This week on Founder Friday, we sat down with Mike Erlin, the founder who watched companies spend billions on hiring and training, then struggle to explain why the wrong people kept getting through.
“Broad ideas attract attention. Precise ideas build companies.”
Mike Erlin has a phrase for the hiring problem he spent most of his career trying to solve. He calls it the blind dog in a meat house.
“Companies were surrounded by options,” he says. “They were spending billions on training and development but couldn’t clearly articulate which human skills actually predicted performance in specific roles. There was no precision. Just noise.”
That observation followed him across three countries and more than two decades of work at the intersection of workforce strategy and behavioural science. And it eventually became the founding logic of AbilityMap, a platform built to do something most HR technology still doesn’t: measure not just what people can do, but whether they will consistently do it, in a specific environment, when the pressure is on.
The question that started everything
The core idea behind AbilityMap is deceptively simple. Most hiring systems, Mike argues, are built around the wrong question. They ask whether a candidate has the skills for a role. What they rarely ask is whether that person has the behavioural propensity to apply those skills reliably, under the conditions the role actually demands.
“Most systems ask, ‘Can this person do the job?'” Mike says. “We ask, ‘Will they consistently apply the right skills, in this environment, when it counts?'”
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A person can know how to communicate clearly and still shut down under pressure. Someone can understand a process perfectly and consistently avoid following it. Skills are teachable. Whether they are applied is a different question entirely, and it is the one AbilityMap was built to answer.
The platform operates on a proprietary 31-capability behavioural framework across eight domains including communication, teamwork, self-management and problem solving. Rather than inferring capability from CVs, credentials or AI-scraped career histories, it measures the underlying behavioural drivers that determine whether those skills show up when they need to.
Mike points out that even a concept as common as communication means different things in different roles. In sales it might require persuasion and resilience under rejection. In healthcare it demands empathy and emotional regulation. Those are not interchangeable, and treating them as if they are is exactly where hiring goes wrong.
After immigrating to Australia from the US, Mike connected with organisational psychologist Kevin Chandler, who was equally focused on closing the gap between potential and performance. Together they built the research and scientific foundation that AbilityMap now runs on. It took years of iteration. But one conviction held throughout. Skills can be taught. Capability determines whether those skills get used.
The bet on science over speed
Building AbilityMap required a series of deliberate choices, some of which slowed the business down before they made it stronger. The first was protecting the science. Rather than layering technology over existing behavioural models, the team invested early in building proprietary intellectual property from the ground up. That decision cost them early revenue but created something that is genuinely difficult to replicate. “Broad ideas attract attention,” Mike says. “Precise ideas build companies.”
The second was a deliberate choice to go enterprise first. The consumer career app market was tempting and faster to access. But Mike and his co-founder held back, focusing instead on large employers where performance consequences are measurable and the ROI of better hiring decisions is clear. It was slower. It also meant that when AbilityMap did build case studies, they were grounded in real commercial outcomes rather than user numbers.
The third decision was perhaps the most important one to hold onto as the HR technology market shifted around them. While the industry cycled through competency frameworks, strengths profiling, AI matching and talent marketplaces, AbilityMap kept its focus anchored to one constant: productivity. If a feature or approach did not demonstrably improve hiring accuracy, development effectiveness or internal mobility outcomes, it was not worth building.
“The HR technology space cycles through buzzwords,” Mike says. “We anchored to one constant. If it doesn’t improve outcomes, it’s just noise.”
What the founder journey taught him
“The organisations that thrive won’t be those with the longest list of skills. They’ll be the ones with the greatest precision in aligning human capability to the work that truly needs to be done.”
Mike is candid about the difficulty of the path. Enterprise sales cycles are long. Educating the market on a concept as nuanced as behavioural capability, distinct from skills, distinct from personality, requires patience and a certain tolerance for being misunderstood.
But what stands out in how he reflects on it is the way the founder experience mapped directly onto the thing he was building. Operating independently. Coping with sustained pressure. Accepting responsibility without a safety net. Adapting when plans fall apart.
“Entrepreneurship is ultimately a test of capability itself,” he says. “All the behavioural measures AbilityMap assesses show up in the founder journey.”
There are stretches, he notes, where conviction has to carry you well before any external validation arrives. For founders reading this who are in that stretch now, that framing might be the most useful thing he offers.
Partnerships have also been central to how AbilityMap has scaled. At a certain point, Mike says, growth becomes less about adding features and more about expanding distribution. Embedding the platform’s capability intelligence within broader ecosystems has allowed AbilityMap to grow without sacrificing the scientific integrity that makes it worth using.
For those considering starting a business, his advice is grounded rather than motivational. Understand your why deeply, not just as a surface answer. Get comfortable being uncomfortable early, because the discomfort does not go away. Focus on structural problems rather than surface friction, because trends shift but structural inefficiencies endure. And build the right team.
“You will win or lose based on the team you build,” he says. It is, perhaps, the most on-brand thing a workforce capability founder could say.
Mike sees AI as both the biggest opportunity and the sharpest risk in his space right now. The technology is genuinely powerful at mapping skills at speed and scale. But it does not resolve the fundamental human performance problem. If anything, he argues, it amplifies it.
As organisations use AI to automate more tasks and redeploy people into work that requires distinctly human capabilities, the precision with which they align people to roles becomes more consequential, not less. A faster hiring process built on the wrong measurement criteria just makes expensive mistakes faster.
“The organisations that thrive won’t be those with the longest list of skills,” he says. “They’ll be the ones with the greatest precision in aligning human capability to the work that truly needs to be done.”
For small business owners, that idea scales down cleanly. You may not have a workforce intelligence platform. But the question Mike has spent his career asking is one any owner can start with. Not just whether the person in front of you can do the job. Whether they actually will.
Keep up to date with our stories on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
