Traitify has a new tool to help companies build great teams — one swipe at a time

Traitify CEO Dan Sines wants you to meet Bob.

Bob, Sines says, is a great salesperson on your team. An HR manager might want to know whether other employees or candidates coming in match up with Bob’s characteristics.
“‘Bob is the best on the team. I wish I had 100 Bobs.’ People say this all the time,” Sines said.
With Traitify’s new product, called Dash, managers can give employees a roughly 90-second personality assessment, and look at the resulting data that shows who might be a match.
“You can now actually check and see, do these people coming in, do they look like Bob?” said Sines. “Likewise, you could say, ‘I wish I had no one on my team who looked like Bob.'” Sorry, Bob.
With Dash, Traitify is looking to harness its Personality API to bring a big-data approach to building teams within an organization.
Personality assessments are already given within organizations, but they’re mostly multiple choice.
“What we’re replacing is old-school assessments that could take 30 minutes to an hour to complete,” Sines said.
Dash offers a mobile-friendly assessment that uses pictures, and those who take the assessment swipe left or right for whether the picture is “Me” or “Not Me.” It’s a total of 56 questions.

My Careers Personality is Visionary/Inventor. Find yours now with Smashfly! https://t.co/YcNtrQ2Ahn #personality

— John (@BigDecisionsLLC) March 1, 2016

With the focus on personality, Sines said the assessment measures “soft skills” that can show how employees will work together. The results come back instantly, and managers get a dashboard that visualizes the data, showing who is strong or weak on traits like whether employees are organized, extroverted, detail-oriented or creative.
Sines said many companies already give assessments to their leadership teams, but Dash offers an assessment for entire existing teams, as well as job candidates. When creating a team, a manager might bring their own subjective viewpoint to the fold of who would be the best candidate for a team based on their own personality, said cofounder Joshua Spears.
“We want to eliminate biases and focus on strengths and weaknesses of big groups,” Sines said.
With this latest product, Traitify is targeting companies with fewer than 300 employees. Companies pay a monthly fee based on the number of employees who take the test. The company sees it being useful for retail, manufacturing, the food industry and other hourly-based sectors.
“When you’re doing volume and you can’t talk to all these people, this gives you a better picture of who’s coming through the door,” Sines said.
Traitify launched Dash at the Social Recruiting Strategies Conference in San Francisco, where Sines said there was positive feedback, and are also heading to SXSW this month.
The SaaS product is an outgrowth of the company’s Personality API, which is already used by snagajob.com, Monster and most of the colleges in the Baltimore area. Since it was founded by Sines in 2011, the company has raised about $10 million, including a $4 million in 2014. Currently, 17 employees work out of its offices on the floor below the Emerging Technology Centers’ Haven campus in Highlandtown.
The growth will come with new clients, but not necessarily staff. For now, the cofounders handle sales. The company sees itself as a supplier of the API, enabling them to “thrive with a small team,” Sines said.