SkyWatch was growing rapidly and needed to find an effective way to scale their culture while building a diverse team.
Fortay's Team Success platform enabled SkyWatch to streamline their talent acquisition, culture strategy and improve time to hire for top talent.
In 2 years, SkyWatch had grown their team by over 250%, killed their phone screen, increased underrepresented talent by 4.5X, improved their hiring efficiency, candidate quality, and retention metrics.
In Fortay, SkyWatch found an intuitive, strategic hiring and culture success partner. “We wanted to make sure we were a culture first company early on, making sure we were adding to our existing culture, not just looking for who ‘fits’, explains Dexter Jagula, Chief Operating Officer.
“When we came across Fortay in our research, it seemed very intuitive to assess our existing culture, then enables us to assess candidates early on for their potential for success – it was exactly what we were looking for.” With Fortay, the company’s employees help build a more diverse team and drive team effectiveness.
Using a values centric survey, Fortay creates a dynamic Cultural Fingerprint™ based on employee input. Candidates provide their value-centric responses and are prioritized based on the alignment score upfront in the hiring process. “Fortay gives us a valuable data point that we take into consideration to ensure engagement and success at SkyWatch.
Seeing the score match up to what we see in reality here is exciting and highly valued,” reflects Dexter. When we hire based on our values and work styles, we increase team alignment from the start which impacts not only engagement but performance and employee happiness.
The quality of the people we've hired using Fortay has been tremendous! We've increased our underrepresented talent by 4.5X and reduced time to hire by 40%. With Fortay, we are adding to our existing culture and have had zero regrettable attrition in over 2 years.
Dexter Jagula,
Chief Operating Officer, SkyWatch
SkyWatch has been proactive, making concerted efforts to build a strong diverse team and inclusive workplace culture. The team builds a great pool of diverse candidates for every role before pulling the trigger on a respective hire. Dexter shared, “Fortay has helped us bring in talent through our doors that we would have overlooked as it focuses on cultural alignment, not skills which is the hardest to objectively evaluate especially upfront.
We’ve increased our underrepresented talent by 4.5 times – something we’re all very proud of here. We are highly interested in people who have a strong alignment to our culture and have set an internal culture add alignment score of 70%. We will keep diverse talent in the pipeline that we’d see contributing to our diversity goals and add to our culture here.”
SkyWatch is on a mission to make Earth observation data from satellites accessible to the world. SkyWatch EarthCache™ is a cloud-based platform with comprehensive APIs to facilitate machine-to-machine integration, informative dashboards to monitor usage, and an easy-to-use code builder to rapidly develop associated applications. SkyWatch is growing fast to become a leading provider of data and intelligence from space.
VISION To enable true breakthroughs by empowering developers to better our world with unbridled access to Earth observation data.
VALUES Simple, Dependable, Empathetic
"The quality of the people we’ve hired using the platform has been tremendous. Fortay gives us high confidence levels we need to hire for quality and speed but more importantly build a diverse team. The effectiveness through which we can hire has increased with a 40% time to hire improvement.
We greatly reduced our overhead and interview hours. Ensuring we have Fortay to assess cultural alignment objectively against our culture, while talent who will add to our culture, making us a stronger team as a whole."
There is no such thing as survey fatigue, only inaction fatigue. Using Fortay’s People Experience solution, SkyWatch monitors their engagement and DIBs (diversity, inclusion, and belonging) efforts as pulse checks, then shares their scores with the team in the spirit of transparency and growth.
“We unpack the why and how, addressing the key issues so we can turn our scores around next quarter. We’ve learned where to offer more support and coaching for a greater positive impact on our company.
"Our culture is what we believe will ultimately impact our success. Building a strong cohesive team from the start is critical; Fortay has been key to helping us achieve this."
The executive team has seen a consistently strong correlation between our hires’ high engagement scores and exceptional retention. We’ve had zero turnover related to cultural alignment or performance over the past two years,” Dexter reveals.
We asked Dexter, why does having a very healthy culture matter to you and how do you attribute that to your success? “I think the quote comes from Peter Drucker, who said culture eats strategy for breakfast. I’m a believer in that. Our mission is important but our culture is what we believe will ultimately impact our success. Building a strong cohesive team from the start is critical; Fortay has been key to helping us achieve this.”
Everyone deserves to work in a workplace culture where they will thrive, allowing them to grow and do their best work. SkyWatch leads with heart, putting their people first. They have grown 250% since rolling out the platform with high anticipation for even larger growth this year. Ultimately, Fortay has transformed the way SkyWatch scales its culture and attracts, engages and retains their top talent.
The most effective way to know if Fortay is the right partner for your unique needs and goals is to see it in action. Our team and I look forward to meeting you!
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