From Hidden Potential to Human Potential: The Story Behind Plum 2026

When Caitlin MacGregor first stepped into her role as President at a rapidly growing company, she faced a decision that would change her life and eventually transform how organizations identify talent. It wasn’t a dramatic moment of insight—it was a crisis. A critical hiring decision loomed, and the stakes were impossibly high. Her CEO warned her that a bad hire would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. In that moment of pressure and uncertainty, MacGregor turned to something unconventional: psychometric assessments. What she discovered in those data points would plant the seeds for one of the most innovative talent platforms in the modern workplace—Plum.

But this story didn’t begin with that crisis. It started much earlier, in the margins of opportunity and the power of someone believing in you when you don’t yet believe in yourself.

The Foundation: Discovering Your Own Superpower (Success Story)

MacGregor’s journey into the world of talent assessment and human potential began at her first “real” job. Fresh out of school and uncertain about the world of business, she was handed what seemed like an impossible task: build a company from scratch. By any conventional measure, she was unqualified. She knew nothing about business architecture, organizational strategy, or scaling operations. Yet her boss saw something in her that she didn’t see in herself.

This moment—this act of faith—became the cornerstone of everything Plum would eventually become. Her boss didn’t hire her because of her resume or credentials. He hired her because he identified potential that transcended what any piece of paper could capture. He recognized a superpower that MacGregor herself was still discovering. That opportunity to prove herself, to grow in real-time, and to exceed her own expectations, became the proof of concept for her later work.

In that role, MacGregor discovered her superpower: the ability to see potential in people and understand how to unlock it. This wasn’t a lesson she learned from a textbook or a management seminar. It was lived experience, earned through the privilege of being given a chance that many never receive.

Years later, this lesson would haunt her in the best possible way. She would realize that most people never got the opportunity she had been given. Most talented individuals relied on luck—hoping that someone, somewhere, would see what her boss had seen in her. And that realization became unbearable.

The Crisis That Sparked an Idea (Success Story)

Fast forward to MacGregor’s next role, where she held significant hiring responsibility. The stakes were high, the pressure was real, and the traditional methods of talent evaluation simply weren’t working. In a moment of desperation—not unlike the pressure that drives many business innovations—she reached for a tool that was rarely used outside of executive coaching and elite consulting circles: psychometric assessments.

The assessments revealed something stunning. MacGregor found herself in a position to choose between two candidates. One appeared perfect on paper. He held a master’s degree, had five years of directly relevant experience, and every executive in the room was convinced he was the “golden boy.” The hiring decision seemed predetermined by convention and credential.

But the psychometric data told a different story. His assessment results showed a troubling pattern: a mediocre work ethic, a profile that didn’t align with the behavioral requirements of the role. Meanwhile, the second candidate—someone who might never have made it past the resume screening—scored in the top three percentile in the entire workforce for productivity and work drive.

MacGregor’s executive coach was blunt: “You’d be an idiot not to hire her.”

So she did something remarkable. She hired both candidates. This wasn’t a compromise—it was an experiment. She wanted to validate what the data was telling her.

Three months in, the experiment yielded definitive results. The golden boy was only delivering about 10 percent of the expected work. He was let go. Meanwhile, the candidate with the exceptional psychometric profile was thriving. The woman with the highest assessment scores became a top performer, the kind of employee organizations dream about but rarely find.

But MacGregor understood something profound in that moment: she only found this hidden talent because she looked beyond the resume. Traditional hiring methods would have eliminated this candidate before an interview ever happened. She would have never known she was walking past a diamond in the rough.

That experience wasn’t just a successful hire. It was the moment MacGregor realized there was a fundamental problem in how the world discovered talent.

The Science Behind the Solution (Success Story)

Over the next two and a half years, MacGregor embarked on a deep dive into the science of human behavior and workplace performance. She studied industrial-organizational psychology, the field that bridges the gap between human behavior and organizational effectiveness. She learned about the Five-Factor Personality Model (often called the “Big Five”), a scientifically validated framework that has been rigorously researched for decades.

What she discovered was revelatory. Psychometric assessments could measure what she called the “secret sauce” of human performance—talents like learning agility, resilience, drive, problem-solving ability, social intelligence, and adaptability. These weren’t vague personality traits or soft skills that managers debated in conference rooms. They were quantifiable, measurable, and predictive.

The science was irrefutable. Research showed that traditional resume screening was far less predictive of actual job performance than behavioral assessments. A resume could tell you what someone had done in the past. It could not tell you what they could actually do in the future or how well they would perform in a specific role.

But here’s where the real insight hit: this powerful, predictive data was locked away. Major consulting firms used psychometric assessments to screen executives and make high-stakes hiring decisions, but the cost was prohibitive. The expertise required to interpret and apply this data was the exclusive domain of industrial-organizational psychologists and elite consultants. The average hiring manager, the small business owner, the talent acquisition specialist in a growing company—they didn’t have access to this information.

MacGregor saw this as a profound injustice. Talented people were being overlooked not because they lacked potential, but because the systems designed to find them were inaccessible. Organizations were making hiring decisions based on credentials and resume polish, missing diamonds in the rough like the woman who almost never made it past the initial screening.

Democratizing Human Potential (Success Story)

In 2012, Caitlin MacGregor and her husband Neil MacGregor (who became Plum’s Chief Product Officer) founded Plum with a singular mission: democratize access to psychometric data so that no one would have to rely on luck for someone to realize their superpower.

This wasn’t just a software company solving a business problem. It was a mission grounded in a fundamental belief about fairness and human potential. MacGregor believed that everyone deserved the same opportunity she had been given—the chance to prove themselves, to contribute their talents, and to thrive in work environments where their strengths were recognized and leveraged.

The challenge was monumental. Psychometric assessments had traditionally been complex, time-consuming, and expensive. The analysis of a single role could take over 100 hours of expert time. The interpretation required deep knowledge of psychology, statistics, and organizational behavior. Scaling this across entire organizations and making it accessible to companies of all sizes seemed, to most observers, impossible.

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But MacGregor and her team had something conventional consultants didn’t have: a clear understanding of what needed to change. They automated the expertise of industrial-organizational psychology. They built machine learning algorithms that could analyze behavioral patterns at scale. They created a 25-minute assessment that measured personality, problem-solving ability, and social intelligence with scientific rigor. They developed an 8-minute job analysis that could identify the behavioral requirements of any role, regardless of industry or complexity.

Most importantly, they built this technology on a foundation of accessible science. Plum’s approach is grounded in research that has been validated for decades—the Big Five personality model—but the company translated academic psychology into practical, actionable insights that any hiring manager could understand and use.

The Plum Difference: Science Meets Accessibility (Success Story)

What makes Plum’s approach fundamentally different from traditional talent assessment is its focus on what the company calls “Plum Talents.” Rather than classifying people as high or low in certain traits, Plum recognizes that talents exist on a spectrum, and context matters enormously.

Being high in a particular talent isn’t inherently good or bad. It’s about alignment. Someone high in independence might be a perfect fit for a role requiring autonomous decision-making, but could struggle in a position requiring close collaboration. Someone high in conscientiousness might excel in roles requiring meticulous attention to detail, but could become frustrated in highly ambiguous, creative roles. The science shows that what drives and energizes one person could drain another.

This is the insight that transforms hiring from a guess into a science. Instead of asking “Is this a good candidate?” the question becomes “Is this a good candidate for this specific role, with these specific behavioral requirements, measured against these specific team dynamics?”

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The predictive power is remarkable. Plum’s data has consistently shown that their assessments predict job performance at a rate four times better than traditional resume screening. Organizations using Plum report a 77% increase in talent potential identification, a 90% quality of hire rating from managers, and up to 77% increases in retention.

But perhaps more importantly, Plum has begun to solve a problem that HR professionals have struggled with for decades: bias in hiring. Traditional resume-based hiring often perpetuates “culture fit” bias—the tendency to hire people who look and think like existing employees, often at the expense of diversity and inclusion. Because Plum’s assessments are objective, behavioral measures, they naturally reduce the opportunity for subjective bias to influence decisions. The platform has become a tool for finding overlooked talent, for surfacing candidates whose backgrounds might be non-traditional but whose behavioral profiles indicate they will thrive.

From Hiring to Human Flourishing (Success Story)

While Plum began as a talent acquisition platform, the scope of its impact has expanded significantly. MacGregor and her team realized that the insights captured in the initial assessment didn’t disappear on day one of employment. The behavioral data that predicted who would succeed in the role could also inform onboarding strategies, guide manager conversations, shape team composition, identify learning and development needs, and even support succession planning.

The same data that answered “Should we hire this person?” could also answer “How do we help this person succeed?” and “Where can this person grow within our organization?” and eventually, “Who are the future leaders we need to develop?”

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Plum expanded into a full-lifecycle talent platform. The company began working with enterprises like Manulife, Citibank, and Whirlpool—organizations managing hundreds of thousands of employees across dozens of countries and languages. The platform now operates in 144 countries, available in 20 languages, serving organizations of vastly different sizes, industries, and cultures.

But throughout this expansion, MacGregor remained grounded in the original mission. Every product launch, every new feature, every expansion into a new market was evaluated against a single criterion: Does this help someone realize their full potential? Does this democratize access to insights that were once the exclusive domain of elite consultants? Does this give people the same chance MacGregor was given—the opportunity to prove themselves?

The Business Impact of Human-Centric Thinking (Success Story)

From a business perspective, what Plum demonstrates is that being mission-driven and being commercially successful are not opposing forces. The companies using Plum aren’t doing so primarily as an act of social responsibility. They’re using it because it works. The financial impact is tangible.

Better hiring decisions directly reduce turnover costs. The average cost of replacing an employee is estimated at 50-200% of their annual salary, depending on the role. When Plum helps organizations hire people who are genuinely well-matched to their roles, the retention benefits alone justify the investment many times over.

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Faster ramp-time means employees become productive contributors sooner. MacGregor noted in company announcements that when employees are in roles where their strengths can shine, they’re more effective, more engaged, and more innovative. The ripple effects extend beyond individual performance. Teams composed of people with complementary talents function better. Organizations with better talent alignment innovate faster and maintain stronger customer relationships.

The 90% quality-of-hire rating that Plum clients report isn’t just a nice statistic. It’s a measure of something fundamental: managers believing that the people hired are genuinely right for the roles they’re in. This conviction, grounded in objective data rather than gut feel, transforms how organizations approach talent management.

A Philosophy That Resonates (Success Story)

What’s remarkable about Plum’s trajectory is how it reflects a broader shift in how organizations think about work and people. For decades, business operated from an assumption that was rarely questioned: you hired the most credentialed person, and hoped they would fit into the role. If they didn’t work out, that was considered unfortunate but inevitable—a cost of doing business.

Plum challenges this assumption. It says: talent is more complex than credentials. Potential is more real than past performance. And everyone—not just executives and elite candidates—deserves the chance to be understood as a whole human being, not reduced to a resume.

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This philosophy resonates because it’s true, but it also resonates because it’s personal to anyone who has ever been underestimated or overlooked. In an era when organizations are struggling with talent shortages, engagement challenges, and the ever-present risk of losing institutional knowledge, Plum’s approach offers something rare: a way to build better teams while treating people with genuine respect for their potential.

Looking Forward (Success Story)

Today, Plum operates as a Canadian-founded company that has attracted significant investment (including from SAP’s innovation fund) and recognition. In 2023, HR Tech voted Plum the best Talent Intelligence solution on the market. The platform continues to evolve, expanding from talent acquisition into workforce planning, learning and development, team optimization, and succession planning.

But the core mission remains unchanged. MacGregor’s vision of a world where no one has to rely on luck for someone to realize their superpower continues to drive product decisions, hiring priorities, and company culture.

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The story of Plum is ultimately a story about what happens when someone who understands the pain of being overlooked decides to build a solution that ensures others won’t face that same uncertainty. It’s a story about the democratization of insights that were once elite privileges. And it’s a story about the power of seeing potential in people and giving them the data-backed confidence to invest in that potential.

In a business world often dominated by short-term thinking and optimization of individual productivity, Plum reminds us of something essential: when people flourish, businesses thrive. The challenge has always been knowing which people will flourish in which environments. Now, finally, organizations have a way to answer that question not based on luck, but on science.

And that changes everything.

Key Takeaways for Organizations (Success Story)

The Resume Gap: Resumes tell you what someone has done. Psychometric assessments predict what they can do. Organizations that recognize this difference gain a competitive advantage in talent acquisition.

Potential Over Credentials (Success Story): The highest-credentialed candidate isn’t always the best fit. Behavior, resilience, problem-solving ability, and adaptability are better predictors of success than degrees and previous titles.

Fairness and Performance Go Together (Success Story): Objective, bias-reduced assessment methods aren’t just more ethical—they’re more effective at finding overlooked talent and building diverse, high-performing teams.

Data-Driven Culture (Success Story): When organizations move from gut-feel hiring to behavioral science-based decisions, they improve quality of hire, reduce turnover, accelerate time-to-productivity, and build stronger teams.

Full-Lifecycle Benefit (Success Story): The insights that help you hire the right person also help you onboard them effectively, develop them strategically, and identify future leaders within your organization.

This story reminds us that the most powerful business innovations often come from someone’s deeply personal motivation to solve a problem they’ve experienced themselves. Caitlin MacGregor was given a chance that changed her life. Now, through Plum, she’s working to ensure that millions of others get the same opportunity—to prove themselves and to flourish.

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