The Story of Crosschq: Building the Future of Hiring Intelligence

Sometimes the most transformative business ideas come from personal pain. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Mike Fitzsimmons shared how a few critical hiring mistakes at his previous venture – a company he had built to $200 million in revenue pre-IPO – ultimately led to the creation of Crosschq, a platform revolutionizing how companies approach hiring.

From Crisis to Opportunity

The genesis of Crosschq wasn’t in a flash of inspiration, but rather in a moment of reflection after watching his previous company struggle to recover from poor hiring decisions. As Mike recalls, “We made a couple of hiring decisions towards the end of that journey that we never fully recovered from. That sort of impaired the progress and the outcome of that business.”

This experience led to a crucial realization. “When I got over that and kind of moved on, sold that company to private equity, and looked back, I was like, God, is it me? How did I miss? How did we miss? Is this a me problem or is this a bigger problem than that?”

The answer was startling: “Hiring still in this country has a 45% fail rate, which means that our companies are ROI negative on almost half of the hires we make.” This statistic became the catalyst for Crosschq’s mission.

The Early Days

The company’s journey began with a conversation between Mike and Pete Gettner, a VC who had invested in one of Mike’s prior companies. What started as a discussion about potentially launching a seed fund evolved into something much more significant when Mike proposed addressing the hiring challenge they had both experienced from different sides of the table.

Despite being industry outsiders, or perhaps because of it, they approached the problem with fresh eyes. The challenge, as Mike puts it, was “Just figuring out, frankly, what to build to go solve this massive problem.”

Building in Uncharted Territory

One of the most striking aspects of the hiring landscape that Mike discovered was the lack of accountability. “We have no accountability to hiring in any of our companies and there’s no other part of the business where we spend this much money, not even close, and invest this much capital and don’t hold it to the same ROI expectations that we do with anything else.”

This observation led to a fundamental insight: most companies were “flying blind connecting the dots between who they hire and how those hires actually impact their business objectives.”

Evolving the Product

As Crosschq developed, they discovered unexpected applications for their platform. “It’s amazing to us in terms of the things that we initially thought we’d be solving versus some of the things that we’re actually solving for now,” Mike shares. For instance, companies began using Crosschq to evaluate the ROI of their recruiting channels and assess the effectiveness of their assessment tools.

The Future of Hiring

Looking ahead, Mike sees hiring intelligence following a similar trajectory to sales intelligence, just on a delayed timeline. “Hiring is ten years behind sales and everything,” he notes, drawing parallels to how Salesforce transformed sales operations.

His vision for the future is clear: “Certainly in three to five years we’re going to be catching up. Revenue intelligence is a very mature category on the sales side of the world of just being able to better visualize your pipelines and optimize and all those good things. We have a fundamental vision that hiring intelligence is going to be the same thing.”

The ultimate goal? Making hiring intelligence “an absolute necessity for every organization to have a platform by which they can better forecast and optimize their hiring.” And in doing so, addressing that fundamental problem that sparked Crosschq’s creation: reducing the 45% hiring failure rate that continues to plague companies today.

For Mike and the Crosschq team, this isn’t just about building a successful business – it’s about solving a problem that “sucks for companies, that sucks for talent and for the individuals that take jobs that don’t work out for them.” It’s a mission that could transform how companies build their teams, and ultimately, how they grow and succeed.