Hold on to your socks, data nerds, there are two new Weirdos in town, their names are Malcolm Fell and Jeff Godbout and they’re taking Weirdly’s technical and scientific skills to the next level.
Over the past few months, we've bought a couple of new guys on board that are lending serious muscle to our product development. Malcolm's a senior engineer, helping us evolve the product structure (and build out our first phase of exciting integrations). Jeff is an organisational psychologist who’s working with us to analyse the mountain of data we’ve collected and refine our awesome question bank.
Here’s a little more about both of them:
[caption id="attachment_6289" align="aligncenter" width="270"]
While not exactly salsa, this is an example of what the world lost when Jeff stopped playing competitive baseball.[/caption]
Jeff is the most american guy you'll ever meet. A salsa-dancing, blond-haired athlete; he wanted to be a professional baseball player as a kid and even though a college injury meant he never got to the big leagues, he can still wear a baseball cap like Matthew MacConaughey in Angels in the Outfield.
After a stint living in Vegas, (where he pulled a Matt Damon and dominated the poker tables) he moved on to more academic pursuits: Organisational Psychology. After working in the field with big-wigs in Washington DC, Jeff made the move to NZ.
Interested in how the field is evolving, he was keen to investigate how his Organisational Psychology skills can be applied to the humanitarian sector, and he reckoned the kiwi beaches sounded like a pretty good place to hang out with his wife and new little daughter.
You know when everything just falls into place at exactly the right time? Weirdly meeting Jeff was like that. We were just ready to bring an Org Psych into the team to help us analyse our giant piles of data, and after years writing psychometric assessments, Jeff was really, REALLY ready to help someone shake up the very traditional way companies screen people during a recruitment process.
We’re chuffed to have him on board – partly for the awesome question bank he’s helping us build, and partly for the way he says “right on” after every thing you say. It never gets old.
[caption id="attachment_6290" align="aligncenter" width="277"]
The funniest gif on the internet, as awarded by the king of internet funnies: Malcolm Fell.[/caption]
When Malcolm was in highschool, his metal band “Turbine” was a finalist in the SmokeFree RockQuest. He played the lead guitar and wore a wig of chains.
From now on, that’s the yard-stick we’re all measuring ourselves against:
“Hey man, check out this cool thing I made!”
“It’s pretty good, but is it “16 year old headbanging to your own band while wearing a chain-wig” level cool?”.
Before his debut as the most hardcore teenage rocker in Hamilton, Malcolm wanted to be a builder. It’s a dream he’s sort of achieved, even if these days he’s building with 1’s and 0’s, rather than hammer and nails.
Before joining the Weirdly crew, Malcolm was Lead engineer at Vend. And before that, he worked with Satellite Media helping to create some of NZ’s most boundary-pushing tech campaigns.
Remember that Powerade Challenge where people were running all over Auckland using RFID chipped wrist-bands? It was one of the first times we'd seen RFID being used in a marketing campaign. Malcolm built that. Along with the ASB Tennis Live Quiz campaign.
These were both projects that pushed the boundaries of what’s possible using cool new technology. And both campaigns required not only killer technical skills, but also a real understanding of what engages people.
Malcolm is an awesome addition to the Weirdly team for exactly those reasons. He’s looking after the back-end engineering of our system. But he’s also bringing a layer of strategic thinking to the role – analysing how people are using Weirdly and working with Jeff to structure and collect the data that will, eventually, help our system learn on its own.
They say the future is in data. Well we’ve just levelled up with two data experts, working from different angles to make Weirdly better, faster and more sciencey.
If you want to see the magic in action (and make your next hiring process faster and less stressful to boot), give a free Weirdly trial a go today.
