Season 4, #4 - Chris Daden Scaling for work 4.0

In this episode of The Founder's Sandbox, host Brenda McCabe sits down with Chris Daden, CTO of Criteria Corp, to explore what it takes to scale purpose-driven businesses in the era of Work 4.0.

Chris shares his fascinating origin story—starting with a childhood shaped by tech-savvy parents and leading to multiple exits, international teams, and leadership at a global talent success platform. He breaks down how Criteria uses science and AI to remove bias from hiring, why soft skills matter more than ever, and how to future-proof your workforce in an AI-augmented world. Learn about his nonprofit, SoCal Tech Forum, and why building trust is essential for AI adoption at scale.

 

transcript:

00:18
Welcome back to the Founder's Sandbox. The Founder's Sandbox is in its fourth season. I'm here, your host, Brenda McCabe, and I'm live this month's podcast is

00:31
from the Founders Space in Pasadena. And I'm joined with my guest, Chris Daden of Criteria Corp. um And a colleague of mine in the startup ecosystem. Welcome, Chris. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here. So am I. So um I want to briefly give  some background on the Founder Sandbox for those that are listening in today. um

00:56
Each episode features in-depth conversations with founders of small and mid-sized owner-operated companies and operators that support the ecosystem. And together, through storytelling, we explore how to build scalable, resilient, purpose-driven businesses with great corporate governance.  And you're going to discover today with Chris, his origin story. I always like to start with  how the person

01:24
that's a guest to my podcast, really started getting involved with the ecosystem of startups.  And your story is quite fascinating.  I'm gonna give a  spoiler alert here. You and I met,  I guess two years ago,  at a Thai  con event where you were on a panel. I was the MC em and  we got to talking over dinner and just your origin story and the multiple exits you've had.

01:53
really um lit up a bulb in my mind. said, Chris, you have to be in my podcast. So it's two years later,  and I'm so glad that we're making this happen. Lucky to be here. Thank you. forward to it. So  this podcast, again, we're going to talk about a lot of things because Chris,  not only are the CTO of Criteria Corp, a talent success company, where you help organizations meet objective evidence-based

02:23
talent decisions that both reduce the bias and drive better outcomes. But also, you're a two times 40 under 40. You've had multiple exits of prior companies. You're a speaker, a founder, a board member, and recently you started your own nonprofit in SoCal called the SoCal Tech Forum.

02:51
Oh, and I forgot you're a member of the Forbes Technology Council. we're going to have... Couldn't have said it better. Thank you, Brenda. So with that, again, my episodes on particularly Spotify, we have a title that's on each episode and we've chosen Scaling Work 4.0 for this month's podcast. Again, it's Chris Daden, CTO of Criteria. So let's start. What would you...

03:21
Call your tagline. Tell us about your origin here in Southern California. Sounds great. Well, just a little bit about myself personally. I've been in tech for ah quite a while now. It's really the only career I've ever had working in tech. So I started  in my youth, frankly. My father was a member of the British Merchant Navy.  you can imagine with that career involved, he traveled all around the world. uh

03:50
Also, of course, gave me lot of inspiration for the global companies that I run today and the teams that I've started around the world. So although my father wasn't directly in computer science, you know, that career of being in the merchant Navy definitely shaped my global perspective. when he  stopped working in the merchant ship Navy as an officer, he  started developing his own software for weather routing for large

04:21
merchant ships  and container ships. So what was amazing about that was it was ran out of a spare bedroom in my parents' house  just upstairs while I was growing up there.  And uh we used to even have a  rack of kind of four by four Dell just desktop computers that were stacked on top of each other with a switch to switch between them. And we're running the workload that my dad made with the software there on those computers.

04:51
It was very visible and evident in my childhood.  My first  kind of internship was maybe when I was 13 or so ah in the closet of that office. We pulled the doors off and put a desk in it and that was like my internship desk for the summer. started with programming in the dotnet ecosystem.  So what year is that more  or less? Yeah,  it's probably like 2005, 2006. uh

05:21
So  it uh was a great introductory language. Fun fact, there's a YouTube video online of me when I'm about that  age doing a tutorial of how to make a calculator. So  very few people have found that. I'll leave it to the public to find.  But you can hear my  very young 12-year-old voice in a YouTube video. it's still there.  So anyway, that's part of my origin story for sure. That's what got me into computer science.

05:48
My first company, started my senior year of high school. I was aqua hired into an organization in Irvine.  And  then I got to join what I would call kind of a real company at that time. um One that had, you know, engineers around the globe working on solving problems and SAS for organizations of all kinds. So that's kind of where I kick started my career. I'm spending the next maybe eight to 10 years  in Orange County  building companies and

06:16
Now I find myself as the CTO of Criteria, which of course I'm not a founder of, but  the energy that I like to bring to the team and the passion I have for what the next era of work has to offer gives me that founder-like energy. Yes. So um how long have you been with Criteria? Were you the first CTO? Were you an aqua hire? Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, great question. So  Criteria has a great history,  almost 20 years  of science and

06:46
um just developing a great core platform that's been used by thousands of customers around the world. I've been there as CTO for the last three and a half years.  So when I joined, was right after acquisition of a couple  companies in Australia that were great additions to our product portfolio. And one of my roles right away after joining was to help integrate those teams,  finish retiring some of the technical debt that comes with acquisitions. um

07:15
really just all the excitement around building for the next chapter of  criteria and making sure that I can contribute in my many ways to our success.  So back to that tagline that  due to your father's um origins in the Navy, m you have a wide global perspective. Tell me about those teams that you had in India before Criteria.

07:41
Yeah, look, I started doing business in India a little over 10 years ago. I was just reflecting on that last week. I had the luxury of visiting my team again. We also just created a new team for criteria. So I was able to go visit them. We all got together for the first time. It was a lot of fun. But about 10 years ago, I started in a city named Indore and that's in the state Madhya Pradesh. And when I started, it was a tier three city. And, you know, I really stumbled across

08:09
who is now  my general manager for my last company.  I stumbled across meeting him through like a development agency and we really hit it off and you know at the time I was 18 years old and you know was willing to take some risk I guess because I wanted to work with an engineer and had to build my product and company and you know what it's like being a scrappy founder and  I just rolled the dice and said sure like

08:34
Why don't you come work for me full time? Let's find your friends as well and let's start a company together. And his name is Vikram. And to this day, he's still the general manager of my last company in automotive SaaS that I had recently exited in like 2021 timeframe. He's still operating that team. Company's going great. So that's been a lot of fun to see that success. But yeah, over a period of 10 years, it's become...

09:00
from a tier three to a tier two city. So things like basic infrastructure have been developed. So just so much fun and so much reflection there. I'm lucky to have, know, that's my, Criteria's new team is now my fourth India venture. So this is my fourth generation. Oh my goodness. It's a scaling work 4.0. So let's go back to Criteria. again, over dinner a couple years ago,

09:29
You started talking about how the science of finding talent is really the bedrock of criteria. And you've been there three and a half years. Talk to us about that, the talent and the science that is driving this company's technology and being used today in hiring across the world. Yeah, I think.

09:58
Hiring is one of those things that we don't always teach  hiring managers or people in organizations. I think we were laughing about that.  If you're, say, a great senior software engineer and you've been coding for 15 years or something,  I think it's assumed that when you get promoted into, say, an engineering manager role, you're now going to be a great hiring manager. And I think hiring science is something that is often...

10:22
underappreciated in organizations, particularly startups and mid-market companies who may not have the resources, right? Because to be good at hiring science,  you also have to invest resources in it, right? So really you don't see most really advanced hiring science or like, you know, psychology teams being involved in hiring until the enterprise level. for criteria, we're all about  using technology  to  harness as many what we call talent signals as possible. So  we have a

10:52
an assortment of assessment tests that can measure things like your cognitive ability, your adaptiveness, your personality fit to a job role. And we do that in rigorous and scientific ways. I think there are probably more ways to do hiring wrong than to do it correctly.  And we take a lot of pride in making sure that our products are always designed to measure those talent signals  and even compound them. So as you find

11:19
multiple talent signals across the life cycle of that pre-employment hiring engagement, you get a compounding, really  almost like a  talent blueprint of the person you're looking to hire, or maybe even like the candidate DNA of that person.  And it gives you a depth of information and data about the likelihood they are to succeed for that specific job role you're hiring.  And  that's really, really valuable to us. And we can talk a bit about why

11:46
that matters more as we enter into this new era of work. Before we go there though, I'm fascinated. What types of talent can Criteria be used for in the hiring process? Is it across all verticals? mean, tell me a bit about that. Criteria is a pretty diverse company. So with 4,000 customers around the world, we are really present in maybe 20 different verticals. So that makes us pretty...

12:15
pretty broad in who can use us for hiring. So,  you know, we joke around anything from,  you know, hiring for truck drivers all the way to rocket scientists. Like there's customers across the whole spectrum in engineering, venture capital, uh you know, executive management, truck drivers for uh companies, uh frontline workers,  all the way up to rocket scientists at companies.

12:45
So recently you were a keynote speaker in London and you provided your closing thoughts on AI in the workforce. So I'm going to steal your thunder right now because you gave this to me and set it up. So work 4.0 belongs to those who pair adaptive mindsets with distinctively, yeah, human skills. Workplace.

13:14
AI will be our most tireless colleague, but the future's real competitive  edge is still human potential, continuously renewed. Wow, unpack that for my listeners. Because we're all getting a bit nervous about will we have job security, what do  we need to do to retool, and is everybody suitable?  Yeah, I think what's kind of amazing is

13:44
um You look at some reports from  the World Economic Forum or other entities and they're saying things like by 2030, 39 % of skills related to kind of the current candidate applying in the workforce will be obsolete. Wow, that's a lot. That's a lot. It's almost half, right? And  what's amazing about that is  then what are we hiring for, right? Because the last few decades  of  us

14:12
hiring has been so focused on how many years of experience did you have,  what degrees do you hold. And it doesn't mean  for many people who,  right, college is the best fit, getting a degree is the best fit for many people. But ah I think what it highlights is there's more to  being workforce ready than only getting these static credentials.  And for people like me, I've dropped out of college twice.  Both times I had some...

14:41
transactional event with one of my businesses. And that was obviously the right choice for me, right? And  I've reflected on that and I feel good about where I'm at and  where I came from. But I think workforce readiness these days is going to continue to index on the more dynamic talent signals and the more dynamic credentials we have as opposed to static credentials. So what that means is my ability to  think on my feet, critical thinking, adaptive reasoning.

15:11
Those are all things that we kind of measure, if at all, we measure them kind of secondarily in our current process.  And these other core talents like digital fluency, AI literacy,  self leadership, resilience,  those are all things that are more of these dynamic credentials that we need to make sure we measure really, really well, because the reality is with the advent of AI in the work

15:40
place, hard skills  are more immediately attainable. And what I mean by that is  maybe if I'm hiring for an accountant role,  I care more about is that accountant a strategic thinker? Do they understand the tax code to the right depth? Do they understand the strategy for valuation of the business? And then of course they have  to click some buttons in QuickBooks or NetSuite or other  systems. But I think AI is going to...

16:09
augment the hard skills of our workforce. And that's going to make us  more index  on the softer skills, emotional intelligence, the adaptability, right? Those dynamic credentials as opposed to how many years have you been clicking buttons in QuickBooks? And it will require, I guess, more critical thinking, right? True. Right? Because you will be your... uh

16:36
day-to-day job will be augmented by AI, leaving you time to upskill or to make those critical decisions, more, I don't know, avenues of strategic development in the company. that's right. Yeah, redeploy to higher value opportunities for sure. think if 30 to 40 % of your day is...

17:04
tasks that can be augmented with AI, then that 30 to 40 % of  your human first  excellence can be redeployed to other parts of the business. an example is at Criteria, we serve uh tens of millions of assessments, um about 10 to 12 million per year.  And we have about five or six million candidates that come through that process.

17:31
when they need technical support or help with the software, they often reach out to our live chatbot.  we at Criteria um want to make sure we prioritize a five-star candidate experience. So even though candidates aren't the ones paying for the service, our customers are, we know that our customer satisfaction is tightly linked to how satisfied our candidates are. Got it. uh

17:54
One of the things we had was thousands and thousands of tickets every month from those five million plus candidates coming into our support system. And what we were able to do was augment our support staff with uh AI chat bots that are trained on deep knowledge bases of criteria and past candidate issues and technical troubleshooting.  we were able to achieve about a 94 % candidate ticket deflection, which is  really, really massive. And it didn't mean that we

18:24
know, laid off half of our support team or something, it means that, you know, those support team members moved into other  high value roles in the organization or were able to now redirect their energy to making long lasting materials like help docs and guides that can then further retrain the AI to make that even better. So that's just an example of augmentation of skill  and then redeploying that human excellence to another part of the business to help you grow. So it has criteria use the same time.

18:54
methodology for their staff? For our staff, every single person at Criteria goes through our assessment products, of course. We drink our own champagne. I had to ask that question. I'm a little biased, but I think I didn't know about the category before joining Criteria. And again, with my origin story, I've hired hundreds of people around the world. And I will never run another team without using

19:22
a criteria talent success platform to hire those people. So  I'm a firm believer and because I didn't know about it before and now I'm using it, it's a big gap in my knowledge. So I would say most of our market potential for criteria doesn't actually know that these tools exist. A lot of them have a retention challenge or they're having an issue hiring the right people  and people like me before I joined criteria don't actually know that this tool set is available. part of my mission is to...

19:51
make sure that startups and founders and mid-market companies are aware that this is available because it solves a big problem for us building the best teams.  so uh last plug for Criterion, then we're going to move on in the interview here. uh How do um customers experience  Criterion? How do they uh get onboarded? mean, what is it, the HR department? Where does, where's the origin? Yeah, really great. So

20:19
We call ourselves a talent success platform because we help people pre-hire with our assessments and video interviewing products. And that's normally the  HR talent acquisition leader.  So someone who's in charge of recruitment for a company or essentially all the pre-employment functions. And then because we have this rich  data set that comes from those pre-employment activities, we have a post-hire product that we call Develop by Criteria. And Develop is designed to use all of that psychometric data

20:48
weekly check-ins with your employees, uh frameworks for behavior to help grow those team members after they're hired using all of that data and science. So a lot of our customers experience criteria on the pre-employment side and then continue to follow through on the post-employment side with our develop product. Wow.  Is there patent protection  with all of the science that you have developed over the years? I think there's obviously copyright.

21:17
um of our assessment tests. think patents and software are inherently tricky,  but we feel really good about the protection of our IP. Excellent, excellent. So let's switch gears. um I met you at the TICON. um You haven't been our keynote speaker yet, but you have moderated panels, and I've seen you in other events.  Tell us about  what do you enjoy, what do you like to talk about when you're keynote speaker?

21:47
For me,  it's just such an honor to share my learnings as an entrepreneur, as an executive with the world.  I still am in this phase where when I give a  keynote or moderate a panel, it doesn't really feel like a real thing. It just feels like another discussion for me.  That's just kind of my style. I just think that the world stays connected by sharing information like that. And for me,

22:16
I'm lucky to be at the convergence of 20 years of Criteria's  product, helping people make hiring decisions and this once in a lifetime emergence of generative AI intersecting with our  workforce skills. So I talk a lot about that.  Of course, I'm building my own teams to build the Criteria software and platform.

22:42
So I'm also thinking about what is next for my team, how do I upscale and enable? And then of course I'm talking to our thousands of customers on a regular basis trying to make sure that we are leaders in the industry.  those are areas I really love talking about.  I'm an engineer at heart as well. So I tend to be quite good at bridging kind of the commercial and business side with like core engineering. So I have a deep background in

23:11
AI and ML um even more traditionally prior to the generative AI boom and now even more so post generative AI boom. We're applying generative AI in ways that um we are on the frontier fine tuning models for our uh really predictive models at criteria.  So those are all areas I love to talk about and it's really an honor to be able to share that with people no matter the forum. Well maybe there'll be a podcast episode two with Chris on this.

23:41
What about, you you love to share, I don't know where you find the time. You've recently started a nonprofit, the SoCal Tech Forum. So share with my audience the types of activities, where's the venue, who is gathered, and what made you start a nonprofit, right? Yeah, it's a great question. I didn't know I would be starting a nonprofit either, but that tends to be how these things go.

24:11
It's been just a journey. ah We started off as a meetup group. my goal for the meetup group was  in the Inland Empire specifically here in Southern California, we don't have many tech meetups. I'm of course networked well in Orange County and Los Angeles.  And  I think that particularly with these technologies that are

24:35
in our day-to-day life, it's very important that we build community around information and knowledge sharing so we can all learn and get up to speed on AI. A lot of business owners are going through transitions with their workforce, with their team that just were never really imagined. for us, we started this meetup group in the Inland Empire because there was definitely a market gap in getting together. I started off

25:02
paying for and hosting the events, breakfast, etc.  And we had so much good interest. had sponsors that decided to volunteer to support,  starting with a company called Clutch Coffee and Rancho Cucamonga, who has a deep history of roasting coffee and brewing technology in Rancho.  And uh we've since got some other great partners to support us.  And in just a little under two years, we've...

25:30
surpassed 750 members in the group. uh that was the reason  once we started getting sponsors involved that it made sense to have a 501c3 nonprofit  formed. And we have a leadership board now, which I'm really proud of. And we host an event at least once every month on the first Saturday of every month. And they're always technology or technology adjacent topics. They always involve.

25:56
technical and non-technical folks, business owners, entrepreneurs, startups.  yeah,  it's been really fun.  Again, an opportunity to funnel and give back to the community and teach people about disruptive technologies. Well, you heard it here on the Founder's Sandbox, the SoCal Tech Forum. It will be in the show notes, all right, how to um get involved and perhaps attend one of those Saturday meetings. um I wanted to give you an opportunity.

26:25
to provide how people can best contact you, either for speaking opportunities, a CTO of Criteria, the nonprofit. How is it best to contact you, Chris? Yeah, I'd love to hear from you. So you can contact me on LinkedIn. So linkedin.com slash in slash Chris Dayden. All one word. And you can learn more about me as a speaker or CTO of Criteria at chrissdayden.com. excellent.

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have that in the show notes. All right, I want to bring you back to the Founders Sandbox, all right,  which is the platform and the podcast.  I really get excited about um this part of the podcast. um I work with my clients on  resiliency, um scalability,  and purpose-driven, right? All with great corporate governance. I always like to ask my guests  what...

27:24
the meaning of each of those three words  has for them. And each of my guests has a different oh interpretation. And it's just a lot of fun to listen to what I resiliency, what's resiliency for you? I think it's appropriate that I answer that in light of  kind of work 4.0. So for me, when it comes to resiliency in work 4.0, um it's about the art  of constantly reinventing yourself.

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but in faster cycles.  And I think what's really important to everyone is that in Work 4.0, hard skills can become obsolete quicker than before.  And that reinvention is critical to really being resilient in this new market. How about scalable? You've scaled a couple of companies, you've been an aqua hire. What does scalable mean to you, Chris? In Work 4.0, scalable will mean

28:22
adequately augmenting the talent you have in humans in your organization with the ability to harness the true power of AI and to do that without losing culture or trust. I think many organizations think of the first half of that. Very few of the organizations can execute on human plus agentic AI and also maintain trust.

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and without losing culture. Have you seen any best practices? This is a little bit off script in terms of companies that have, or are scaling, right? Because this is just scaling pretty quickly in the last year or so. Sure. And are there any best practices out there in building that trust? Yeah, I think having a real holistic AI strategy is key.

29:18
One main component of a holistic AI strategy is how can you get tools to the fingertips of every staff member in your organization  so that it's embedded in their workflow? Because a lot of the top-down AI strategy from organizations, like a CEO says, you must use AI and we must be 25 % more efficient, is really shallow when it comes to strategy. And it very rarely results in a culture

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sustaining in a company for this AI growth and augmentation. So what I've been really impressed by is, you know, when I host things like AI monthly global office hours at Criteria, or I host one-on-one sessions with employees to learn about how they're using AI, because you're able to push those tools down to your team members and let them use it in a safe and comfortable area, it allows you to see what people creatively do with AI. And most of the time,

30:17
I could say there's probably 60 or 70 % of use cases that I would never have expected my staff to use AI for, and I would have been the bottleneck of creating if they were waiting for me to do it, and instead give them a safe experimentation zone. And I think that is key to a sustaining AI strategy for So your best practice is actually a criteria from what I'm hearing here. And it's very becoming because I'd like to talk about playfulness in the sandbox, right?

30:46
I read recently, was an EY um study, I think it was this last week, that about 40 % of employees that are forced to use AI tools give up after a month. They don't see the utility in their day-to-day  tasks they're doing. So there is something to what you just said, building trust, but building it from the bottom up, right? Yeah, I resonate with that for sure. And I think the only way people  break that barrier

31:16
is by seeing their colleagues successful with it.  Very rarely is a demo from an executive leader going to be, I mean, it might be enough to begin a culture of AI. Like I had to do a lot of demos and show people kind of the art of the possible.  And then as soon as I saw pockets of AI  intelligence in the organization, the quicker you can elevate those people to  lead and present their findings, the faster...

31:45
you build up kind of the natural human competition between your team and everybody all of a sudden will get more behind it. And that's really important. I think you've reached a point of success in your AI strategy when you were once leading the AI learning sessions and now you are not. How cool is that? You heard it here in the founder sandbox. All right. Purpose driven. What's a purpose driven enterprise for you?  I think that

32:12
This is timely based on our  discussion just now where  organizations  need to harness AI at the right times.  think purpose for criteria, for example, means how do we measure talent signals that are  able to give us the best candidate blueprint or the best candidate DNA possible?  And for us,

32:40
every single day, regardless of the technology, what fuels us  is  having that purpose-driven  statement of collecting talent signals around the world  for any team.  And you really do  get lost in that sometimes, for good and for worse, when you're just trying to collect as many talent signals as you can. And being purpose-driven means  always doing the right thing when it comes to that.

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mission statement that you've set. And for us, it's collecting talent signals. I think that AI can do that well in a lot of areas, but AI can also be very dangerous in those areas. So when it comes to Work 4.0, having that purpose-driven enterprise statement  is very, very important because it anchors us for our new product development. It anchors us for how we're using new technology to  help people  make the best teams.

33:39
Going back to that, to build the trust,  we might clip this out, um does criteria maintain  a group of scientists to actually peel back the layers and make meaning out of the signals that you  are capturing to create new signals? That's one question. The second is,  does criteria have an ethicist  on board?

34:08
on call or how do you ensure there is  guardrails around talent signals? Yeah, those are really great questions. think for criteria, when we say we're rooted in science, it wouldn't mean very much if it was just a bunch of engineers and product managers kind of deciding what science is, right? So  for us, we take a lot of pride in our product IO psychology team.  So a lot of them are

34:37
industrial organizational psychologists by trade that are working full time for criteria.  And their role is assessment development, assessment validation. uh And particularly in the light of fine tuning AI models, they are very, very hands on in creation of those models, validating those models.  There's a lot of  legislation we have to comply with, not only the normal data privacy stuff like GDPR and CCPA, but also

35:07
industry specific laws like the New York bias laws and others that help protect uh candidates  as they are applying for roles. So that is very, very near and dear to our heart. And also we conduct adverse impact studies  and we do case studies with customers to make sure that the product is uh behaving the way that they intended to behave.

35:32
You know, we've got norms for all of our assessments and we adjust those norms based on massive populations of data.  So  all of that is how we ensure scientific signal.  This is amazing. Last question.  Did you have fun in the Founder Sandbox today, Chris? I had a lot of fun in the Founder Sandbox.  Really a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thank you, Chris. So to my listeners, if you like this episode with the CTO of Criteria, Chris Daden.

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Sign up for the monthly release for more podcasts where I have business owners, professional service providers, and corporate board directors who are all working to build with strong governance, resilience, scalable, and purpose-driven companies. Thank you. Signing off.