Startup Interview with UB Ciminieri, interviewIA CMO

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

I’ve been in Colorado since 2006, navigating my career through various-sized technology and marketing/brand companies, learning a lot about growing companies and finding the right talent to grow a successful company. I was also involved in a workplace shooting that gave me purpose to help talent find work that helps them feel meaningful, safe, and included. I also joined the Colorado Technology Association in 2008 where I began to grow my network of tech professionals who would help make the launch of our first company (that would become interviewIA) successful. All this to say that it has been an amazing journey to get to this point.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

We are interviewIA. For organizations looking to achieve an equitable, data-driven, and repeatable interview experience, interviewIA offers an intelligent interview collaboration platform that powers the interviewers in the talent acquisition process and guides unbiased interviewing and hiring decisions.

What is the origin story?

We started our first company 5 years ago to research and develop our talent methodology that now powers our tech startup. We all have backgrounds in recruitment, brand awareness, organizational change, training, and technology, all of which helped us develop our interview collaboration platform last year.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

We believe that we are uniquely situated to address two key areas where the world is currently experiencing rapid change. First, COVID has created a new way of working, a new way of hiring, a new focus on remote capability, and many challenges around reskilling and hiring overall. Second, the conversation around social inequality, unconscious bias, Black Lives Matter, and a need for systemic change has truly created an opportunity for real action.

Our team is so aligned with the passion to help companies match their work with the right candidates who find that same work meaningful to them. We are not only building a technology to facilitate change, we are creating a solution and an ecosystem to support systemic change so that we all learn to hire inclusively and create opportunity for everyone. That’s why I love this team, because it’s the right team to make this a reality.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

I would most likely be conducting trainings about Bias and Empathy and Team Interaction through the training company I started two years ago called Breaking the Bias.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

Our core metrics as a startup are very simply focused on Monthly and Annual Recurring Revenue. Our success will be measured on velocity and traction to increase those numbers over the next year.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

The most exciting part of our traction as a company is the fact that everyone we talk to absolutely understands how we can help them solve their hiring issues. And our product team has taken an innovative approach to continuously find ways to improve the product and bring new and relevant functionality to the public as quickly as possible.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

We have been keenly aware of artificial intelligence’s role in perpetuating bias in the hiring process. Any technologies that are powered by AI that focus on the evaluation of human beings, without involving human beings in that evaluation process, is most likely biased and doing more harm than good.

We focus on the ethical use of machine learning and technology that can aid human beings in the interview process, not replace them. Technology, when developed correctly with a diverse group of engineers, product roles, software developers, etc., can most certainly help a person, a team, and an organization get better. I’m excited about scaling the ability to help more people become better interviewers.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

We were nominated as one of the Startups of the Year for Colorado Springs. It’s exciting to be recognized by this publication because it’s a recognition by the people who we are trying to help.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

My advice would be to lean into being more curious about all people and looking for ways to create equal opportunities and benefits for all, no matter what I’m doing.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

I’ve learned that it takes an intentional effort to become a founder and leader of an organization when you’re used to being an individual contributor. This transition is not to be taken lightly and involves self-reflection and learning from many other perspectives to find your footing.

Vote for InterviewIA for Startup of the Year in Colorado Springs!