As the founder of PILOT, one of just a few LGBT-owned HR tech startups, Ben Brooks is used to being in rare company.
Now he’s in ever rarer company as HR Tech Conference’s 2019 Pitchfest winner.
“There’s so many other great companies that pitched,” he said Thursday after the second annual competition’s final round. “Companies with a lot of capital and are really far along. We’re blown away that we won.”
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PILOT is the industry’s first scalable SaaS platform for employee coaching and is designed to help HR executives quickly and affordably deploy high-impact coaching at scale, with analytics to prove impact. Customers include MetLife, CBS, Aon, Thomson Reuters, Pandora Radio and more.
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The competition featured a flurry of pitches from 30 companies and every segment of the HR tech market space. In addition to the title of Pitchfest winner, PILOT also received a check for $25,000, courtesy of Randstad Innovation Fund.
Brooks, who was named to HRE’s Top 100 HR Tech Influencers list earlier this year, credits his passion as the determining factor in the victory.
“We change peoples lives and health,” he said. “I know that we do that, at a gut level, and that helps me bring the passion.”
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PILOT’s top selling point is that “it’s an affordable way to develop talent that’s really effective,” Brooks said.
“Diversity and inclusion has been a big theme this year,” Brooks said, “and you have to get development out to a lot of people to level the playing field and that’s what our product is all about.”
