Unicru

» see unicru.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Applying for work in Turkey in 2005 meant a printed CV and a conversation, and if the place was small it meant knowing somebody. The American version of the same errand had, by then, acquired a machine in the middle of it. You went into the store, found the hiring kiosk, and answered a long list of flat statements about yourself that you agreed or disagreed with. Nobody read your answers. They went to Beaverton, Oregon, came back as a score, and the score decided whether a human would look at you.

The company behind that was Unicru. It was founded in 1987 as Decision Point Data, a name out of the years when selling statistics to employers was a consulting engagement billed by the project. Its customers were the chains: Kroger, Best Buy, CVS, Lowe's, Toys R Us, Blockbuster Video, Albertsons, Hollywood Video, Marriott, Caribou Coffee. By the summer of 2006 Kronos said the system was deployed in more than 29,000 hiring locations for over 140 companies and brands, and that Unicru's models had been built on more than fifty million job applications.

On 13 July 2006 Kronos Incorporated of Chelmsford, Massachusetts announced it would pay approximately $150 million in cash for the privately held company, and the deal closed on 1 August. Kronos' own annual report puts the gross price at $177.8 million once you add transaction costs, a patent settlement and assumed liabilities to the $149.2 million of cash, $97.9 million of which it drew on a revolving credit line with Citizens Bank. Chris Marsh, who had been running Unicru, became a division president. The division was called Talent Management.

~ the case file ~

~ the personality test ~

What people remember is the questions. The format was a long run of statements about your own character that you marked on an agree-to-disagree scale, with the same idea coming back in several different wordings so that inconsistency would show up in the scoring. That is a defensible way to build an instrument and a tiring way to spend twenty minutes standing at a kiosk in a supermarket. The complaint people had about it was always the same one: it felt like a test you could fail and not like a test you could pass.

What made it stick was the output. What reached a retail manager was a band, and in practice that band made the hiring decision before any interview existed. According to its vendor, Unicru was involved in 16 percent of major retail hiring in the United States as of early 2009, by which point Unicru had not existed for thirty months and the product was selling under Kronos' name.

~ the answer keys ~

The test could be solved, and it was. Answer keys circulated on message boards and job-hunting forums, and the Wall Street Journal reported that the practice spread during the late-2000s recession, when the number of applicants per opening went up. Kronos disputed that it was widespread or that it meaningfully damaged the validity of the instrument.

Both positions can be true at once, which is the uncomfortable part. A screening model trained on fifty million applications is measuring something real about the people who filled it in honestly, and nothing at all about the ones who read a forum post first.

~ the kiosk years ~

Unicru bought Guru.com in 2003 and Xperius, formerly Personic, in 2004, then sold the Guru.com name and logo on to eMoonlighter, so the freelance marketplace sitting at that address today traces back to a different company entirely. The company itself went into Kronos on 1 August 2006 and reappeared inside a product called Kronos Workforce Acquisition, powered by Unicru. The trademark kept turning up in Kronos filings for a while longer and then stopped being printed. unicru.com has no address record now.

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