternative?

Jason Carroll 14:13

Well, I mean, there are multiple legs of the stool. Structured interviews are still one of the best determining factors. And not just having a structured interview, but using the right strategy for that interview, like behavioral descriptive questions. So that's the term you want to look up if you're listening to this and you're like, what does he mean? Yeah, behavioral descriptive, which is instead of asking you a question that you answer, it's tell me an instance where XYZ happened. So now you have to actually recall a real scenario. So that's a piece of it. Um, you know, referrals, but handling them in a productive way. That's right. And sure, we can find out about experience if we want to. Personally, out of my dozens of people or dozen or so people that work for me, I haven't seen, I don't even have in my inbox a single resume of anybody that works for me right now. Never seen it, don't want to see it because it doesn't matter for me. If I need to hire a Salesforce architect, I'm going to use my platform to determine what are the kind of behavioral hard wirings that's going to give this person, like that's going to be the best fit if I find this person who's wired to succeed, feel energized, et cetera. And then I'm going to use ARIA or AI to write a job description that that speaks to that person's wiring. So yeah, there's going to be the job duties and all that, but it's also going to almost be like a sales pitch for the kind of person I'm looking for. And so the people who are applying now, I'm weeding out the ones that are just the wrong wiring because they're going to read some of the stuff and they're going to go, ew, well, that doesn't sound fun at all. But then there's going to be some that light up. Some of those people are going to read Salesforce expert, whatever, architect, and then be like, well, I don't have that at all. So I'm not even going to apply. Right. Yeah. But there's going to be some people that have it. And so they apply. And there's going to be some people that are like, I don't know how to do this, but man, this company sounds cool and this job description sounds awesome. And I bet I could learn. And they're going to apply. And these are the hidden potential folks that we never even see when we overemphasize the resume and the prior experience.

Why No Single Trait Predicts Success

Josh Matthews 16:20

You know, I'm with you 100%. Can I just say that? Yeah. Man. Like this is, in fact, the last podcast talked about that. It talked about all the things that people are doing wrong and how they're losing. Like, I forget the exact title, but it's basically like your best candidate. You already said no to the best candidate and you don't even know it. Right. We all know that these vibe coding, not vibe coding, these sort of vibe interviews, like, hey, I just want to get to know you. That's my style. Let's have coffee. Yeah. I want to know all about. It's like, okay, whatever. That doesn't work. That's a one in five shot of success. And you're right. Like, unless you're hiring someone who has to be like steeped in serious, whatever it is, machine learning theories to go work on some global panel for, you know, for like world agreement on how an MP4 is going to be structured. Like, yeah. Like you don't necessarily need a degree. Not at all. Yeah. Not at all. It used to mean something. It doesn't mean the same thing anymore. It's completely devalued. But this idea of look, it's broken, man. And you know it. Like the hiring systems are dog shit. And unfortunately, the people that are involved in the hiring are nice, genuine, earnest, well-meaning people that lack the skill set to even be able to analyze those behavioral questions that you were just describing. Tell me about a time when you didn't suck at interviewing. That's a good question. Me personally, I always suck. No, I'm just kidding, dude. I only don't suck at interviewing. No, I'm just joking. I'm making a joke. Come on, man. Come on. No, I'm making a joke. But like those tell me about a time things, yeah, they're real and they can definitely throw people. What do you think is uh do you have like have you noticed for yourself that when it comes to the people that work for you or that you're helping people get hired, there's you and I already know like intelligence is sort of the key. Like if you're smart, there's behavioral stuff too, but it kind of starts with intelligence. Like, can you problem solve? Can you figure this out? Is emotional intelligence, like can you handle, you know, can you be flexible? Like all of these sorts of things. But is there a specific quality beyond say intelligence and you know potential that you see is intrinsic to all top performers?

Jason Carroll 18:52

No. We don't measure intelligence and we don't measure EQ. We we measure natural styles and and and relationships to things like emotion that can give us clues. But the beauty of EQ is their skills. Anybody can become empathetic or resilient or whatever else if they put the work in. So things that are pure skills you can work on. We don't measure IQ and intelligence. We don't measure and so we have to look at the eight attributes that we do. And there's just per role, the answer to your question is absolutely yes. But across the board, where like if you have this or that or the other, you're gonna be good or not, not not even remotely. No.

Josh Matthews 19:42

So like conscientiousness just as an attribute, that's not something that you see come up like all the time or in most roles.

Jason Carroll 19:51

No, no. So what we have a couple of things that we measure, one of them called a precision, which is gonna be kind of closest to that conscientiousness. Okay. Where it's like, I want things to be right. I have like this inner drive for things to be buttoned up and to be done the right way, exacting standards, high standards, high work ethic and expectations for myself and others, right? Sounds great. But when you if that's dialed up too high, even if it's a strength, it can really derail projects because it can tap the brakes so hard that everything has to be perfect. And so it never ships.

Josh Matthews 20:32

Yeah. Every good quality can be maximized to the point of liability. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Jason Carroll 20:39

I love how you said that. I'm a musician, so I talk about strengths getting too loud. I had a guitarist who just cranked his amp way up too high all the time. I'm like, that's not good music, man. I know those.

Speaker 2 20:51

Yeah.

Jason Carroll 20:52

Um, you know, and so dial it in, man. Dial it in. Make good music. Yeah, yeah. You can see my, I don't know if you can see my guitar in the background here. Uh but yeah. So low precision people means that they're actually strong on the expedience, understanding that close enough is good enough, and and having this ability to wing it and be like, hey, we'll figure it out as we go. Low precision people generally are going to be more risk tolerant. All right. And we need people in our organization who have an appetite for risk. And we need those that are risk averse, and they help us like with that rigor and that validation to make sure that our ideas don't fail.

Josh Matthews 21:36

So your vision of diversity is going to be something different than just what we, you know, witnessed the last five years. Yeah. You've said that visionaries often create chaos if they don't have systems. How does that chaos specifically show up in hiring and team building? Like we because you just described somebody who's like a risk taker of these. Visionaries, they're not always systems bound because they never get to do what they do, right?

Visionary Chaos And Team Balance

Jason Carroll 22:07

Yeah. I'm chaos incarnate. Are you yeah. Um I mean, just yesterday we had our first four minutes of server downtime ever because I was like, ooh, I have this new method of rolling out code that will eliminate any downtime. And there's a bug that I really want to fix. So I'm just gonna go ahead and do it right now in the middle of the middle of the day? Yeah, like an idiot. And of course it didn't work. And so I had to roll things back and I was down for four minutes. Like that to me, that's like ultimate sin, right? Because of so many users. And that was so stupid of me to do. Uh so I fixed it then, and then I actually rolled out my update at like two in the morning today. And then I actually fit fixed my script. So now I can. Anyway, I'm chaos incarnate. I'll take a different route to work just to do it. Like I don't want to do the same thing that I've ever done before. But, you know, and now I'm early on, I'm a startup, and right now it's okay. But the result of that is currently I have a business and a platform that is scalable, but it's not multipliable because I haven't been able to create an actual repeatable go-to-market strategy that the strategy itself can scale. So the platforms can scale, right? I I can take on enterprise clients all day long and it's not going to slow me down. But the strategy of new clients for us right now has just been the universe dropping people in our lap. And that's not a plan, right? No. It's great that we're getting referrals. It's great that we're in these networks. Our close rates are insanely good, but it's not a plan. And I'm not the planner. I'm not the one who's going to come up with that plan. So I have to balance myself out as I bring on more strategic talent. But I also have to be mindful. If I find my opposite, well, now I've just created such a chasm between how we're wired that we'll we'll just we'll never meet eye to eye. It'll take three weeks for everything done.

Josh Matthews 24:06

You'll repel one another like magnets. Exactly. Exactly. It's a real tricky thing. And I, you know, I think that's where you go get help, right? It's like it's not the how, it's the who. It's like, how do I scale? No, you don't, it's the who. Who's going to help you scale, right? And I personally found not that I'm here to solve any challenges that you're facing, because I have myself, man. But there are really great ways of interacting. And I'm sure you already do this with AI. If you've built this sort of rubric about what you are, who you are, kind of behaviorally like you do with ARIA, right? Where you can actually get that to start solving your problems for you with very low hallucination and deep tests and pushback and no fluff and like all of these sorts of things. What do you think when you look at companies that come on board, right? You don't have to answer any sort of like business questions, but sort of like your typical size company that that signs up. Are they 10 people? Are they 100 people? Are they 2,000 people? Like what sort of size? I know that you can do enterprise level, but you know, what's sort of your typical size client right now?

Jason Carroll 25:22

Yeah. The the range is, the typical range is anywhere from 50 to a couple of thousand. Okay. And so we, again, we are capable of the larger ones. That's just not who we're going after. We have a high concentration of the like 20 to 50, but simply because we've ended up uh in like certain networks, like uh EEO or YPO, if you've heard of either of those. Yeah. Um, you know, that it's a bunch of entrepreneurial risk taker people, and they come on board and they're just like, I have to tell everybody about this, and they're already in a network. And so we get, you know, the referrals start rolling in. So that's just you know, I say the universe is dropping people in our lap. That's why.

Josh Matthews 25:59

So in a 50-person company, are all 50 people taking assessments?

Stress Signals And Role Mismatch

Jason Carroll 26:04

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I should have had you do it before this. I don't know what I was thinking. Uh, what were you thinking, Jason? I actually thought of that about five minutes before we jumped on here. Yeah. Uh it only takes about 10, 12 minutes. So it's super short. This isn't one of those like 45, 60 minute Hogans or whatever. It's it's engaging, right? So it's an easy ask. It's very easy.

Josh Matthews 26:25

Does it measure stress? Does it I talked to a guy the other day for an AE role for a Salesforce org? And I'm talking to him. I was like, You got stuff going on, man. What's going on? He's like, Yeah, I've got stuff going on. What is it? Like, you don't have to tell me, but you could tell me. Court battle, custody stuff. It's like, oh, okay. Don't change jobs. Right. Just stay where you are, hunker down, try to be the best you can, get through this, recover. Because you you can't you're not going to have the energy to bring that adapt adapting to a new role is. I'm kind of curious. Your assessments with does it recognize that? Can it pick up on things like that? Like, are there enough opportunities for input? Is it like you is it tapped into Slack? Like is it kind of analyzing all this stuff?

Jason Carroll 27:14

No. So it's not tapping into any other third-party things. Okay. Way too many privacy issues and corporate compliance issues there. Sure. Yeah. Two ways that it can one one thing is we can see what would drain and stress you out, but we're not necessarily looking at what is currently stressing you out. There is a module where like so we have our core identity that we measure, and then we have our work styles. And so if I do the work styles portion of the assessment, which is basically like kind of a similar assessment, but it's answering it in how well, like what's expected of me from work right now in order to be successful.

Josh Matthews 27:51

Okay.

Jason Carroll 27:51

And so if I answer that and we end up with, you know, the graphical representations and they're radically different, that can be an indicator. Like whatever's being expected of me right now is pulling me out of my hard wiring in a major way. Uh so that can absolutely now. Does that mean I'm stressed? Maybe, maybe not, but it's a it's a big indicator. And then we use that to ask the right questions.

Josh Matthews 28:13

Yeah. That's what happens when you put the wrong person on the wrong job or you give the right person the wrong tasks. Yep. You know, it's like, hey Josh, I want you to go through with a fine-tooth comb this Excel sheet for eight hours a day for eight days in a row or kill me now. Yeah. My God, right? It's like there's an app for that, dude. No. Yeah. But some people would be able to do it. Yeah.

unknown 28:37

Yeah.

Product Design Built For Real Use

Josh Matthews 28:38

I met with a software company yesterday. We were talking about some software that I have with them. And I was like, you know, I'm I'm a little frustrated because I can't get the metrics that I need out of this software, specifically because what should be a tick box for me for how I use it is about eight steps. Tick here, click there, enter this bit of information. It's like, I'm a small company, I don't need any of that stuff. I know what's going on. I just want to be like, yeah, click. This happened. And consequently, I don't get KPIs because I'm not going to put it in. Good luck with that. You know? Talk, talk to me about interface. Okay. Because the software that you've got, there are guys like me, like I just described. I'm not doing that. How much of this is sort of hard-coded, and how much of it is just natural language chat?

Jason Carroll 29:29

I mean, the charts are there to serve as like visual representations and snapshots. They're helpful, but it's the AI that people are using all the time. So it it looks and feels a lot like a clot or a chat GPT. You pull it up, you have your chat history, but uh the difference is how it's been trained and the tagging features. So putting pulling other people's assessment results into this chat and having that conversation in that way. But if I'm like if I'm on a team in the software and I open up ARIA, ARIA preloads everybody from that team. So it's there's really a really easy lift to just navigate the software, go and chat, and have that natural language conversation. And we have a whole prompt library, which is really fun. So like if you just kind of want to explore, you're like, what should I even ask right now? There's a whole library for that from anywhere from team dynamics, hiring, job descriptions to sports and performance and bounce back strategies. And because we've uh uh we actually have a number of D1 sports teams using our platform. Oh, very cool. And things like you know, heck, faith and spirituality or relationships and romance and other stuff. So you know, we saw how our clients are using it, and we're like, oh, this is gold. Not what we thought, but this is gold that's built into the software.

Josh Matthews 30:52

So every employee has access to this.

Jason Carroll 30:54

They can, yeah. Uh I mean generally most companies aren't doing it that way. Most companies are they kind of have the select few, you know, executive team, HR, downstream leaders. It's like a per se package. Uh no. They have the option of giving everyone access. Okay. It's an annual license based on your employee headcount, and then it's unlimited everything. It's just, you know, practically speaking, if you've got 300 people saying, hey, 300 people log into this platform and use a chat without getting some sort of training or workshop or something, it can be potentially messy.

Josh Matthews 31:30

But is it mostly leaders leadership that's using this? Sort of like team lead on up? Yeah. Okay. And then when they go in, it's personalized to them, right? So it's like, okay, this is Josh's console. This is Josh, you know, like this is Josh's team. Is it giving me, you know, let's say I'm in marketing and I um really don't interact with sales too much? You know, I'm like a second tier down, like the CMO, I'm three steps down, but I'm still a team lead. Is it giving me access on how to communicate with the VP of sales? Yeah. In this console? If you it's going both ways. Okay.

unknown 32:08

Okay.

Jason Carroll 32:09

Now your chats are private. Like nobody else sees what you're saying. Even if you tag somebody in the chat, you're just tagging the results. You're not, you're not putting them in there with you. You can export and you can share chats, but that's different.

Conflict Resolution And Fewer HR Fires

Josh Matthews 32:22

Are your clients seeing a reduction in HR issues?

Jason Carroll 32:25

Oh, yeah, man. Yeah. I I just heard a testimonial. Actually, I was presenting to a board of a network, a CEO network, and I got like two minutes in, and then I had two clients in the room and they took over. And they were like, actually, Jason, let me tell you. And so I didn't even present, they did it for me. And one guy was just like, I had two people that were having conflict, and I tried everything in my playbook, and I could not get them to see eye to eye. And then I was like, Oh, yeah, I should ask Aria. And so I did, and I just literally printed the conflict resolution guide that it gave me and walked through it with them, and it was solved in five minutes, and I couldn't believe it. That's awesome, man.

The Crowded Future Of HR AI

Josh Matthews 33:06

Yeah. Yeah. It's so cute. Jason, it's a real gift that you're giving to these organizations, but more importantly to these leaders and to these people. You know, it can't be, it can't be like we talk about this stuff, and it's fun and it's interesting, and it's it's topical, and you know, everybody who listens to this show knows I eat this shit up. But not enough people do because for whatever reason, they're just not wired for it. Fair enough. But this is stuff, real stuff. And when it comes to the world, it's changing fast. It's changing. I'll bet 70% of the world doesn't even know how fast it's changing. I think those of us who are building AI software and working in hiring and are in touch with the job market and the hiring market can see exactly what's going on, including shifts, just as recent as December. You know, OpenClause changed a lot of things. And there needs to be a change. And it has to happen ideally faster, faster than it's happening. I think, you know, 90% of people would look at a different job if they were presented the right kind of offer. That's the job satisfaction in the United States so low. It's so freaking low. Now there's AI encroachment and fear, right? I mean, clearly your software, like it or not, is displacing certain levels of experience that are necessary. You can take someone, I mean, and fair enough, it doesn't matter. Like, why not? Why not? Like, okay, you don't need someone who's been managing people for 20 years, and I know that metric doesn't matter. But like, you don't need that kind of background and deep learning experience if you can have a conversation and all the only quality you have is that you'll see this, digest it, and then take action on it. That's the quality necessary for that leader now, right? And you're helping these people. Do you think do you think that HR as products like Active Index and others? Again, there's nothing similar, but like other AI-oriented predictive modeling software. What do you what do you think is gonna happen? Just be a futurist with me for a moment. Two years.

Jason Carroll 35:27

It is so hard to know. The AI is accelerating at a clip that we've never seen new innovation accelerate. The tools that exist right now, if you like I actually part of the presentation in New York was a couple weeks ago that I was telling you about, there was a slide that showed all of the not even all, but just a suite of available AI tools for HR, from learning and development to hiring and ATS and coaching and all this stuff. And it was the most busy, messy, intimidating slide I've seen in any presentation in a long time. And it was meant to be. Because the point was there's too many options, and this whole space is very convoluted. All I can really do is focus on my lane. And I'm not replacing humans. I'm I'm not replacing human judgment. I'm I'm liberating human judgment so that we can take that dynamic of understanding other people and scale it broader and faster so that things like what you're saying, job stat goes up, turnover goes down, trust increases. So like I I've got my vision for what I want Active Index to do in the world of work. But then, man, I you know, I think I need a substance before I can futurize what two years from now is gonna look like.

Josh Matthews 36:53

Sure. I mean, at the end of the day, we don't we don't know. Like we just don't know. But you're you you talked about that crowded HR software space. It's ridiculous. It's gonna get rid of well, it it will, but not yet. Because what's going like it's still growing. Um I was gonna wait to share this to my audience, but I've I've built software over the weekend. You know, I probably put 35, 40 hours into it. It's serious software. It's not related to HR. It's not related to anything I do, but it's just something, it's sort of a passion project. And it's gonna be, it's very cool, and I'm excited to share it. But that I was able to sit there with my with my agent, you know, my open claw, and get website logic, like you just put it all together, you know, build the whole thing out. It's still in, you know, it's you know, it's like this much time to build it and then like that much time to refine it. You already know that, right? Yep. But that a guy like me, who's not a coder, can do that in a weekend is that's the new benchmark. It's outrageous. And now, and you'll see guys like Mike McCullough, principal engineer at Salesforce for vibe coding. He's been on the show and he's a friend of mine. He was joking the other day, he's like, Do you remember, Josh, like a year ago, and we were uh, you know, I was I was like telling Lovable to to like whatever, build some app, lovable.dev. And now I just tell my agents what to do, and then they just go and build it and bring it back to me. Like it's so it's it's such a different it's such a different thing. The next step, of course, is that those agents should build them anyway without you, you know.

Jason Carroll 38:39

So so what are another few weeks gonna do?

Josh Matthews 38:42

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's it's absolutely insane. So I think this space is gonna get crowded, but I also think too that there's just gonna people are just gonna home grow their own stuff, right? Yeah, but what they're not gonna do is go hire a what did you call them? It was psychometrician. Yeah. Psychometrician. Like they're not gonna go, they're not gonna go do that, right? But like until a psychometrician avatar is available on Claude that can just be accessed for everything, you know.

Jason Carroll 39:11

Uh you can do it. I mean, I you can download the IBM SPSS software, and that's your statistical analysis. You can use an agent to teach you how to be your own psychometrician. And you can go build this thing. That's not rocket science. It's behavioral science.

Josh Matthews 39:27

But the thing is, is it's not can you? It's are you gonna? And the answer is no. And with that in mind, you should definitely check out is it aptiveindex.com?

Jason Carroll 39:37

Yeah. Yeah. Index. Yeah.com. Okay.

Josh Matthews 39:45

Do you or have you noticed, and we're gonna wrap up here in a little bit, I want to thank everybody who's been listening to this show live or who's um listening to it on uh the Josh Force YouTube channel, the hiringedge.ai podcast. Um, and then also stay tuned for some good blogs and some clips that are gonna come out from this program. But one of the things that I've noticed with people who are spending time with anything related to behavioral awareness, it's it's kind of exciting and it's fun at first, and eventually they just kind of get it. Like, do you have any markers around, say, clients where they've used um your software for a year? Drift of I'm not saying the whole company as a whole, because companies rotate people and it's always going to be on. But but like, oh yeah, I don't even need that anymore because I know I recognize that type of person and what that person needs and and what you know, how to communicate with them to get the most out of them. Do you see these people kind of growing, not just professionally, but emotionally because of the use of ARIA?

Jason Carroll 40:54

Yes to the growth, but no to the drift. And I think you'll even you'll you'll feel this answer yourself. The more you go to AI and and learn, the more you kind of keep going to it, right? Like you haven't drifted away from your AI usage because you've learned. You've learned and you're like consuming. I mean, our art the human brain is unbelievable what we can retain and how we can compute.

Josh Matthews 41:25

Yeah, it's it's like that, it's like that. I know kung fu.

Speaker 2 41:31

Yeah.

Josh Matthews 41:32

I know kung fu.

Jason Carroll 41:34

Yeah.

Josh Matthews 41:34

You did it much better than me.

Jason Carroll 41:36

I've been living and breathing this stuff for 10 years, and I get it, but I'm in aria all the time. Uh I'm in ARIA for my personal life when stress happens, you know, and because it's it serves as this companion to not just teach you and learn and you can grow, but to also like check yourself and to like be a sounding board. Uh and what I try to tell my clients is like you are the thought leader, and AI is your thought partner. And so if you engage it that way, don't let it do thinking for you. You be the thinker and you let it be your partner in thinking. And sure, you can use it for writing faster emails if you want, like, fine. But like I'm thinking about AI strategically. And for the human element, like we're not gonna stop learning how to better interact, how to grow in emotion, emotional and social intelligence. You know, we're not we're not gonna arrive someday and be the perfect human with perfect self-awareness and ability to match other people's needs and expectations. Ain't gonna happen. Yeah.

ROI Of Avoiding One Bad Hire

Josh Matthews 42:39

You make an excellent point. And you're right. I mean, I mean it all day, every day, right? So yeah, it's not like, oh, now I know I know how to prompt, so now I don't have to prompt anymore. Yeah. It's a little bit, you know, it's it's a little bit different. It's a little bit different. Um I want you to have a chance to share with the audience what kind of um financial benefit they can realize. And uh, it's gonna be different for different types of companies, it's gonna be different for different size companies, but when you know, if turnover is reduced by 22%, right? If um if there are less lawsuits resulting from you know uh disgruntled workers, things like that, if you're not hiring the wrong people for the right job three out of five times, four out of five times, have you been able to go back to some of your early clients and sort of have them articulate for you what the cost benefit has actually been by going with aptive index and what does that look like?

Jason Carroll 43:52

Yeah, I mean hard numbers are tough, right? Yeah. But just ballpark. There are themes and you mentioned a bunch of them already. Biggest, clearest ROI is hiring. We've all seen a great resume and has somebody do really well in an interview. And so we pulled the trigger and they bombed. We we've all experienced that. And we also know how painful that is. The direct replacement costs can be up to and even beyond that person's full salary. But the indirect costs of a bad hire, the ripple effect, the culture impact, the lost productivity, all of that stuff can be three, four, five X somebody's salary, especially for like the six figures types of roles. So if I I mean, dude, our our software costs it's peanuts, man. Like it's it's nothing. Yeah. In the grand scheme of things. So let's say you fall in the tier and it costs you 15 grand for the whole year because you've got a couple hundred employees, which means you're probably hiring a couple a month, right? Maybe not that much. But if you avoid one mishire, you've just paid for the software for the next five, 10 years. Yeah. It's just, it's a no-brainer. And what about the advantage? You will avoid the mishire.

Josh Matthews 45:11

Look, those are all great points. I'm glad it's so nice to have someone on the show who can amplify that reality because it is very real. And sometimes when I tell people like the cost of a bad hire is 5x or 3x or 10x, depends on the role. It sounds so fantastical, they don't want to believe it. They're like, Josh, I don't want to pay you $45,000 for this person. Why would I do that? You know, um, and and then not listen to you. Right. Like, why would I do that? It's like, well, if you if you delay this hire by four months, you're gonna lose um $120,000 to $140,000. And then if you lose that client because you don't get the work done, um, you could lose a million dollars in billings next year. So it the numbers real, right? And I'm kind of curious how your internal HR talent acquisition teams are they falling in love with this? Are they resistant to it?

Jason Carroll 46:11

No, they love it. The smaller companies I'm going in through the founder or CEO. Uh, but once we get in the three, four hundred, two thousand range, we're going in through HR most often. Yeah. And they love this stuff. They don't see it as a threat. And it's actually, you see this like breath of fresh air that happens because they're all every lead of HR right now is being asked to embrace AI initiatives.

Speaker 2 46:38

Yeah.

Jason Carroll 46:38

But zero direction on what the heck that even means. And so they go out and they start looking at these tools, and they're they're like a direct threat and an affront to who they are, what they do, how they've done things before. Yeah. And so, of course, they're a little bit nervous coming into a conversation with us. But then when they see it come alive, they're like, oh man, this this just enhances everything that we're about. This, this like helps our culture. It helps me with judgment calls, and it's not replacing anybody on my team at all. It's a it's and then they start using it and they just go nutso. And I get unprompted testimonials all the time. It's fantastic.

Ask ARIA And Where To Connect

Josh Matthews 47:16

Awesome, man. Yeah. That's great. What haven't I asked you that I probably should have asked you on this show?

Jason Carroll 47:23

I do have one cool thing coming soon. If you go to ask aria.com, you can sign up for a lot of people. A-R-I-A. Yeah. Uh just like the opera. Ask aria.com. Uh Puccini. You can you can sign exactly. You can sign up for like the wait list. This is the consumer offshoot of Apptive Index. So tens of millions of people are already using AI as a mental health companion. Like it's it's their first go-to for like therapy and self-growth and all this kind of stuff. Tens of millions, just in America. And the problem with that is that's not what Chat GPT is made for. It doesn't know who you are other than your chat history, uh, and it's gonna tell you what you want to hear. And Aria's already been tuned to not be a yes man. She knows you deeply, and she knows the immediate people around you on your team at work or your spouse or your or whatever. So ask Aria, because I've had so many people asking me to do this, is it's gonna be chat-based, all the graphs and dashboards and none of that. You take the assessment, fill in your bio, and just start chatting. And it'll be like, hey, you know, show me what you know about me, Aria, and she'll give you this readout that you're just like you're looking at it, you're going, How in the world does this AI know me after a 10-minute assessment? Like it's yeah. Yeah, right. But then she'll prompt you, she'll she'll walk you through scenarios and situations. You can get your significant other to take it as well. And like now you can interact with those, you know, both of those results, or your friend group, or your uh faith community, whatever kind of thing you're in. That's the that's the dream of Ask ARIA is to be the consumer offshoot. And I mean, it's technically ready, but I I you know it's probably not gonna really launch for another month. But I'm really excited about it.

Josh Matthews 49:18

Like, so can people build like ARIA is a brain now. Can people build their own software with ARIA as an engine?

Jason Carroll 49:29

No, we're it's ARIA is simply an LLM connection to like the anthropics and open AIs of the world, but that's been fine-tuned and trained on its specific role and of course all the aptive index lingo and language and science. But no, there's no there's no way to tap into ARIA from an external platform. Not yet, at least. Think about that. Yeah, we I have. We've got some clients that we're talking to already for uh some unique use c use cases. But yeah, it's it's not as easy as it sounds on surface. No. But it's it's doable, but it's doable.

Closing Notes And Hiring Plug

Josh Matthews 50:11

Come on, man, prompt it out. Jason, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much. My audience thanks you. You're appreciated. Let's give them some ways to connect with you. So it's Jason P. Carroll, two Rs, two L's here on LinkedIn. Um, and if you're watching this on LinkedIn, you can just click the button below. If you're watching this on uh Josh Forrest YouTube channel, you're gonna have links in the description to Active Index and to Ask Aria and to uh Jason's LinkedIn profile. Anything else? Anything else I missed that we can point people to? Oh, um I don't think so.

Jason Carroll 50:52

I mean, if you happen upon this and and you love sales and this sounds like something fun to sell, I am hiring.

Josh Matthews 50:57

You are hiring. Hit me up, yeah. Okay, no, that's good. And uh we'll be back in two weeks. I'm excited about the next show. You'll be hearing all about it in the post next week.