Can they do the job?Will they thrive here?Kit asks both, on every call.

Which to choose

Choose Eightfold if you want a talent intelligence platform that models skills across the people you employ and the people you could hire. Eightfold describes itself as "the system of intelligence for workforce decisions" and says it helps "find candidates based on skills, potential, and fit".

Choose Speak to Kit if you want to hire for quality, retention and impact: every applicant asked about what a top performer delivers in their first 12 months, every hire checked at 30 days, 90 days and a year on the Talent and Enterprise plans, and the high performers in the pipeline found, whatever their CV says. Kit only speaks to people who choose to speak to it.

Quality of hire: what a top performer delivers in 12 months

Before Kit speaks to anyone, each hiring manager says what a top performer delivers in their first 12 months in the role, what is hard about it, and why people succeeded or failed before. Kit turns that into one standard and asks every applicant about it, by phone or in writing, in a way that fits their experience.

Eightfold's talent acquisition page promises to "Go beyond the résumé to quickly identify quality candidates with the skills for today, and tomorrow." Skills answer whether a person can do the work. Kit asks that, and whether the person will thrive in this team, under this manager, with this hard part of the job. It asks where they were at their best and why.

Retention: who is still delivering a year later

A Project Brains survey, reported by HRreview in April 2024, found 16 in every 100 new hires at UK small firms leave within their first year. On an £80,000 salary, one failed hire costs about £51,000, counted line by line on the How Kit works page.

On the Talent and Enterprise plans, Speak to Kit checks in on every hire at 30 days, 90 days and a year, and asks who is doing well, who stayed and who grew. That lets a company count first-year leavers among people hired through Kit against the hires before, team by team.

How one failed hire costs about £51,000

Impact hiring: finding the high performers

Avoiding a bad hire is not the same as finding a great one. In most jobs performance is not a bell curve. Joo, Aguinis and Bradley studied 229 samples of real output in 2017: three quarters had a lopsided shape with a long tail of top people, and a bell curve fitted best only 4.8% of the time.

Hunter, Schmidt and Judiesch measured how much output varies between people in the same job. In professional jobs, the gap between an average and a good performer is about 48% of average output. In routine work it is 19%. Stars show up most where the job has freedom, complexity and no ceiling on what one person can produce (Aguinis and colleagues, 2016, about 625,000 people).

That gap rarely shows on paper. Thinking ability counts right to the top, more so in complex jobs (Arneson, Sackett and Beatty, 2011), and past performance travels less well to a new employer than within one job (Sturman and colleagues, 2005). So Kit asks how a person got a result, what got in the way, and what they would do differently.

Side by side, and price

Vendr reports a median of $25,000 a year from 4 purchases of Eightfold. Eightfold does not publish prices on its own site. Speak to Kit costs £250 + VAT a month per agent month to month, or £200 + VAT a month on an annual plan.

What it looked like at Dot Collective

At Dot Collective, Kit took 556 applications and spoke to 293 people, 64.5 hours of conversation, with the longest call running 56 minutes. Every person who wanted to speak to Kit got a full conversation, not only the people whose CV stood out. At Dot Collective, 503 of 555 applicants finished a conversation with Kit by 11 September 2026.

Speak to Kit will not build profiles on people without their permission. Anyone who speaks to Kit can ask for their details to be deleted at any time. The legal limit is 30 days, and Kit tries to do it the same day.

Profiles, permission and the people you hire

Speak to Kit's position is plain: we will not expose clients to the risk of building profiles in the US without people's permission. Kit learns about a person only from the conversation they chose to have. It does not gather data about people from the web, and it does not score anyone who has not spoken to it.

What Kit learns over time is about teams, not individuals. Each company builds its own picture of what top performance looks like for the whole company, each department and each team, from the profiles managers sign off and, on the Talent and Enterprise plans, the check-ins at 30 days, 90 days and a year.

The hire that shows the difference

At Rhaelm, one woman had spent five years at home with her children, and her CV showed it. Ranked on her CV she came 100th. Kit spoke to her and put her first, and she got the job.

What it is worth

Quality, retention and impact each show up in money. In a Leadership IQ study of more than 20,000 hires, 89 in 100 of the hires that failed were down to attitude: being coachable, motivated, and suited to the team. Speak to Kit asks every applicant about exactly that, against what a top performer delivers in 12 months. Each failed hire avoided saves about £51,000 on an £80,000 salary, and on the Talent and Enterprise plans Kit checks in on every hire at 30 days, 90 days and a year. For example, an online grocer hiring about 2,400 people a year has about 380 first-year leavers, costing about £7.7 million a year. Halving that would be worth about £3.8 million a year (estimate).

Each high performer found is worth more again. As a floor, Schmidt and Hunter put a better-than-average person at no less than 40% of salary a year more than an average one: in a job paying £60,000, someone in about the top sixth adds at least £24,000 a year. That is a rule of thumb, not a measured figure for any one job.

What halving first-year leavers is worth