Adaptalytics
Improving Business Outcomes

Adaptalytics is a leading analytics consulting company that specializes in solving complex problems using data, modern technology, scientific methods, and human creativity. By delivering rapid, powerful decision tools, the company enables clients to make fact-based decisions, thereby optimizing their business. Adaptalytics’s focus is different when compared with other analytics companies; their area of interest and expertise is one of the most overlooked business departments with respect to adopting analytics—Human Resources.

In an interview with CIOApplications, Richard Grant, Principal and Chief Business Officer, and Dan Anderson, Principal, and Chief Data Scientist, at Adaptalytics, share their views on the company’s offerings and how they help clients drive business outcomes through “people” analytics.

Please provide us a brief overview of your company.

Richard: We are primarily a data analytics company with a strong focus on “People” analytics.

Dan: We are creating value from our clients data that’s typically generated in our client’s business processes. These processes can be in the compensation process, mergers and acquisition processes, the employee lifecycle processes in itself, and everything in between. Often, business processes have challenges that hamper the quality of data management. So we go in, analyze it, and find out the pieces of data that are not clear or accurate as they should be and work with that data to redesign the process so that clients can collect better data for more precise analysis going forward. Our methodology involves a lot of feedback loops.

Who are your typical customers? In your interaction with them, what sense do you get of the challenges they face now concerning people analytics?

Richard: We have been and continue to be industry agnostic since day one. We cater to a range of companies, from Fortune 500 companies with 50,000+ employees to SMBs with 500 –10,000 employees. We work across a broad spectrum of industry’s right now, we are working with non-profit entities, defense contractors, retailers, and consultancies amongst others. We focus on people data and human resources functions and improving our client’s business outcomes by giving them the analysis they need to make better more informed decisions that will drive their business forward. If you have data and you have a business issue or a goal to drive further value within your company through data analysis, that’s what we will do for you. It’s pretty much how we have shaped our entire company.

Dan: Working across a variety of clients and client sizes, we provide more tactical tools-based solutions for smaller clients comprising 500 - 2000 employees. They usually have a smaller HR team with little to no analytical expertise or capabilities. One of the key issues that these companies face is concerning the annual compensation process. They need help in managing their budget, doing the math, working through cycles within their organizations, and we provide/build a variety of tools to get them through the mechanics of the entire process. On the other hand, we do much much larger projects as well with enterprise-level clients. We usually provide them with bolt-on capabilities to their existing, often understaffed analytics teams.

Typically, we find larger companies have a dedicated team for analytics but filled with people who may not have the bandwidth required to fulfill their role. On the other side, smaller companies will have a person, maybe two doing analytics, but only as a secondary role. The problem here is that it is often different from their background and is not a subject they specialize in.

So, our capabilities as an organization is not limited to a particular industry as these issues are happening everywhere regardless of what they do or sell; everyone has data, everyone has people and everyone wants to improve their processes and decision making. We fill a huge need regardless of industry.

Could you please cite one or two case studies on how you have enabled clients to overcome hurdles and attain desired outcomes with your analytical services?

Dan: Sure we have a couple of really nice ones! One that jumps to mind, we had a client who wanted to optimize and improve their recruiting process. They recruited from Ivy League schools only. They used to send large recruiting teams to all the job fairs, and their recruiting process was extensive. In fact, they spent a substantial amount of time in shortlisting candidates from a handpicked pool of a few thousand resumes. Their selection process involved one-on-one & group interviews and case studies &objective testing, after which they would hire only 1 to 3 percent of the entire candidate pool. However, despite their rigorous recruiting efforts, only half of the candidates they hired proved to be a good performer in the long run. They engaged us to help them improve their recruitment process by analyzing the data they had gathered on the attributes of candidates at the time of hire and how it changed over time when they were employed with the firm. The engagement aimed to ensure that 85-90 percent of their hires would become top performers in the long run as opposed to the fraction of that occurring now.

Our final deliverable was a 25-pages document with each page being on one major finding based on the voluminous amounts of data they had provided us. We found certain prevalent attributes in the existing set of top- and non-top performers. We gave them guidance and results based on signs of performers and non-performers for them to look out for in the candidates or employees during the recruiting phase. At the end of the day, we were able to provide them with incredibly valuable insights from their pool of data, helping them save a remarkable amount of time, effort, and money on their recruiting and hiring process. We are confident those improvements will translate into the hiring of more top performers as well over time.

What, according to you, are some of the differentiating factors of Adaptalytics that give it a competitive edge?

Richard: Our people is perhaps our most differentiating factor. We hire folks from a broad array of backgrounds and industries, considering that we have a diverse clientele. Almost all of our projects are sponsored within the C-suite of the client. We have to have people who can perform the technology analysis and translate the findings into useable and implementable business improvements.

Dan: There are many technical firms comprising brilliant experts in their team. But, what they lack is a business person to translate complex technical aspects into a language that a business executive can understand and pursue as a project initiative. That’s where we come in. We bring the best of both worlds as our focus is on solving our client’s problems, beyond just technology. It should be able to save them massive amounts of money, optimize their processes, and offer better yields to shareholders. All of which can happen only if the issues are presented in the right way, knowing the right things. Like our peers, we too have super-geeks in our company. But ours have the business acumen required to help clients effectively.

How has the company’s journey been so far?

Richard: We are growing very rapidly, reaching new revenue highs month over month for the last 14 - 15 months in a row. We continue to hire great folks and source great clients.

Dan: As partners, we bring great value to each other and the company. While we both are businessmen, Richard is the executive figure, and I am the data geek. Though our approach to solving a problem is relatively different, it complements our work as a team. Clients love it, the absolutely love the blend of skills we bring. Last year, we achieved a YoY growth of 4.4X, and in January 2020, we grew by nearly 40 percent compared to the previous month.

What does the future hold for your organization?

Dan: Though we are industry agnostic, we are observing a lot of demands in general outsourcing support and M&As. A third could be around business process tools. Considering that most of the HCM software out there doesn’t have the level of configurability that a business needs, we built several tools and leveraged automation to help clients achieve their desired goals. Our motto is simple; if you have data and business problems, then we have solutions.