Building culture and continuity with PI Hire: How people data helped Totango prosper

Looking to scale up

Companies all over the world have mistakenly made hires based solely on a candidate’s experience. Jamie, the COO of Totango, admits an early hiring misstep was pivotal in her evalutation of the company’s hiring practices—and ultimately, of The Predictive Index software. She and CEO Guy Nirpaz were quickly scaling the company, and they knew they needed to take a new approach if they were going to meet their long-term goals.

A natural path to adoption

Today, Totango is a recognized leader in customer success management. They know a thing or two about people. So it makes sense they chose to focus on the people and their behaviors when hiring, instead of evaluating a person’s resume alone. Within only a month, Jamie discovered and adopted PI, then went about trying to rally her team together. She wanted them to see what she did: that PI could help solve their hiring challenges.

Gaining buy-in across the business

Of course, as is the case at many organizations, there were skeptics. She got pushback from other areas of the business. Not everyone saw the value of investing in people data at a time when the company’s go-to-market strategy was still evolving, and the main hiring priority was speed. Fortunately, Totango leadership has long recognized that a sound talent strategy is vital to a successful business strategy. And ultimately, the proof was in the payoff—using PI was helping Totango keep good people around.

Scaling with a system

These days, Totango has established its market footprint and brand identity. The company has evolved its hiring strategy in ways that allow it to scale—with PI Hire playing a consistent role in each stage of that growth. Every part of the business uses PI now, and attrition is down across the board—by as much as 20% in some departments that were slower to implement it. That sort of efficiency has been critical not only to Totango’s expansion efforts, but its ability to solidify its culture.

When people stick around longer, they tend to form bonds, and they start to naturally mold the company’s identity and value proposition. But that only happens if those people are self-aware, cognizant of not only their own behaviors and strongest workplace drivers, but those of their colleagues as well. Totango employees fit their roles, and they also fit their team and the culture.

Indeed, Jamie attributes the organization’s ability to maintain a fast pace and its collaborative nature to its ability to find those complementary players. Their talent strategy has allowed them to transition smoothly toward a hybrid model. People are afforded the freedom to develop without too much pressure. The expectation, in most cases, is they will stay 10 years. And that sort of continuity has, in fact, been embedded in that value proposition.