Introducing Karen Antrim, Head of Arena's Client Success Team

Karen Antrim joined Arena Analytics in 2020 to develop our Talent Discovery offering. In 2022, Karen expanded her role to head up the Client Success team, bringing with her a wealth of hands-on experience and industry knowledge. We’re taking this opportunity to tell you a bit more about Karen and our vision for Client Success going forward.

Tell us a little bit about your background–what did you do before you came to Arena?

I started out in the IT space, where I spent 15 years as a hiring manager hiring hundreds of people. For the past 17 years, I’ve worked in Talent Acquisition. I was one of the first ‘talent sourcers’ to use digital tools and search techniques to find candidates, and was a founding member of the Recruiter Academy and Lean Human Capital. As the Practice Head for Talent Sourcing and Recruitment Marketing, I worked with healthcare systems to build or improve their sourcing teams and practices. I also spent time at Trinity Healthcare System as their National Director of Talent Strategy building their system-wide talent strategy.

What made you want to join Arena Analytics?

I was first introduced to Arena as a prospective client. Having worked in Talent Acquisition for years, I was painfully aware of the limits and problems associated with the “assessment” category of HR software. Though commonly used across many industries, most assessment tools are far too static, dated, and often rife with bias. Fundamentally, assessments focus on evaluating candidates against a predetermined set of characteristics rather than predicting outcomes, and the overall experience can be time-consuming and cumbersome for hiring manager and candidate alike.

When I heard how Arena approached the problem of retention, I was hooked. I believe in the power of math to solve this problem. I believe in the candidate experience and the hiring manager and recruiter experience. But the most important piece for me was Bias Mitigation, because it uses technology and data science to address the fundamental (and usually unintentional) unfairness that common human cognitive shortcuts introduce to the hiring process.

What is your vision for how the Client Success team should operate in order to best serve our partners?

At Arena, our Client Success team has three key imperatives:

1. Create a successful implementation experience that sets our clients up for success.

2. Maximize adoption of our retention prediction technology to bring the greatest amount of value possible to our clients and their candidates.

3. Help our clients understand our value by generating measurable, significant improvements that solve their problems

We think the best way to accomplish these imperatives is to build a Client Success team that is equipped to understand the specific needs and problems of our client organization, a team that can help our clients get the most our of our solutions and produce meaningful results that matter to the business. Part of our goal is to provide guidance as to how Arena should fit into the clients workflow, and we are able to offer the most value when we can represent our client's point of view.

What is your favorite part about the work the Client Success team does?

Client Success is the “voice of the customer” inside Arena. I love that we get to engage with clients and take in what we learn from them about their experiences to make the platform better.

What do you think is the greatest benefit clients can realize from the Arena platform?

A more engaged, dedicated staff. Our retention prediction predicts tenure, and when used creatively in combination with our new Talent Mobility offering, it can point employees to new career opportunities in your company. Providing these opportunities through training and investment shows your commitment to staff, and that commitment and dedication is returned in the form of quality staff who stay with your organization.

What are you hearing from clients in the field? How is Arena helping them, and what could we be doing to better help them?

We are hearing more and more that “likely” candidates are more responsive and engaged during the hiring process. I think we could be more effective at helping our clients understand how the product can predict a good match for people that are not yet skilled in a specific job.

Are there any upcoming features or product initiatives from Arena that you’re particularly excited about bringing to clients in the future?

Today, we’re thrilled that clients are getting real value from Talent Discovery and ReDiscovery, in the form of new candidates for their hard-to-fill roles. We’re rolling out the application dashboard in the Arena Analytics Portal to provide an alternative view of applicants beyond the ATS. And we’re excited to offer a sneak peak at our new Talent Mobility solution, designed to help you help staff thrive in your organization after they are hired. This reflects a continuation of our commitment to enable better hiring decisions and to help our clients better manage their talent pre- and post-hire.

Anything else you’d like to share with Arena clients?

Personally, I thought I was coming to the end of my professional work life around the time I got to know Arena. The ideals and goals of the company are so inspiring to me, that I asked to be a part of this company. Now having been here a while, I have learned more and more about the depth of the mission we have embarked on. Everyone here strives to create products that allow for more opportunities and equity in hiring.