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A Netflix for Your Career? It’s Possible.

How awesome is it when Netflix recommends you a TV series that then becomes your new favorite? Or Amazon suggests a book that you can’t put down? Wouldn’t be it great if the same could happen for your career?

That’s what I’m trying to achieve with pymetrics, the startup I co-founded with Julie Yoo. We met as postdocs at MIT, both excited by the idea of using neuroscience to solve business problems.

That led me to Harvard Business School, where I watched classmates struggle with career choice for two years, and was inspired to start pymetrics. I thought, “Wow, we could actually help people with this problem.” And that’s how we came up with the idea of a recommendation tool for careers!

pymetrics seeks to re-envision the Myers-Briggs for the 21st century. Over the last two decades, neuroscience has revolutionized our understanding of the brain and given us novel ways to assess cognitive and personality traits. We apply this neuroscience-based assessment and prediction technology to helping people find their optimal career path, and help companies find ideal candidates.

How do we do this? We replace questionnaires with neuroscience games and statistics with recommendation engine technology. Rather than asking you questions, we assess your cognitive and emotional profile by having you play a series of short computer games adapted from the last decade of research and give you career and company recommendations.

During talks on campuses and at events like the Forté Foundation MBA Women Leadership Conference, I’ve gotten feedback that pymetrics makes the recruiting process a lot less intimidating, not as complicated, and actually fun!

I wish I had a tool like pymetrics as an undergrad. I was an English major at Dartmouth. It wasn’t until my last year there that I took a neuroscience class and was hooked. Then I thought I should be a brain surgeon (rather than scientist) so put myself through two years of premed postbacc studies only to realize I almost gag whenever dealing with large quantities of bodily fluids. Oops. Forget med school.

It was only then that I decided brain science, rather than surgery, was the way to go. It took me even more time to realize that while I love brain science, I am not suited for the academic life style.

Having ended up as an entrepreneur, it was a long road and I would never would have thought I’d end up where I am today. I think pymetrics could have helped me with some of this insight earlier on. Like me, you may find an amazing career in something you never imagined, only it may take a little less time!

 

Frida Polli is the CEO and co-founder of pymetrics. Frida holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was a Robert L. Kaplan Life Science Fellow, a PhD from Suffolk University, and a BA from Dartmouth College. After a decade of brain imaging at Harvard and MIT, she went to business school to develop commercial applications for neuroscience assessment + analytics. The result was pymetrics. Frida is also the proud mom of an awesome 8 year old.

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