Creating a social antivirus with robust science to address a million dollar flaw

Greatvine is the result of years of research, delivering you the most simple & powerful intervention to save your organisation thousands of dollars & hours, and create a work environment where your people thrive.





Your people are your greatest asset.

Unlock their potential with leaders they want to work with.



The difference between a great and a bad team is not individual performance: it's engagement.

Individuals gifting you their discretionary genius. Teams coming together to deliver more than the sum of their parts.

That's when the magic happens, and great results flow from there! But just how important is this?



It sounds crazy but a long-term study of 200 companies, led by Harvard professors, found this shocking result:

Positive Culture

in companies resulted over 10 years in a

765%

net revenue boost



Much is said and written about culture, but the core of it is this:

Leaders' values shape their team's culture.





Greatvine helps you find leaders with values your team wants.





The Problem

A recruitment flaw is letting your teams down



Recruiting people is hard. It's a high-volume, time-pressured search requiring judgement based on incomplete information.



Did you know:

  • Recruiters spend 10 seconds per CV on average… but 78% of candidates lie on their resume?
  • Recruiters spend 1 to 2 hours in interview with a candidate… but short interactions are where narcissists shine most?



Teams want honest, reliable, humble leaders who have their back… but those values are visible over years, not minutes.



Despite our best efforts, the system is advantaging leaders we want the least, resulting in sobbering data:

Senior leaders in organisations are

4 times more likely to be psychopaths

than people in the general population



If that wasn't enough, our cognitive biases trip us up every step of an interview. Research has shown we tend to prefer candidates:

We could go on but you get the idea.



Still want to bet your team's next leader based on your intuition?

We cannot avoid biases, but Greatvine gathers years of people's impressions about your candidate to balance out your short-term intuition.





Can you imagine burning 50% of your data center?

Actually, you might be doing way worse...





The Impact

Retain talent, knowledge and relationships



We all heard it: “people leave managers, not companies”.

Not only does research validate this, but the hidden costs associated with people leaving can be staggering.



50%

of people quit their job to get away from a bad manager

according to a Gallup study of 7,200 people



By checking a candidate's track record, you can avoid hiring the kind of manager people run away from, and save:

30 to 400% of staff's annual salary: the cost to replace people who leave can quickly explode.
50% of your corporate knowledge, or more: the first people to leave are often your top performers.
$100,000+ worth of client relationships: your people built trust with clients, don't let that trust walk out the door with them.
$150,000+ dealing with collateral damage of toxic high-performers: one company did the math for you...





The wrong leader can destroy years of work in a matter of months.

Want to be left fixing their trail of destruction and a broken team?





The Solution

Scaling your social antivirus



Many solutions exist to identify great leaders, but only one has stood the test of time:

  • Psychometric tests are nice, but are time-consuming for candidates and could be gamed
  • Leadership recruitment experts are effective, but cost time & money you may not have
  • Reference checks are self-defeating, since the candidate picks their referees



To get real insights, we naturally look for others' opinions about a person's character.

71% of US companies have an employee referral programs: this remains the best way to trust a candidates' values are aligned to what we want.

Gossip enables groups to identify those who are helpful or harmful to the greater good.

Dacher Keltner, UC Berkeley Professor of psychology





Greatvine builds on humans' natural search for social validation

so you can close the information loop even when recruiting outside your network.



The science

Picking up the signals that matter



There's a million questions you may want to ask to get the low-down on your candidate, but we boiled it down for you.

Greatvine reduces the signal-to-noise ratio to deliver insights that can best help you find great leaders.



Greatvine is built on robust science, with a touch of magic…



The data science

To get insights across networks, we built an algorithm that tracks down a candidate's former colleagues.

We mine data and cross-reference profiles globally to reach out to former managers, peers and subordinates.

We use this to increase your confidence level by eliciting answers across many years, role contexts and relationships.



The social science

To ask what matters most, we poured through social science research to pinpoint the makings of great leaders.

We focus questions on values former colleagues can easily identify, but are hard to pick up through other means.

We use this to compare your candidates' results to our benchmark of great & worst leaders, and get a sense of where they sit.



The legal science

To ensure this is "gossip for the greater good", we put safeguards that keep the whole process in safe waters.

We get consent from candidates, frame our questions to avoid defamation risks, and we protect respondents' anonymity.

We use this to give you suggested interview questions for you to investigate further and make your own hiring choices.





Greatvine does the hard work to make your leader search easy.

Try Greatvine now





Greatvine Insights builds on the great work from leading academics in the fields of management, organisational behaviour, psychology.

In no particular order, here is a non-exhaustive list of thanks to the researchers that guided the creation of Greatvine Insights:

  • Bob Sutton, Prof. of Management Science & Engineering at Stanford - highlighting the prevalence & impact of ‘assholes’ in organisations
  • Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Prof. of Business Psychology at University College London - highlighting flaws in the recruitment of leaders
  • Amy Edmonson, Prof. of Leadership at Harvard - highlighting the importance of psychological safety for teams to perform
  • Dacher Keltner, Prof. of Psychology at UC Berkeley - highlighting the positive value of gossip to allocate power for the greater good
  • Donella Meadows, Pew Scholar in Conservation and Environment and MacArthur Fellow - highlighting levers of intervention in systems
  • Warren Bennis, Distinguished Prof. of Business Administration at the University of Southern California - highlighting the makings of leaders
  • Jeffrey Pfeffer, Prof. of Organisational Behaviour at Stanford - highlighting the systemic advantages of negative traits in corporations
  • Daniel Kahneman, Prof. Emeritus of Psychology at Princeton - highlighting the cognitive biases that can trick our intuition
  • Jim Collins, research & consultant - highlighting the characteristics of 'Level 5' leaders