Pinsight
Bringing Fairness to Leadership Selection and Development

Although most managers claim to maintain fairness and diversity within their workforce, research shows that their decisions when it comes to hiring and promotions, are often swayed by unconscious bias. For instance, managers are 3 times more likely to identify men as having leadership potential than women, and they are twice more likely to choose White men over Black men as high-potential employees. Such bias is detrimental for organizations as it blocks potentially more capable people from reaching the levels of leadership where they make a positive impact and exposes organizations to the risk of losing profits, losing talented people, and inviting lawsuits. Fortunately, technology can address this problem as it can provide unbiased data to inform many important personnel decisions – from hiring to promotion and development.

To this end, Colorado-based Pinsight has created an end-to-end platform called the virtual assessment center, which offers a high-tech “blind audition” for leadership roles. It measures candidates’ and employees’ capabilities via a realistic online business simulation. With the assistance of certified human assessors, it creates a highly engaging, immersive, and fair experience for participants.

“Pinsight stands for ‘people insight,’ and we leave no stone unturned to provide actionable insights for managers to help them make better decisions about who to hire and promote”, says Martin Lanik, the CEO. Pinsight’s pre-hire assessments help businesses ensure that they place the most capable candidates in leadership positions and usually come as the last step in the recruiting process. On the post-hire front, Pinsight’s assessments focus on helping organizations identify employees with leadership potential, measure their readiness to step into a management position, and feedback their strengths and gaps for development planning purposes.

Unlike their competitors, Pinsight’s assessments measure qualities that people can actually change – their skills and behaviors. The assessments are designed to observe employees in simulated scenarios, placing them in a fictitious company where they role-play as a senior executive, director, or a manager. This blind audition for a leadership role helps not only to identify but also to develop future leaders. A key differentiator for Pinsight is their development app, which leverages artificial intelligence to generate a tailor-made development plan for every employee based on his or her assessment results. It features daily activities that guide employees to practice areas where they’ll see the fastest growth.

Pinsight supports mainly large and midsized corporations and helps them design leadership assessment and development programs that prepare their next generation of leaders. Lanik talks about a success story involving a Fortune 500 technology company. Their new CEO set a top-talent strategy to focus on attracting and retaining the best talent in key positions. They selected Pinsight assessments based on higher predictive power and cost-effectiveness compared to their previous selection methods. After only six months, the quality of hires at the organizations increased by 13%. Simultaneously, leaders who were promoted to middle-level management based on the assessment were 6 times more likely to retain talent on their teams.

Holding a strong track-record of many success stories and industry awards, Lanik plans to further develop Pinsight’s products to help clients make more informed hiring and promotion decisions. He envisions that Pinsight continues to invest in more sophisticated analytics engine. They also aim to widen their research initiatives pertaining to bias in the leadership pipeline. Pinsight has partnered with two premier universities in this regard. “We continue to further our mission to bring fairness to leader selection, development, and succession, so that leadership positions are awarded based on merit and not based on what people look like or where they come from,” concludes Lanik.