Attuned Founder Pain Story
Casey Wahl
CEO of Attuned
HIGHLY-EXPERIENCED GUESSWORK
After 10,000 hours, I was supposed to be an expert.
Despite meeting thousands and thousands of candidates over 14 years of conducting hiring interviews, even hiring hundreds -- I still couldn’t be sure of an individual’s motivations.
Were interviewees gaming their responses to what they thought I wanted to hear? Did they know themselves well enough to understand what motivated them? Were we using a common vocabulary? Were their answers complete?
The answer was “no” to all of these.
Once someone was hired it became even trickier. The answers given during the interview process were rarely reflected in performance once a person was on-boarded.
All of this guess-work was frustrating, time consuming, and frankly, expensive.
MOTIVATING A NEW HIRE
Let’s go back many years: I’d spent hours on the interview process of a young grad for one of our a smaller, newer teams I was managing directly, and decided to hire her. I saw promise and kindness in her. I believed she would be a quality recruitment consultant, one that would be successful while maintaining a level of integrity that would raise the bar for everyone around.
The team spent hours and hours onboarding her. After about a month, we switched gears to on-the-job training. I would do weekly one-on-ones. I would spend a lot of desk time answering questions, encouraging, and everything else that goes into the full commitment to help someone develop into their best.
After some months, she began to struggle. She was thoughtful and would try, but it was only enough results to just survive. I could never find a way to tap into the motivation that was going to make her great at her job.
In the months leading up to her one year anniversary, our one-on-ones began taking on a tint of deja vu. I found myself saying, and doing, the same things all in an effort to keep her motivated and to help her break through to the next level of performance. She would nod her head, but then it would be the same level of performance over the next week: just ok overall.
After about a year she left. It was extremely frustrating.
Looking back years later, I don’t think it was her not having the right skills. Rather, it was my inability to find and fulfill the reasons she had for coming to work that kept her from reaching the performance levels we needed for the team.
And hers was not the only painful experience like this - where I’d spend so much time trying to develop a promising hire, only to have it not work out a year later. Over the years there were many people I had to ask to leave too. Sometimes this mis-hire rate would get up to 40% of team members. It was best for all that they moved on, but it was never an enjoyable experience for anyone involved.
KEEPING A TOP-PERFORMER AT THE TOP
It wasn’t just fresh faces that I didn’t fully understand.
Usually, I’d get the hang of reading, and learning how to uniquely motivate an individual after about twelve months, but there were a few people, individuals I’d managed for years, that I still couldn’t figure out what motivated them. It seemed absurd to me that after all of this time trying to understand someone’s motivations I couldn’t.
One guy I worked with, and managed for years, always performed well despite my never being able to exactly pinpoint what drove him so much. For much of his time with us, he outworked most of his peers, but once he reached a certain level of success his motivation tapered off.
He didn’t want to put in as much work; reaping the rewards of success became more of his focus.
Our relationship, as well as the team’s growth, stagnated as this high performing member was starting to call it in.
There were a lot of difficult conversations, as we groped around for the right way to communicate, blindly trying to find a way for our differing visions of the future to coalesce. And then we couldn’t do it anymore.
These were the seeds that germinated for years.
DIAGNOSING THE ISSUE
Over years of painful experiences in my recruitment agency line of work, I’d come to learn that motivation was all the difference. You could screen reasonably well for intelligence, listening and questioning skills, empathy, fortitude, sales and learning ability, but screening for motivation always proved evasive. And it was motivation, throughout all the frustrations on the job, that separated those who performed well and stuck with it, from those that either went through the daily motions or dropped out.
It was also difficult for me to tap into the right motivation. I wasted so much energy trying to motivate people in ways that didn’t resonate with them intrinsically. So many one-on-ones where I was just pulling out my own personal motivation playbook trying to apply it to them.
While I knew intellectually that their motivations must be different from my own, it came out as if by default, the only language I really knew. I tried to motivate them along the lines that motivated me so intrinsically. But it did work for everyone.
UNDERSTANDING INTRINSIC MOTIVATION AS A SCIENCE
Conversations like these with Attuned’s co-founder, Daniel Bodonyi, led us an idea: What if we built a SaaS business that could solve the problem of understanding intrinsic motivations at scale?
We hoped to create a solution for all those other frustrated managers and team members, so they didn’t have to go through all the pain we had been through.
We wanted to shorten the feedback loops so individuals and managers could grow faster.
We wanted to give everyone confidence in knowing not only their team’s motivation, but also their own.
And Daniel did what Daniel does so well: he got to work, getting deeply, deeply involved in the research. He brought on Ildiko and Barnas, Attuned’s creators, as well as an extended team of psychologists.
After almost 2 years of grueling foundational data acquisition, we finally had enough science to come up with an alpha version of Attuned. Though early iterations of the motivator assessment had nearly 400 questions and took 2-3 hours to finish, we cajoled, harassed and bribed hundreds of strangers friends and loved ones to take it, giving us enough data to statistically validate the results. (Today, Attuned’s motivator assessment consists of 55 questions and can be completed in 10 minutes.)
We then cross-checked our findings with Gordon’s Survey of Interpersonal Values and Super’s Work Values Inventory. And to the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale for the engagement functionality of Attuned. All along the way confirming the Chronbach’s alpha for each motivator.
UNLOCKING THE POWER OF INTRINSIC MOTIVATION
We’ve solved our own problems: no longer do we mishire, no longer do we have to struggle blindly through 1-on-1’s to motivate our team. After creating Attuned we took our mishire ratio from 30% to less than 7% today. Our team and leaders share a common language and are much more enabled to get the best out of each other.
We believe we have created something special with Attuned.
With Attuned you can understand yourself better, by knowing your intrinsic motivations. You’ll be able to know your team better. You’ll have the foundations to communicate with your staff or your boss more effectively on what is needed to bring out that inner fire and get everyone excited, even on a rainy Monday morning.
Further Reading: “How a recruiting firm finally(!) learned how to hire”
Download The State of Motivation Report 2025. It’s free!
