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(March 24, 2004) - As we mentioned in the first article, our initial reaction to Unicru was a nodding ho-hum. Kiosks in mass retailers seemed like a modest job for an unambitious company. Of course, we assumed, anyone could automate that process. It's so predictable.

Here we are, years later, munching a bit of crow pie. We lost sight of the simplest business idea. Never try to boil the ocean.

With a very focused set of market targets, Unicru has patiently and precisely released its offerings to "targeted vertical markets". In other words, they know what they are good at and only move with extreme caution into other areas. This allows the Unicru team (now nearing 200 people) to focus clearly on the leverage points of very similar hiring processes with very similar outcome objectives.

Beginning with retail, where hiring is very similar across large organizations, Unicru applied Total Quality and Six-Sigma principles to the hiring process. The focus allowed them to aggregate data on the outcomes of each hiring decision as they began to build databases of applicants, assessment results, performance outcomes and so on. The magic is that these various databases can be mined for the data that allows Unicru to help clients.

In retail, the desirable outcomes are obvious and routinely tracked at the employee, store, regional and corporate levels. Cash shortages, shrinkage, timeliness and efficiency are very often measured right at a cashier's workstation. Customer satisfaction data is routinely collected. Wiring these elements together with assessment, application evaluation and background checking info from the hiring process is a pretty straightforward exercise. The result is a "mine" of interesting data relationships.

You can actually "see" the impact of the hiring process on shrinkage, timeliness, efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Turnover and retention are critical issues in the retail industry. The trick, in many cases, is getting employees to stick around long enough to "repay" the investment required to get them onboard and up to speed. The Unicru solution provides a window and an analytic framework for quality improvements on this level. Tweaking the assessment results, the application requirements or increasing the quantity of applicants can help a client select people who are more likely to stay.

By choosing the right target markets, Unicru has built a successful franchise in areas that didn't require solving all recruiting problems for all people. Rather, they've taken clear, volume related problems and built a toolset that enables them to deliver value far beyond the typical administrative automation so commonly found in our industry. They have a roadmap for expansion that focuses on markets that are most likely to benefit form their approach. It is a carefully considered development strategy that is an industry "how to do it" benchmark. As a result of their approach, the company is tightly aligned to its goals and learning about the market is shared internally as a growth tool.

As you can see, we're fairly well impressed.

John Sumser

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