Is a picture really worth a thousand words?
In 1940, four boys wandering the hilly countryside of rural France discovered a cave filled with prehistoric paintings depicting charging bison, stags, and horses. Despite being 17,000 years old, the images were not only identifiable, but powerful.
Images have been used throughout history to convey profound meaning in an instant. From Egyptian hieroglyphs to emojis,it’s like the saying goes: “a picture is worth a thousand words.” So we talked with Daniel Sines of Traitify about how he’s putting pictures to work to enhance the customer experience.
Experience: A picture is worth a thousand words
Inspiration: The Caves of Lascaux
Modern Day Execution: Daniel Sines, CEO and Co-Founder of Traitify
Three Takeaways
Key Quotes
Links
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Narr: They dared each other to go in. The entrance to the cave was cleared; the four boys had dug at the opening with their penknives, removing stones and chaff. They had heard legends of a secret tunnel deep in the woods that led to hidden treasure. They dropped a rock to hear how far it would go, echoing into the dark.
The oldest, Marcel, was the one to lower himself down the narrow shaft first. It was his dog that had found the hole anyway, chasing after a fox. It was damp and cold and smelled like wet earth.
The others soon followed. The youngest boy, Jacques, would later recall that “the descent was terrifying.” He was only 14 at the time. One of them lit an oil lamp, slowly casting a meager light on the vast cave walls. What they saw next would be one of the world’s great archaeological finds. Jacque recalled seeing “a cavalcade of animals larger than life painted on the walls and ceiling of the cave. Each animal seemed to be moving.”
There were bulls and bison, stags and horses. In black, red, brown and ochre. The boys held the light to the walls, working their way down the cave. Their voices echoed in the hollows. One found the figure of a bear, another a bird, calling out to the others to come see. They imagined the hands smearing the paint onto the stone, long ago. But as their gas lights began to dim and they prepared to exit the cave, questions seemed to linger: Who had made these paintings? When did they make them? And why?
After keeping the cave a secret for about a week, the boys told their school teacher about it. Seventeen-year-old Marcel Ravidat [[ RAH-vee-dah ]] and his friends found the Caves of Lascaux [[ lah-SCO ]] in September of 1940 near their village of Montignac [[ mon-tin-YACK ]].
Hitler had invaded France at the time, so it took a while for the caves to be fully examined by scholars. But when they eventually did, they found and catalogued more than 6,000 images. And yet one question that the boys asked themselves vexed those scholars.
The timeline has been established. We now know that the Lascaux Cave paintings are an astonishing 17,000 years old. We even know a little bit about the hunter gatherers who painted them. Yet one question remains unanswered. Why? Why would these people who had so little take the time to make such beautiful art? What did these spectacular cave paintings mean to them?
So warm up your wrist and practice some stick figures, because on today’s episode, we’re exploring the power of images. We’ll talk about why a picture really is worth a thousand words, and we’ll talk to someone who’s using the power of images to redefine customer experience.
Daniel: I think it's wild when you like, look back in time and you think about the Egyptians or the Aztecs or something like they were writing in, what we're now doing is our emoji is basically I think that is just a common thread in human history. That visualization of language is helpful.
Welcome to Often Imitated, a podcast about remarkable experiences from the past, and how they inspire people to create great customer experiences today.
In this episode we talk with Daniel Sines, co-founder and CEO of Traitify, about how Traitify is using images to help both candidates and companies find their match. We dig into why images are so powerful, and how you can use them to enhance your customer experience. But first, a word from our sponsors.
Often Imitated is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Learn more at oracle.com/cx.
Narr: There is a great paradox about the paintings in the caves at Lascaux. On the one hand, the paintings are incredibly mysterious. No one knows for certain why they were made. Some hypothesize that they were painted for religious purposes. Others as a form of history or recording keeping. Some scholars even think that they were just created for fun.
But though their origins are somewhat mysterious, on the other hand, their meaning is still clear even 17,000 years later. Even today, we can understand what the paintings are trying to convey. Though the languages of that era have long since passed into obscurity, we can easily pick out the various animals that these primitive painters were depicting.
And that is the great thing about images. They can break barriers of culture, background, age, and even time. We wanted to find out how images can be used in CX to break barriers today, so we talked to Daniel Sines, CEO and co-founder of Traitify. At Traitify, Daniel is using images in some unique and innovative ways.
Daniel: What we've done at Traitify is we've actually built an innovative assessment format. that's designed to measure a person's personality in under two minutes, say much faster, more fun and engaging way to measure personality. And we apply that across the entire candidate journey. So helping people find the right job, helping employers find the right candidates and helping people to develop and grow in their roles.
Narr: But Traitify didn’t start as a tool to pair employers with potential candidates. Daniel’s co-founder, Josh Spears, actually had a much more personal objective in mind when the company started.
Daniel: The company was actually started because Josh went on a blind date that did not go so well. He came back to me and said, I wish I'd have known this girl better to plan a date that would have matched our personalities. And so initially we were trying to build a dating application to match people, to date activities, and looked for personality assessments.
And what we found was that they were all just too long, too cumbersome to use for this kind of consumer engaging experience. My background's in design, Josh and multimedia productions. We're very visual people. And we basically said, I wonder if you could take that phrase a picture's worth a thousand words and actually measure it.
Narr: But it wasn’t long before they pivoted to a more business-friendly and useful direction.
Daniel: What we help companies to do predominantly is reduce turnover and increase performance and their workforce by. Aligning the right candidate with the right role. And that is really to the benefit of both parties. We're, trying to basically create happiness in the workplace, which is a real challenge.
If we can help to get the right person in the right seat, they stay longer and they're more productive for the company. And they're also happier with the role themselves.
Companies have used assessments for a long time in their process, but normally it's a point of friction. It's the thing that people repel away from and don't want to do because they're long they're cumbersome and they provide no value back to that person. And we've shifted that paradigm.
So our experience like I said, is about two minutes long. It's completely mobile designed. We show people a series of pictures. They simply say mere, not me to them. And it builds a personality profile very quickly. But what we do is we actually give feedback to the candidate that we let them learn more about themselves, learn about ways they could handle interview questions, how they could grow in the role.
Narr: Sometimes, words fail us. When we’re asked to describe something, especially ourselves, it can be difficult to find the precise words for what we want to say. It can be even more difficult to articulate exactly what it is that we want, especially in something as complex and important as a job.
But that’s where a picture really is worth a thousand words. Daniel says Tratify is working to humanize the application process. To personalize it to the candidate, helping them find out more about themselves in the end. And images are key in achieving that.
Daniel: The test is made of about 70 images. But it only takes about one to three seconds per image to respond. And that's the beauty of the question process. If these were written questions, typically people would spend 20, 30 seconds on it and there'll be a much longer tests. But people process images about 60,000 times faster than words.
We show people situations where you might see people working in different settings or , conversing with people or at a coffee shop. Or you might see a plant growing through concrete and it's relentless. There's a lot of different types of images in there that are designed to evoke a very specific response and people. And so we're looking for the type of image that's going to be as likely to get a, me as a, not me
Our science is built off of what's called the big five. It's one of the longest standing personality frameworks. That's been about 50 years of research. Very predictive across job roles, predictive across a lot of other things as well. We use that format because of the depth of the science and the validity of it.
So what candidates can then see is some insights from those five dimensions, which are openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability. And so different clients of ours will show different degrees of this information.
A real problem that happens out there. People apply to a job and they never hear from an employer again. Or they just get a rejection. And it's very demoralizing for those that are out there applying for jobs and constantly getting rejected. But with no feedback, we want to at least give the person something that they can take as a learning experience from what they've done in this process.
It was our aha moment when we started saying how can I. How can I measure more words quickly? Let's turn them into a picture. And that phrase a picture's worth a thousand words is aspirational.
Narr: While Traitify has a unique opportunity to use pictures to match people with companies that they’ll love, they’re not unique in their ability to use images to shape customer experience.
At every step of the customer experience process, from troubleshooting to content management, CX leaders are finding that images can break through barriers, and communicate more than they could ever hope to with words.
At Traitify, the use of images also helps them to understand problems at a deeper level, so that they can help employers address issues at the root.
Daniel: A great example of this. We work with a grocery store chain and they were having substantial turnover problems basically a little over a hundred percent. Every person they'd bring in a role, they'd have to bring another person in to fill that role.
Within that year, what we did was we came in and we analyzed what were these people that were leaving and what was the common thread? And what we found was that often people are high on openness and high on extroversion. So very creative, very outgoing people were being hired in larger numbers. And then they were putting them back of house, stocking shelves. And these people are just not finding it enjoyable. They were, easily distracted because you're higher on your creativity level. You're not getting to do anything creative. And so by simply making that more aware for that company and having them kind of shift where those people were to the front of house in front of customers and find more people for this back of house role. We produced turnover for them by over 30%. And it's saved millions of dollars in that turnover cost.
Companies don't do a great job of describing what jobs are and that's something we're trying to help them make a change
But then we like to actually come in and do analysis on current employees, look at any kind of performance data interview, any managers look at any kind of quantitative information. And that helps us to create that initial understanding of what a profile could look like.
Over time, then we continue to learn as to, who's working better in these various roles and how can we help them find the better spot where they're gonna fit and that adjusts over time and gets smarter and smarter with it.
So we've actually taken a shift of focus and focus completely on high volume. So we work a lot with restaurants, retail, hospitality, manufacturing, logistics where there is very high degree of turnover, a lot of challenge and happiness in the workplace. And we're trying to help those companies find their way through.
Narr: And they’re rethinking the hiring process, reframing the idea of the candidate.
Daniel: At the core we need to treat candidates like customers. And I think that's been a problem that has not been solved in the entirety of the recruiting experience over years and years. We often treat these people as more of a commodity than the customer.
So what we do is we look at your hiring process and say, Why are you asking all these questions of the person? Do you really need all that information at this step? Does this need to take 45 minutes to go through, to apply for a job where you're going to make $10 an hour? Why are you doing that? And if we can help them to dig through this and take that apart.
We can help them reduce the time across the entire experience.
Narr: You can process an image 60,000 times faster than text. And it’s also more fun. Today, thousands of people visit Lascaux every year. Even though the art is rudimentary, it’s still beautiful to modern eyes.
This is an upside of using images that shouldn’t be overlooked. Not only does it help users understand the CX better, it’s also a more enjoyable experience. And at Traitify, they find that that element of enjoyment means people are more likely to use their technology.
Daniel: Imagine you're applying for a job at, let's say like a Starbucks or something, and you get rejected from that job without any feedback or information on it. What are the odds that tomorrow you're buying Dunkin donuts?
Most brands are working with a person in this hiring experience that will buy from them. So if they choose to stop buying there, it has a real obvious effect on their bottom line. I think that doesn't include, what do those people go on to say on social media, what do they say to their friends? And does that create an even bigger amplification of the problem? If they had a really bad experience in the hiring process,
if you talk to candidates and do any kind of interviewing, they always refer to the black box. They just they're sending their resume in after hours of working on it and have no idea what's going to happen. And then they feel no loyalty back to that brand. And it's amazing how just a simple little thing back of any bit of feedback changes the way they'd rate an experience with that company.
Narr: Just as the cave paintings reveal that early people were hunters, tool-makers, creators, and spiritualists, Traitify’s assessment also draws insights from the candidate. Their strengths, weaknesses, preferences, dislikes...and can even suggest potential roles for them.
Daniel: We actually walk through insights on their entire experience with us and any other data we can get 'em on the rest of their experience. We walk them through that as well. And then we try to keep them up to speed on any kind of market trends we're seeing. As we're working with, many people within their industry, how can we help them to learn from that?
Narr: Daniel says it makes sense to ditch the old, written question list. It’s too lengthy and time consuming. And Traitify’s version has the data to back it up.
Daniel: I've heard from many others when we're unseating an old assessment that they never took the test that they're giving to their candidates. And my first question is why. And they said it just took too long. I didn't want to go through it. Neither did your candidate, It's not enjoyable. So you wanted to at the baseline say this is something I'm willing to do. Before I ask thousands of other people to go do this
The truth is that for every one of these brands, your people are your most important part of your business. There should be an area that you invest the most in if you want to have the best results for your company.
Checking our core metrics, which are completion rates time to take and what that assessment quantity is relative to the expected from that account. Honestly, we're really good on those metrics. We have about a 96% completion rate across now, 15 million tests. So it's a pretty steady metric that we can rely on and trust.
We want to hear from the candidate, how did they actually feel about the experience?
We have a 98% positive response to the results matching you. So that's a very high number, but we've also asked questions like. Does going through this experience make you feel like you're more interested in this company or that you want to work here more. And we tend to see, results in the 90 to 95% range with most of those
We work with some companies where they actually use us. Pre-applied so. Companies might have too many jobs out there and you have no idea what jobs you can see at the brand. So you take our test and it says, ah, here's the jobs that might be a best fit for you. Check them out as a Netflix for jobs like experience.
And in those cases, we often see really great feedback from candidates because they appreciate that they no longer have to just search for something. They can actually discover interesting opportunities at that company that they might not have been aware of.
We're not designed to remove people from your process. We're designed to help prioritize the order that you follow up. And who to reach out to first, and we're also trying our best to redirect a candidate that might not be as good of a fit to a better opportunity within the company,
Narr: So what Traitify is doing is figuring out how to appeal to that visceral human reaction. Can they identify with the image?
It's an interesting problem that involves the combination of a team of psychologists. So the team of designers working together on it. And so that's our goal is how can we get to that thousand words? And then after that, maybe it's, how do you add 24 frames per second to it?
The designers are working with the psychologists to pick images that are eliciting the right response. The psychologists are then imbuing that with the traits and the personality information we're looking for.
And then the developers are building out the actual way to test that, to feed back loop to con to ensure that we've actually measured those elements.
Most people, when they first hear about this, say, Oh, that's pretty easy. And then when you start digging in and realizing all the levels of depth, you have to go to pick one picture that'll universally apply. It's very challenging.
The test is a 92nd image based assessment where people simply say me or not me teach image and it builds a personality profile. In that time we have a 96% completion rate across over 15 million.
So the core science behind the Traitify assessment is the big five which has been around for 50 years is considered one of the most predictive assessments and the most tested assessments for validation across cultures.
I think it's wild when you like, look back in time and you think about the Egyptians or the Aztecs or something like they were writing in, what we're now doing is our emoji is basically I think that is just a common thread in human history. That visualization of language is helpful.
Narr: Whether it’s 20,000 years ago or 2021, the power of imagery remains the same. It’s been used as a form of communication across cultures for centuries. So using it in customer experience makes sense.
Like Daniel said, it’s a faster way to communicate a complex idea, it gets results, and people are more likely to engage with it than text.
Speaking of people being more likely to engage with images, Marcel and Jacques became guides to the Lascaux caves when they opened to visitors in 1948. The caves now receive hundreds of thousands of visitors every year.
In a similar vein, By using pictures, Traitify gets thousands customers, or candidates, to connect and engage with the experience on a primal level. And it teaches the user something about themselves in return.
Every CX leader could learn something from their success. Using images might not make your customer experience as famous as the Lascaux cave paintings, but it might help your customers have just a little bit better of an experience.
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This is your host, Ben Wilson, Head of Content of Caspian Studios. thank you for listening to another episode of Often Imitated. If you like what you’re hearing, tell one friend. This podcast was narrated by me, Ben Wilson and produced by Meredith O’Neil and Ezra Bakker Trupiano. You can learn more about our team at CaspianStudios.com
This podcast is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Learn more at oracle.com/cx.