The Vocabulary Test Trap: What AI Fluency Actually Looks Like with Wouter Durville, CEO of TestGorilla

**Alex Theuma** (0:03)
Every decade or so, the rules of software change completely. This is one of those moments. The AI Revolution Show is the intelligence podcast for B2B software founders navigating the platform shift. The founders building through it, and the founders already on the other side.
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Wouter, thanks for coming on the show.

**Wouter Durville** (1:34)
Great to be here. Thank you, Alex.

**Alex Theuma** (1:36)
Yeah, good to have you. So, I wanted to ask straight away, like thinking about everything that's happening, right? Forget CVs, degrees for a second. If you had to hire somebody today for a job that's probably going to change five times in the next three years, what's the one thing that you'd actually hire for?

**Wouter Durville** (1:54)
Right.
Well, I would not hire for what they know. I think I would hire for how they behave, right? So at TestGorilla, we have a set of behaviors, like things like think big, raising the bar, continuously learning and growing. Those are examples of behaviors that we have. So I would hire for those things because they stand the test of time, whereas knowledge, of course, with AI, that's, yeah, it expires fast, I think, these days.

**Alex Theuma** (2:15)
What is TestGorilla in a sentence? People that are still hiring of CVs, you know, looking for good feelings in the interview. What is it?

**Wouter Durville** (2:24)
I would say it's the ultimate talent shortlisting engine. So what you can do with TestGorilla, you can do two things. One, you can source people from a database of over 800 million people, of which millions have already done our skills test. So it means skills tested already. And then you can source from them, and then you can narrow your shortlist further with world-class assessment tools that we offer, like skills test, AI interviews, resume scoring, et cetera, to get to an ultimate shortlist of people that you want to interview before you hire them. That's what you can do at TestGorilla.

**Alex Theuma** (2:53)
What made you set out to do this, right? Why build, launch TestGorilla?

**Wouter Durville** (2:59)
The idea for TestGorilla was really born out of my own struggles with hiring as an entrepreneur. So I've been an entrepreneur for basically my whole life. I had a remote social enterprise before TestGorilla, way before COVID. And we would get a lot of applicants. We were selling handmade carpets, handmade rugs made by women in developing countries. So really nice product, beautiful product with a nice story around it. So we would get huge numbers of applicants even though the company was quite small. And we were really struggling. How do we find the best people, first of all? How do we make it fair for everyone? How do we make it efficient? Even if we spent 30 seconds on the CV, you have a few thousand, that adds up. So we were really struggling with the old way of CV-based hiring. So we were looking for new ways. I was not looking for a new business idea, I was just looking for to solve my own problems. And then we thought, hey, maybe have a few skills tests, just to narrow the applicant pool a bit more. It would be great. So we started basically copy pasting tests from the internet, but that already really worked. And then I was like, hey, I want to buy this product. I want to buy basically what TestGorilla became later. But I couldn't find it. So that's when I put on my entrepreneurial hat, I was like, wow, this can be an opportunity to offer skills tests and all these kinds of tools that we offer now at the top of the funnel, especially at the top of the funnel, because assessments have been around for maybe centuries, at least a century, I think, the US Army. Typically, assessment at companies, at corporates, were used at the bottom of the recruitment funnel. At the end, like two, three candidates, you would send them to the assessment center. Whereas we flipped it around. We said, hey, let's do it at the beginning, right? We were sourcing candidates, give all of them the same kind of set of skills test, and you get a much stronger pool of applicants that you then start interviewing. So that's how it started. So I'm trying to solve my own problem.