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How This Founder Is Using Neuroscience To Help People Discover Their Dream Jobs

This article is more than 7 years old.

How are you supposed to identify (and land) your dream job when you don't know the answer to the oft-asked question: "What do you want to do with your life?" Pymetrics is using neuroscience-based games to help people discover their cognitive and emotional strengths and data science algorithms to match companies with qualified candidates while simultaneously mitigating unconscious bias in career choice and hiring and decreasing attrition. Pymetrics was founded by Frida Polli and Julie Yoo, Harvard University and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ph.D. graduates, in 2013 and is currently used by 150 schools nationwide and employers ranging from Fortune 100s to startups. They have raised $8.63 million from venture capital firms including Khosla Ventures, Mercer, Randstad and BBG Ventures.

Elana Lyn Gross: What inspired you to start Pymetrics? What was your career path?

Frida Polli: I spent a decade as a Ph.D. neuroscientist doing brain imaging research at Harvard University and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My research was aimed at uncovering the mysteries of the brain and predicting how behaviors impact outcomes. I truly loved the science I was doing but was frustrated by the lack of focus on practical applications. I went to business school at Harvard to figure out how to create applications for the cognitive science we had been working on. While I was at Harvard Business School, I realized how archaic career assessment and recruiting remained. It hadn’t changed since when I was in college — and that was awhile ago. I also realized that we had been working on science and technology in the lab that could help solve this problem. Reconnecting with my MIT colleague, Julie Yoo, we developed the idea of using neuroscience assessment and data science to offer better career assessment to job seekers and predictive, yet unbiased, hiring assessment to companies.

Gross: What has been the biggest challenge and, on the flip side, the biggest reward of starting Pymetrics?

Polli: The biggest challenge has been breaking into the world of human resources, a world foreign to Julie and me. Recruiters did not understand how a seemingly simple but very different technology could be useful to them. We encountered a lot of skepticism. However, now that we have a lot of companies using our technology, the biggest reward is realizing that we are truly transforming an industry.

Gross: What advice do you have for other women who hope to start their own businesses?

Polli: Take the plunge. Women make great bosses. Just because there aren’t that many women-run businesses doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be. There are still many structural and practical reasons that women are underrepresented in high-level management. The numbers will continue to improve, but not without every woman carrying her weight and taking the plunge.

Gross: What is a workday as Frida like? Please walk me through a day!

Polli: There is no typical workday. Work involves meeting with clients and investors, internal meetings to discuss strategy and product, writing content to get the Pymetrics message out there, analyzing data to uncover cool aspects of the work we are doing, speaking with journalists, presenting at conferences, dealing with internal interpersonal issues and much more...topped off by a healthy dose of homework with my eleven-year-old daughter and downtime with my family.

Gross: What are your responsibilities as CEO and cofounder of Pymetrics?

Polli: As CEO and cofounder, my broad responsibilities include company and product vision, hiring and fundraising. Essentially, I focus on making sure that we know what we’re doing and that we have the right people and funds to do it.

Gross: What are the most important characteristics someone needs to have to be successful in your role?

Polli: Passion, the ability to lead or inspire others, toughness and perseverance. They are all related. You have to really love what you do and communicate that well to others, whether it's teammates, future hires, clients, investors or journalists. You have to be able to carry on even when you face failure and rejection. There are many situations that will not work out, and it’s important to be able to learn from failure and keep going.

Gross: What are three characteristics you look for when you’re hiring a new team member?

Polli: Drive. A positive attitude. Resilience.

Gross: What are the most important skills for doing your job and how did you develop them?

Polli: I’m still learning on the job so this is an evolving question but here are some important ones. Domain expertise in neuroscience is a big part of what allows me to do my job effectively, as well as the skills I learned doing research for ten years at Harvard and MIT. As a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, I learned about hiring, fundraising and management skills. I was part of a very large lab, and postdocs were left to run their own, large-scale projects. I learned other skills like public relations and sales on the job as the CEO of Pymetrics. That’s part of what makes a startup so much fun: It’s one of the few places you can learn on the job and no one thinks you’re underqualified for your position.

Gross: What's the biggest lesson you learned at work and how did you learn it?

Polli: Develop toughness. Work is not always a bed of roses, and there are things that happen that will require you to deal with situations that are unfair or unfortunate. Learn how to move past them and not let them get you down. There are lessons to be learned in even the worst of circumstances. While it’s normal to feel discouraged and demoralized for some period of time, ultimately your success will be determined by how well you can overcome hardship. I’ve had to learn this several times over. The first time was when I had a former advisor in graduate school try to impede me from leaving his lab by threatening to interfere with my academic career if I did so. I did it anyway, and thankfully prevailed, but it was a tough lesson. The second time, more recently, was when a client project went dramatically off-track because of outside factors beyond our control. Again, the key was separating out what I could have done differently for the future (if anything) from a general sense of discouragement and then finding a way to use these experiences as motivation to succeed.

Gross: What is one thing that you wish you had known when you were starting out your career?

Polli: I wish I'd known how many times your career might pivot. Going into college, I thought I was going to be a journalist then documentary filmmaking in college led to my interest in neuroscience. This ultimately led me to pursue a Ph.D. in neuroscience and spend a decade doing brain imaging research. However, my impatient and practical tendencies made me seek a more applied goal for neuroscience, and here I am as an entrepreneur at Pymetrics. Who knows what’s next!

Gross: What is the best advice you've ever received?

Polli: It’s the age-old version of lean in: Just do it. Women like to plan, and that is usually a good trait. However, women can plan themselves out of many situations because they cannot imagine how their current lives will accommodate future scenarios. For example, a common thought before having children is, "How can I work at the pace I do now and have a child?” The answer is that it doesn’t exactly work that way. You don’t need to slow down per se, but having children just makes you a much different type of employee. I've found that it makes you more efficient and less anxious about the details, for example. In this way, you can be a parent and have a demanding career. As Sheryl Sandberg points out in "Lean In," this excessive planning leads to women to remove themselves from scenarios that seem impossible based on their tendency to plan. So, just do it. It will all work itself out, and you will figure out a way. And if something needs adapting after the fact, that’s fine too.

Gross: What is your business advice for other young professional women?

Polli: Seek out role models that reflect your goals, both professionally and personally, and then follow their lead.

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