TL;DR; The right problem, the right market, the right team and the right reason…

Talk to people about the keys to building a successful company and you will quickly reach the inevitable topic of employees. Which begs the question: If employees are so important, how is it that the recruitment process is so unstructured, unmeasurable and sadly biased in many cases?

Think of the last time you recruited someone. Try to reverse engineer the process from job posting to screening to interviewing to the final offer and ask yourself two kinds of questions about each step:
Why did I…? How can I assess…?

• Why did I choose to use this specific wording when I posted the job?
• How can I assess if the job post will yield the candidates I’m looking for?
• Why did I pick that person from a pile of 50 CVs while screening?
• How can I assess the quality of my screening?
• Why did I ask those specific questions, and not others, in the initial phone interview?
• How can I assess the quality of my phone interview conclusion?
• Why did I reject this candidate?
• How can I assess the quality of my decision?

Well if your answer to all the question above starts with “HMMMMMMMM” you’re not alone.

The Right Problem (For AI)

AI is quoted so often lately that it might sound like a magic solution to all of humanity’s problems. The truth is that it’s really important to pick the right problem when trying to leverage the advantages of AI. You’re looking for problems that are beyond human capacity.

Problems that involve huge amounts of data, and that can’t be processed by a human brain, that generate an unmanageable amount of interconnections/relations and hide patterns you can use to classify new sets of data or predict future outcomes.

Recruitment (and people analytics in general) is exactly the type of problem that begs for AI…

The Right Market

HiredScore customers are Fortune 500 companies that have anything between thousands to hundreds of thousands of employees and hire thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of new employees each year. Recruiting this large amount of employees requires these companies to spend millions on sourcing and screening of x10-x100 candidates in a slow, expensive, and, in many cases, sub-optimal process.

As you can imagine, this process results in huge (and beautiful, if you care about data

) data sets that, if processed and transformed via AI, reveal incredible patterns and actionable insights into the actual recruitment process helping you answer the ‘Why’ and ‘How’ questions above, and most importantly, can help to optimize your recruitment strategy.

But this is only half of the picture. Companies invest billions in talent management, which means tracking their workforce’s performance is essential to their business. We’re talking about years and years of tracked employee performance.

It means that once you unlock recruitment data you can combine it with performance data, and, well, if you’re an AI person, at this point you’re feeling a tingling sensation by imagining the type of actionable insights and learning you can generate.

The Right Team

Recruitment is a complicated problem to solve. It combines the need to navigate in an extremely complicated business environment (e.g. become an official IBM partner and then extend this partnership to integrate into their Fortune 500 existing recruitment systems), creation of products that leverage the power of AI while staying compliant with ever-evolving regulations, and finally — like many other SaaS products — solve the often conflicting needs of our buyers and end users.

Tech alone or business alone will not cut it. Data science alone or amazing UX alone will not cut it. To solve the recruitment puzzle requires a large set of cross disciplinary proficiencies that the HiredScore team brings to the table. Combining experience in corporate America recruiting across the food chain of the industry, experience in Ad-Tech (think supply and demand), in data science and content recommendation (think candidate recommendation), consumer applications (think simplifying legacy workflows) and many other fields all driven by a powerful sales/performance driven culture.

The Right Mix of Cultures

Even though the US is the #1 market for many Israeli companies, they still struggle when trying to scale their operations to the states. They find themselves needing to “artificially transplant” American genes into their company process and culture or risk failure. As can be expected, this kind of “late stage” DNA transfer doesn’t end well in many cases.

The HiredScore team is different in the sense that it has been built from day one as a powerful combination of American and Israeli cultures and strengths. It’s what enables the company to navigate the complicated US corporate and business environment while maintaining the level of agility, creativity and cutting edge tech so characteristic to local, Israeli industry.

The Right Reason

I always feel blessed that I’ve gotten to choose where I work and what I spend my days building. I also feel that this privilege comes with a responsibility to try and pick challenges that matter. Helping companies recruit better employees, faster and cheaper is important, but it goes deeper than that…

The world is full of amazing individuals. If you’re reading this post, you’re most likely one of the lucky ones who got a chance, but many (some would argue the majority) don’t get a chance to enter the opportunity cycle. They might not get a chance because they are part of the “wrong” gender, or because they were born in the “wrong” country or to the “wrong” ethnicity or they didn’t have the financial means to get the “right” education (but are perfectly capable of learning independently online). Whatever the reason, the result is the same.

For a lack of better tools, companies apply basic practices that result in huge parts of the population being filtered out of the opportunity cycle for the pseudo-wrong reasons and the sad part is that those who do pass the filter are not necessarily even the best people for the job.

The data is there, the technology is getting there. We just need to connect the dots and drive the next generation of recruitment platforms that enable companies to build their ideal workforce and provide individuals an equal opportunity to unlock their full potential.

Sounds like a great reason to wake up in the morning

‍