In many countries worldwide, the pursuit of skillful and engaged employees is not so much a war on talent as it is an art of measurement. Attain WSS Global is a human capital development firm that understands this like no other. Their team also understands psychology, rendering them true psychometrics specialists. Another thing they understand is the limitless potential of digitalization.
We sat down with founder Riaan van der Merwe to get a better understanding of how he has been digitalizing psychology and building an internationally successful business with the help of our Pointerpro platform:
- Digitalizing psychometric tests to attain global success
- Growing a business with the capabilities of Pointerpro
- Zooming in on an assessment for developmental purposes
- Streamlining the assessment process with Pointerpro’s Distribution Portal
- Other highlights about growing Attain Global’s business with Pointerpro
- Future projects with Pointerpro and tips for new users
The mission: Digitalizing psychometric tests to attain global success
“If you can dream it, you can build it. There’s no need to look anywhere else.”
Hi Riaan, thanks for joining me in this interview. Let’s start with the beginning. What is Attain WSS Global?
Thanks for having me, Jeroen. So, we started this venture about 8-9 years ago and set out to digitalize assessments. First of all, Attain Global employs subject matter experts – the psychologists who design our assessments.
Now, we’ve all been in the game for most of our lives. And for many years, this type of thing was a manual process. With technology advancing, soon enough, we asked ourselves the question: “How could we digitalize psychometric tests and psychological assessments? But also: “How do we get it all into the market?”
That’s why we provide them with leadership, entrepreneurship, mentoring, and incubation opportunities or programs. We help them build a strong foundation to lead themselves, lead others, and lead change.
What is a psychometric test?
A psychometric test is a standardized assessment tool designed to measure a person’s psychological attributes, such as intelligence, personality traits, aptitude, or specific skills. These tests are often used in various contexts, including education, career counseling, and recruitment processes. Generally, the results of these tests provide insights into an individual’s strengths, weaknesses, preferences, and suitability for specific roles or situations.
And what was your go-to-market strategy?
Well, in essence, our vision is characterized by a pursuit of excellence and innovation. Our team is not just one of psychologists but also of IT experts.
So on one hand, we have subject matter experts: highly experienced psychologists who meticulously design each assessment or survey. They go beyond merely considering job requirements and delve into understanding the intricacies of each organization we work for. For instance, their processes, their systems, their culture, their values… And so on. Basically, they ensure that every assessment accurately measures what it is really intended to measure.
Our IT team comprises specialists who ensure that the digital platforms through which we deliver our services are not just functional but perfectly aligned with our customers’ needs. They make it all user-friendly, efficient, and tailored to the specific requirements of each organization.
And thirdly, we have a very unique approach to our assessments. We focus on direct assessment through situational judgment tests (SJT). In short, they maximize predictive validity, which enables organizations to make more informed decisions about candidate selection, development, and organizational fit.
Growing a psychometrics business with the capabilities of Pointerpro
To summarize, the “magic” formula has been subject-matter expertise, plus digitalization, plus a unique, specialized assessment approach. Correct?
Yes. So, that’s basically where it all started for us. And then the next step was to find a platform that could accommodate our needs.
And that’s how you found Pointerpro. Did you try other solutions before?
Well, obviously, I’ve gone to town on this. I mean, we looked long and wide online. I can say I’ve pretty much had trials with all the tools that exist out there. And it’s really by sheer luck that I came across Pointerpro back in the day.
As soon as I started the trial version – within a couple of hours, or at least at the very early stage – I realized Pointerpro was aligned with our needs. I could literally see the road forward.
You already mentioned your unique SJT approach. Can you tell us a bit more about the assessments you develop?
Yes. To be very clear, Attain Global thrives on bespoke solutions. We don’t roll out generic assessments. That doesn’t suit our company model. What we do have are five core pillars we use to support our customers.
- The first one is the person-job-fit assessment, which is a psychometric test for recruitment purposes or organizational restructuring – for candidates advancing to higher levels, for instance.
- Then we have assessments for developmental purposes within the organizations. We identify key skills required for specific divisions and then create a bespoke assessment around that, to show persons’ capabilities and where they need development. And we then also initiate developmental courses.
- Thirdly, we also conduct skill audits for organizations to see where they are and where the shortcomings are in the available skill sets. In effect, those also trigger development areas.
- The fourth one is employee engagement surveys or culture surveys, which are often integrated into the assessments for developmental purposes or person-job-fit assessments.
- And then, there are 360 performance assessments to get aggregated insights on individual performances.
So that’s what we focus on, but they all intertwine with and complement each other in some way.
Zooming in on an assessment for developmental purposes
“We’ve built thousands of variables into this one specific report template. And the rest is history. It works. It’s just perfect!”
Just before the interview, you mentioned a very successful digital readiness assessment project for a customer. Can you talk a bit more about it?
Yes, so the success of that project was rooted in the deep-dive of our team – which, as I mentioned, consists of psychologists and IT specialists.
This customer is part of the manufacturing market. For this market, today’s wave of digitalization is like a fourth or fifth industrial revolution, so to speak. Organizations really feel they need to assess candidates’ digital skills. But bear in mind this actually requires a very sophisticated framework encompassing multiple roles and proficiency levels. And that’s basically a study our experts carried out over six months.
And you translated all of that into online assessments with Pointerpro?
Yes. It was actually a package of six sub-assessments. On one hand, there was a transversal skills assessment that evaluates a crucial set of abilities that cut across various tasks and roles. These are things like enterprise mindset, continuous improvement mindset, learning agility, emotional intelligence, and so on.
And then, we also developed five assessments that focused on specific digital skills that we identified as crucial for this organization. Things like digital literacy, data creativity, and numerical and verbal reasoning. It’s a list of twelve.
That’s quite a list!
Oh yes! This entire assessment suite was designed to evaluate thirteen roles that fall under three tier levels in the organization. It’s really large scale.
And all of the data you collected resulted in personalized feedback reports for each individual… Can you tell us more about the PDF reports?
First and foremost, I must say this was another big part of our decision to go with Pointerpro. The Report Builder is just brilliant. I love it! I’ve built some really sophisticated reports and I must say, at a certain point, I thought I would break the program, building the report template for this organization. But It just kept going and going. And I’m quite pleased with the result.
You know, getting all that data to an endpoint and telling the platform: “There are 13 roles, and you need to report this specific information for this and this information for that…” It was a tremendous task. We’ve built thousands of variables into this one specific report template. And the rest is history. It works. It’s just perfect.
Wow, impressive! And am I mistaken or was this also created in multiple language versions?
This specific assessment was translated into seven languages. And again, all of the seven languages successfully came through. The reports are out there. It’s been delivered with great success.
Streamlining the assessment process with Pointerpro’s Distribution Portal
“With this particular customer, assessment volumes have gone up 300%.”
Can you tell us how you went about the distribution of this assessment suite?
Yes, you know, timing is a key factor in a process like this. And it’s by sheer luck in timing that everything worked out so perfectly. Pointerpro rolled out the Distribution Portal right when we needed it. It was a bit of a lifesaver for us because the process before that would have been very manual or required a lot of tech.
But so we’ve been able to use the Distribution Portal for the roll-out in the EMEA region. That’s Europe mostly – a total of thirteen countries and various languages. You can probably imagine all these people enrolling to be assessed. It was just not a viable solution to do this in-house. We needed to be able to hand it over to our customer, so that they could manage the distribution.
So this helped us a lot to set up the customer on the portal and give them full autonomy to roll out their assessments and get the results in their hands efficiently. The Distribution Portal makes all of that possible for us now.
Yes, and you’re not just using the Distribution Portal for this customer. Could you tell us about another use case?
Sure. So we’ve got another big organization that rolls out assessments basically all over the African continent. So they have about 35 regional managers, and each regional manager is in charge of a set amount of outlets – with shop managers. In total, I think they have about 3,500 outlets all over Africa. And they asked us about two years ago to create a digital platform for them. They used to do the assessments on paper, very manually.
So, we digitalized it all quite fast, but then we ran into a problem: The distribution side of it. You know, because I would have 35 regional managers basically ringing me: “I need to assess. I need to assess. I need to assess.”
That’s when I realized we needed some other way to distribute this. And again, the Distribution Portal couldn’t be there quickly enough for us. And as soon as it went live, we set up the customer. Now each regional manager has their own login and can follow up on the results.
Since we started using the Distribution Portal, little by little, we’ve been trying to get more out of its capabilities for us in-house, on projects… for everybody, basically. With this particular customer, assessment volumes have gone up 300%.
Other highlights about growing Attain Global’s business with Pointerpro
“You’ll probably roll your eyes now, but I feel like I’m part of the family. My comments have always been well-received by the support team. It feels like we’re brainstorming together. They’re just very accommodating.”
Are there any other things you’d like to highlight about your experience with Pointerpro?
So the Pointerpro software in its entirety, I must say: “Well done!”
Really, there are so many features. I got on board at an early stage using the software, so it was very easy to grow with it when new features came out. I know the platform really well so I can figure out a lot just by myself. And the versatility of the software is phenomenal. To this date, I haven’t run into anything that I can’t do with it.
I mean, it gives you the opportunity to really get creative with the data. The possibilities for integration with other software and programs have also opened up the field for us tremendously. I can’t see any limits.
Can you tell us about your experience with the support team? After all, you’ve been with Pointerpro for a few years.
You’ll probably roll your eyes now, but I feel like I’m part of the family. When my creative juices get flowing, I tend to go straight onto email: “Can we do this?”, “Can we do that?”, “How would this work?”
And I must say they’ve always been very, very accommodating. And my comments have always been well-received by them. It feels like we’re brainstorming together. They’re just very accommodating.
Future projects with Pointerpro and tips for new Pointerpro users
I know for a fact that the support team appreciates your input. Speaking of brainstorming. Any future plans to tease us with?
I’ve got a wishlist “this” big (laughs). You know, especially with the introduction of the Distribution Portal to the platform, a lot of potential for development has opened up for us.
For all the assessment programs that we create, there’s always a lot of time and work done in the background before things get digitized. And so, for example about six years ago, we started working on this “mind master program.” This is something that’s based on a life- and career guidance framework for young people, that will be rolled out in schools. It also involves suicide- and bullying awareness and tests emotional intelligence. It’s quite elaborate, and it will go live this year. We feel very strongly about it, and we’re quite excited about it.
And to manage a thing like that, we needed a platform with great capabilities for distribution – which we now have with Pointerpro’s Distribution Portal. So anyway, we see a lot of case-specific possibilities like that, which would be really interesting to discuss further with Pointerpro’s professional services team.
You really get creative with our platform, Riaan. Do you have any tips for people who are just starting to discover Pointerpro?
The biggest tip I can give anybody is to not be scared of the software. Go for it! The only limit there could be is yourself here. If you can dream it, you can build it. There’s no need to look anywhere else, at least in my book. And don’t hesitate to ask Pointerpro for help.
I like that quote. I’ll put it on the top of the article: “If you can dream it, you can build it.” Thank you for this interview Riaan. And thanks for being such a fantastic Pointerpro user!
No problem. Thank you!
