Harry Handles It: Episode 35 with John Betancourt

Most companies invest in hiring. Few invest in teaching managers how to actually lead.

In this episode of Harry Handles It, Harry Nalbandyan sits down with John Betancourt, former Fortune 500 executive, longtime executive search consultant, and CEO of Humantelligence, to talk about what really drives engagement, retention, and performance inside organizations.

After building a recruiting software company to $2.5M in annual recurring revenue, John watched demand disappear almost overnight when COVID halted hiring. The pivot that followed led him to a bigger problem: personality assessments and leadership workshops that cost thousands of dollars but rarely change day-to-day behavior.

John explains why 45% of managers never receive formal leadership training, why engagement surveys often miss the root issue, and why most friction at work is not about competence but about conflicting behavioral styles.

The conversation covers:

• The difference between static personality reports and real time behavioral insight
• Why people do not quit companies, they quit friction with their boss
• How psychometrics can identify what actually predicts high performance
• Why most leaders struggle to adapt their communication style
• How AI can function as a behavioral coach inside tools like Teams, Zoom, and Outlook

This episode is for founders, executives, and managers who understand that culture is not built through slogans or surveys. It is built in the moments of feedback, conflict, and decision-making.

If you want to reduce internal friction, improve leadership effectiveness, and build teams that perform under pressure, listen to the full episode now.

"Harry Handles It" is a podcast hosted by Harry Nalbandyan. Each episode explores how top-tier performers navigate pressure, build discipline, and execute at a high level in business and life. Follow the show for direct conversations about performance, leadership, and intentional growth.

Transcript

Harry Nalbandyan (00:02.318)

Welcome to the Harry Handles it podcast. Today we've got the incredible John Benton Cordon, who is a tech founder, former Fortune 500 executive, workforce strategist and the CEO of Human Intelligence, a new AI company. Welcome to the podcast, John.

John Betancourt (00:21.264)

Thanks for having me here, Harry.

Harry Nalbandyan (00:23.086)

Of course. Before we deep dive into human intelligence and what that does, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you found yourself to be the CEO of human intelligence?

John Betancourt (00:35.258)

Gosh, like why I started human intelligence as an entrepreneur 10 years ago or how did my career get me there?

Harry Nalbandyan (00:43.692)

Yeah, both. What's your favorite story about starting it?

John Betancourt (00:49.167)

Yeah, so

You know, I was a high educated guy, Northeast 18 years, 20 years. I left the U S to Latin America, 10 years Europe for 10 years. then came back to the U S, worked at large corporations, proctoring gamble, Reebok Puma, worked at a similar type company in France called decathlon. and then I had a second, that was 15 years. Then I had a second career for 15 years as a headhunter. So what they call an executive search consultant.

with the two blue chip firms, one called Hydrocon Struggles, one called Corn Fairy. They're like the McKinsey or Goldman Sachs for recruiting executives. And I went from large corporate because I couldn't stand, you know, how bad managers made one's life miserable. And I always thought there should be a better way of making managers better. And then I went into headhunting where I found executives through interviews and using personality tests.

So between those two careers of large corporate companies with bad management and then using psychometrics for recruiting, I always had this dream of using psychology at scale with technology to help everyone. And so 10 years ago, I launched human intelligence using psychology. a personality test, embedded within workflow. So within Microsoft teams, outlook, Slack, zoom, you name it.

where you can get insights about people while you work and where you work at any time. Such questions like, how do I work better with Harry? Why are we having conflict? so the goal was always to just make work more enjoyable, relationships and connections stronger. And so now in this world of AI, we're probably one of the few AI companies that actually does not replace people. We're actually enhancing people's relationships.

John Betancourt (02:44.59)

And we're the first AI that actually makes work and people more human, which is kind of a flipping on its head. This fear everybody has. so that's kind how I got into it. And it's been a long 10 years and it took a while for AI and technology and integrations to get to the point where it is now seamless and fun and a great tool to use.

Harry Nalbandyan (03:04.408)

So tell me a little bit more about human intelligence. I know at our firm we've used some of the personality tests for hiring assessment, better training for our team, the Colby's, the Prince. Is that similar to the human intelligence tool or is just different way of delivering that kind of information to the people?

John Betancourt (03:23.074)

very different. Let me tell you an analogy. Have you ever used Grammarly?

Harry Nalbandyan (03:28.909)

Yes.

John Betancourt (03:30.78)

So the analogy is how is using a dictionary on your desk different than using Grammarly? The dictionary on your desk you never use. Grammarly you're using 10 times a day. We're the exact same thing. All the psychometric tests you just mentioned, Predictive Index, Colby, Hogan, Laminger, people take them, they do the workshop, you spend $30,000 for the team to to know each other.

Harry Nalbandyan (03:38.178)

Yeah.

Hahaha

John Betancourt (03:59.004)

And then it goes over the folder and you never look at it again. That's analogous to the dictionary or the source. We did what Grammarly did. We basically take those results, upload them into a system, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Zoom, Google Workplace. And now like Grammarly, all that information is flowing so you can ask any question anytime. So we get usage of about 25 to 30 per month. So we're looking at 300 uses a year, 300 times the system.

what we call ask or this kind of agentic robot woman ask aura can answer any question like a personal coach. So it's actually the first AI coach that knows you, knows your team, knows your firm and can, or the whole organization and can answer questions around the psychology, just like in the old model of psychometric personality tests, you would only get that in the workshop in person for $30,000 for two hours. And then never again, ours is

Any moment all day long, 24 seven for tens of thousands of people up and running in 10 minutes, no software integration needed.

Harry Nalbandyan (05:03.246)

I love that because we found that to be a challenge. Like we do these tests, we found some value in it, there's some benefit. There's a big kumbaya moment, but then how do you carry that forward? And I love that this solution patches that together.

John Betancourt (05:15.932)

And what you just said, how does that, how do we carry this forward? That is the number one complaint and feedback at the end of those workshops. Hey consultant, this was amazing, but how do we now use it in our day to day? And the answer was always, well, remember to go into your folder. And, and it doesn't matter that the people you're working with probably haven't taken it because it was only for our little team of 10 and not the 4,000 employees. So, and we give the assessment for free. I actually don't believe there's any value.

Harry Nalbandyan (05:32.59)

Hahaha

John Betancourt (05:44.612)

in a self-awareness tool if it's not being used by people with others. So I give the test for free.

Harry Nalbandyan (05:51.34)

Incredible. I mean, you said it's been a 10-year work in progress. Can you talk about some iterations of the company as it came up to be what it is today?

John Betancourt (06:02.268)

You know, we started, because I just come out of headhunting and recruiting for executives. I was looking for an assessment at first to just be me interviewing someone and filtering, understanding their behaviors, their motivators, their work styles. And so most recruiters at law firms or at any company don't really know how to measure behaviors, motivators, values, work styles, right? They're not professional psychologists.

And so I found and bought for two and a half million dollars, the world's most advanced scientific instrument personality tests that measures behaviors, motivators, values, work styles, leadership styles, and communication styles. And so I bought it and I built a software company with an applicant tracking system so that anybody could just send the link to a candidate or group of candidates through already integrated into UKG workday success factors or ISIMS, Delay or whatever the ATS is.

So you just send it out through your existing system and you could see the profile and compare it to the hiring manager or compare it to the team or compare it all the high performers. So it was a bull, it was a home run, right? Like give it to all your high performing junior law firm workers, right? The ones who come right out of business law school. Give it to your high performing ones and it'll tell you what are the characteristics of 28 things. What are the four things that explain high performance at that law firm, for instance?

that indicate success. Are they all decisive? Are they all deliberate? Are they all conceptual or detailed or did? And then you can use it to hire and it'll give you a score how good fit they are for the role or the team. We did that for three and a half, four years, crushed it, got up to like two and a half million dollars. We were top startup Miami, but then COVID came. I would have loved to have been a restaurant during COVID because a restaurant, at least there was no loss for demand for food, right? People still ate. Actually, I think a lot of people ate more.

Harry Nalbandyan (07:54.957)

Hahaha

John Betancourt (07:55.568)

But at least my 20 pounds actually were. The problem with restaurants was, the demand didn't go down. We just can't serve in our restaurant. We got to get the food to that customer. That was real challenge. with recruiting software, nobody was hiring. mean, so our demand went to zero within three months, our two and a half million in ARR went to zero. So I fired everybody but two developers. So that was the first four years of the company. you know, fast growth and then nothing.

Harry Nalbandyan (07:57.71)

You included.

John Betancourt (08:23.396)

And then we tinkered around, we pivoted like, how do we get the psychometric tool for existing employees? And so we, got it into zoom and Microsoft teams virtual so that you could do it during meetings. And we sold it as a collaboration platform. And it was awesome. Like you could, you could write an email, push the button. Every wrote your email for you in, Outlook or Gmail, the way your recipient wants to read the information, unlike Grammarly, which can't do that. Grammarly can pick the tone you want.

But if you don't know the person you're writing to, that doesn't matter if you pick your own tone. You want it to be written in the tone for your audience. And we could do that, Grammarly. You could get insights around a meeting. Like right now in this meeting, you could click the button, it'll tell you on Zoom or Microsoft Teams, the dynamic of the team. And so better norming, forming, storing for cross-functional or remote teams working together. Now that all came to not because this sounds silly. We had a great collaboration platform.

You would think collaboration is important. Well, just because people were talking about how hard it was to collaborate, no company in the world has a chief collaboration officer. Where does that person sit? How do you sell a collaboration tool to a company where there's no one with the mandate to solve collaboration other than IT during COVID, which was, let's get people connected. But connected is not collaboration. So IT didn't care how well people collaborated. They just wanted to make sure everybody could get on a call together.

And so we found ourselves kind of like pushing water up a mountain because nobody cared at these companies about collaboration. And so we did two and a half years of kind of that didn't work. then we saw, chat, JPT come out to two years ago. And that was the moment I thought, you know, Mike drop type moment, every, every piece of content in the world will be, will be consumed, not through like a.

a click and read, click and read, click and read, like you do on Google search engine, but a, let me just ask a bot, let me just ask a coach. Let me just, so, and if you noticed every company out there now has asked, you know, Jim and I ask, Amazon, they don't have their own names. We're ask Aura. And so I was like, wow, why don't we just create an ask Aura kind of like a chat, PT, but it's bounded and constrained by questions around collaboration, teamwork, leadership, conflict and all the things that psychology can help answer.

John Betancourt (10:47.558)

So it was a long meandering path, but for the last two years we're really crushing it and we're growing again and it's really been fun.

Harry Nalbandyan (10:54.104)

That's awesome. mean, recruiting is a big problem for almost any business that's scaling or growing at all. What did you bring from the private headhunting space into human intelligence that you found benefited from your experience in that?

John Betancourt (11:11.28)

Well, think when our first iteration of the product, kind of just knew the way recruiters think. And so it really helped with every little feature and function. So even pricing, right? Like I remember that most, most applicant tracking software was, was priced per candidate and same with assessment tools were priced, like how many assessments were taken, but then companies don't want to pay for a thousand assessments if they're only hiring one person.

because at the end of the day, other 999 assessments they paid for that aren't being really used. we changed the pricing more to like the executive search model, like, hey, what value is there for us to find you the right person? Let's just put a fixed value to that and we'll give you the assessment unlimited version, right? So that was one thing that we did on pricing, being able to do comparisons not only with the manager, but with the team.

with high performers, those are things that I got and I learned from my headhunting role. There are probably a lot more little details, that was five years ago when we were doing the recruiting tool.

Harry Nalbandyan (12:18.22)

And so tell me a little bit about your background before all this. Tell me about the Facebook before the Facebook and how that came to be.

John Betancourt (12:28.444)

Interesting. funny you found that, uh, that reference. Yeah. So I used to, I used to, I used to love meeting people like my, my vibration is curiosity and connector. Those are the two things that kind of define my energy. And, uh, and so my father was a professor in France at a business called called INSEAD. And every summer from the age of three or two, we would go to France with all these other kids from all over the world. And, know, I'm 55, 56. So, you know, back.

When I was in high school, there was no internet. mean, I didn't get internet until was like 25, maybe 28 years old. And so I used to write postcards to all these kids I met. And we're talking not a few. By the time I was 10, I was writing a hundred postcards a week. By the time I was 18, I was writing like 300 postcards a week. And so when the internet came right after college at 22, I could then scale even more.

And I also had more money. could travel more. worked all over the world. So was meeting people every three years all the time. I practically didn't have time for dating. And so they called me to Facebook before Facebook because I knew more people than anybody. Like Facebook had a cap at 5,000. I already knew 20,000 people when Facebook came out, right? Like same with LinkedIn. so the running joke was like Juan knows everybody. With Juan, there's a one degree.

So, uh, one degree of separation with John that that's kind of the, and, uh, and I had this whole system of staying in touch and a lot of little, a lot of things that Facebook tries to do to keep you connected. I was doing naturally. that's the story behind that on, uh, which also kind of led to my human intelligence. Ask Orb is at the end of the day, we're all about human intelligence using psychometrics to create better connection, using psychometrics to, creating a.

A vibration between people as if they've been married for five years, even though they've only met for five minutes.

Harry Nalbandyan (14:22.786)

I love that so much because after these assessments, after considering the human psychology in our own practice, in my own practice, in my own team, changing the way I communicate with the different team members, depending on how they receive information has been a game changer for me. So I love that this tool exists and I love how easy it sounds like it makes the facilitation of this connection with other team members. Somebody who I may not have 15 conversations a week with, but the one time I need to speak to them every other month or every month.

It becomes a memorable and elevating experience for everybody involved. And things don't keep crossed and messages don't get mixed.

John Betancourt (14:58.597)

Yes.

Yeah. Especially during performance review period. It's the most delicate conversations about, you're not performing or what's your career path. What should it be? What would be good for you? What'd be good for the company? All of those moments are delicate and until like ours gives the script to someone like you, you Harry clearly know how to take a report of somebody else, interpret it and then change, even though it's difficult and then deliver a new message. Nine to 10 leaders can't do like.

you. And so our tool allows those other nine to figure it out without naturally being able to change their behavior.

Harry Nalbandyan (15:36.984)

Yeah, yeah, I love that. And how does it show up in like your workplace flow? I know you said teams, know you said Slack, but does it kind of show up with suggested ways to communicate with somebody or do you have to prompt a tool to tell you?

John Betancourt (15:51.024)

So prompting is a big part of how we constructed our platform. If you go to chat, GPT, there's just a big square. I don't believe people are curious enough to know what to do with that big square. Like, you know, you give 80 % of human beings in this planet five hours with God and they wouldn't know what to ask.

Harry Nalbandyan (16:16.429)

Good. Yeah.

John Betancourt (16:17.454)

It's sad, but it's true. So instead of having a square, we kind of guide people kind of like a coach where we say, what do you want to do today? And then we have different boxes like tiles on a screen or on your phone. are you having conflict? do you need to lead a team or manage a team or have something around team dynamics? Do you have questions around cross-cultural stuff? do you have questions around,

Just somebody else in the company you want to know about so let's into one of those. Let's say it's About somebody else about Harry got him Harry. Um, you want to know how to collaborate with Harry you want to know? How to develop Harry Conflict with Harry and then let's say collaborate collaborate. Okay, and then we have five questions How are Harry and I most different? How are we most similar? So and we still have the little bar where you can just go straight into your question if you have it

but we were kind of coaching people, right? Like for a team, team dynamics, how do I lead this team? What would you read during this team? How do I motivate this team? Write a motivational speech for this team. know, who is the most, do you want to find someone in your company? And you click in and like, you can do a dropdown. Most creative person in the company, most structured person, most process oriented. Trying to create a team, write the description here. So we're kind of.

pulling along the user with questions that they might not have come up with on their own.

Harry Nalbandyan (17:45.676)

Yeah, that's really cool. Does it depend on the input from team members? team members all have to take an assessment built into the tool?

John Betancourt (17:54.062)

Yes, we do not scrape and crawl people's emails. That's not a, it's not, ethically correct. I wouldn't want somebody reading all my stuff and trying to get to know me and, and B it's actually not accurate. The only way you can know somebody's psychology and what values they have, what motivates them is actually taking a personality test. most tests have to be validated as, as scientific instruments, or they cannot be legally used at companies both for recruiting and for coaching.

and so there's only about 30 tools out there in the world that are actually scientifically validated. We're one of them. That's what we had to buy our way into that tool. so, so yeah, so to get the insights and to be able to answer questions about other people or a team, everyone in company has to take the assessment. Now it's not mandated on a Monday morning email goes out, Hey, welcome to human intelligence. This journey for better collaboration, leadership, team effectiveness. We're going to use this tool.

If you want voluntarily, you can take and participate. It's a 10 minute assessment, or you can even upload other assessments. So we now have the ability, we're agnostic. We can upload anybody's assessment, Hogan, disc, predictive index. And we get about 93 % of employees opting in voluntarily to take the assessment.

Harry Nalbandyan (19:08.142)

And is the tool, do you have a target business size? Is it a good tool for a business of two people? Is it a good tool for 200, 2000? What do think?

John Betancourt (19:18.454)

Yeah, so.

Leadership, collaboration and understanding applies to every company in the world, whether it's two people, 20, 200, 2,000 or 20 million people. Now, the smaller the company, the more you know everyone. So a picture of a law firm, 10 people that have worked together for 10 years. They've already figured out how to communicate with each other. Otherwise it wouldn't be together that long, right? It's like a married couple after 20 years. All these tools wouldn't matter because after 20 years you figured out how to change your approach and

You know, when you have something really important, I got to approach my wife or my spouse this way. Right. however, because most 10 person companies haven't worked 10 years together and they have some new people coming on our tools still make sense. However, it's not going to get used more than maybe three to four times a month. Okay. A large company with 20,000 employees, which is now complexity. You're working cross-functionally. You're on seven different teams.

You don't see these people. There's new employees every month. You're working with people in different countries there. You're getting about 30 uses a month because every day there's someone you're writing to working with on a call with that you have no idea who they are. And so there's just more usage at the bigger companies, smaller companies, there's a little less usage, but it's just as valuable to have. Obviously we make money on the bigger companies. So we're focused on selling this kind of product.

to 500 or more employees, but for less than 500, we give a really good one price for everybody, which isn't too much and people can have fun with it.

Harry Nalbandyan (20:57.292)

Awesome. Does it still tie into the recruiting aspect at all to help provide assessments of, is this new person going to fit in or how would this new person fit into this specific team?

John Betancourt (21:09.006)

You can use it for that. we also have that's this ask Aura agent in our recruiting tool. So we now have two modules, ask or the AI coach, and we have the talent fit for recruiting our old product. That's still there with, with ask or a built in.

Harry Nalbandyan (21:24.814)

Got it. cool.

Harry Nalbandyan (21:30.434)

Have you found that companies will spend a lot of money recruiting people, but they don't spend as much time or effort in trying to retain or keep or coach these teams into more success?

John Betancourt (21:45.702)

I think they spend equal amount of time and money, but on the wrong things. Right. So, you know, every day, every month for the last seven years, I've been reading about engagement surveys. want to understand our employees and why they're engaged, why not, why they're not feeling connected. you know, people are quitting and, and, you know, they're spending millions of dollars on these engagement surveys, which tell people if they're happy or not.

Harry Nalbandyan (21:49.262)

Tell me about that.

John Betancourt (22:10.492)

At the end of the day, tool like Ascorah solves all engagement. It'll tell you the two biggest things with engagement are, I quit my boss, I can't stay in them. Right? And that's usually friction. I don't believe that everybody's out there so mean and horrible. I just think people have different styles and it feels like the person hates you when they have, you know, a different style. If one person's decisive and the other person's deliberate and the boss is decisive, they'll get so frustrated by the deliberate subordinate. not only are they decisive boss, but they're also conceptual.

Now you have a deliberate subordinate who's also deets oriented. So they're taking forever and they're giving too much information. I mean, this is like, it's going to blow up and then neither one is right or wrong and good or bad. But the feeling that both will have is I hate that person. They don't know what the hell they're doing. Okay. our tool will get rid of that. Our tool explained to both people that, neither one of you is right. You both have to meet in the middle, right? Because a leader of five people has to come to the middle with five different profiles.

It's hard to be a manager, but you have to become a schizophrenic and have different personalities for everyone. But unless you have a tool like ours, it's very difficult to do unless, you know, if there's like 10 % of people can naturally do that. And the other thing, so our tool helps with that reason people quit and who are not engaged. And the other reason our tool helps with engagement is what projects you're working on. Our tool, can literally say the company has these five projects, A, B, C, D, E, and you describe it. Which one would be best for Harry to keep, to keep him most fulfilled and engaged?

today there's no tour boss in the world that would know the answer. Even Harry wouldn't know that answer because you don't know all the intricacies of each type of project and how that will tap into your motivations, your values, your work styles. Or in two seconds, you could plop that in and ask, or, and it'll tell you, give Harry project three, cross functional project that's strategic. And here's why. Right. And so we solve engagement. but a lot of money's being spent on that. So think money and time is being spent on

these things, but just, the wrongly placed. Another study Gartner showed that only 40 % of managers, so picture a big company, all those mid-level managers, 40%, I'm sorry, 45 % never get training on leadership, on how to lead a team or manage a team. The problem is they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for the 5%. They're not spending on a tool like ours.

Harry Nalbandyan (24:27.116)

I believe that.

John Betancourt (24:35.266)

one tenth of that for the whole company. Our tool can develop all managers, all levels for a fraction of the price. It's only a couple dollars per person per month.

Harry Nalbandyan (24:45.358)

Yeah, just to give people that little bit of human intelligence to help make better communication decisions or make better decisions overall with their team. I feel like there's great value in that. So tell our viewers, John, how they can find out more information about you, more information about the company and stay connected.

John Betancourt (25:01.744)

Yeah, they can find me on John at LinkedIn at John Betancourt. they could go to my email and write to, john.betancourt at human intelligence.com. and they can visit our website at www.ask Aura. That's a U R a dot AI.

Harry Nalbandyan (25:24.31)

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for the conversation today, John, and I look forward to speaking to you again.

John Betancourt (25:29.584)

Thank you, Harry.