Eightfold.ai | Believes in managing talent more effectively.

In a fast-changing world of technology, Eightfold. ai believes in managing talent more effectively. Organizations need an in-depth understanding of the skills within their teams and the talent needs of their business. Job Intelligence Engine and global talent insights are critical for comparing skills and roles required for future success. Eghtfold.ai manages all.

The CEO and Co-founder of Eightfold.ai believe that AI and machine learning are not magic, but they are necessary now for companies to hire quickly in a world where skill needs are changing fast, and there’s a near-frenzy recruit and retain.

In exchanging a few words with Mr Ashutosh Garg, he enlightened his aims, projects and more about the future. Continue reading to find out.

Q. Eightfold.ai states it uses AI and machine learning to address the needs of the talent management space. Can you give us a sense of what form of AI/machine learning is used in your product?

Search, Recommendation and Personalization – at scale – are the essential foundation blocks of our Talent Intelligence Platform for Eightfold.ai. Underneath the covers, we use Deep Learning to take the candidate data available inside the enterprise and combine it with publicly available data to create a current, rich and deep profile of candidates. This is a hard problem and requires multiple levels of abstraction.

We use various machine learning primitives like Word Embeddings, Neural Networks, Boosted Decision Trees and Long, Short-term Memory (LSTM), to name a few, to solve this problem.
Our ability to understand the context of all available data allows us to (a) focus on candidates’ capabilities – not just the keywords listed in their resumes and (b) present the relevancy of those capabilities to available job opportunities.

While most solutions in the market use keyword or boolean search, we can predict “what’s next” for a candidate – whether they are outside looking into a company or an employee looking to find the best next job internally. Our deep learning models are purpose-built for people and jobs and allow us to take all the disparate data points available to make an informed and transparent recommendation.

The ability to explain “why” builds tremendous trust and confidence in both the candidate and the employer to rely on the TIP platform.

Q. What are some of the top driver’s organizations’ factors in investing in work tech?

Your company is your people. Having a platform that identifies potential skills or best fits for new roles only adds more value to your organization.
If you can ensure you have a worker who continues to grow their skills and career, they are exponentially more valuable than a static employee.

Q. What are some of the challenges that will be faced by organizations and employers alike when it comes to adoption, and how can they mitigate those challenges?

The biggest challenge will be overcoming existing biases and mindsets. There are so many poor assumptions about remote work environments or how employees can interact with each other. If you have identified and hired the correct people, they will be passionate about their role and naturally build to success together.

Q. “Explainability” of AI systems is a hot topic. How can your customers understand the reasons behind your hiring recommendations?

Employment is the backbone of society; simultaneously, one of the business’s most complex problems is matching the right person with the proper role. People pitch recruiting as if it were a transaction.

Still, to build a holistic platform, companies need to develop a process that solves this problem and creates work that is most meaningful to the highest number of people. In addition, companies have a say in what they’re looking for. For example, when it comes to diversity, they can input whether they’re searching for men or women or people of a particular ethnic background.

Our platform provides visibility into each recommendation, so both the candidate and the employer understand why they are a good fit for a specific role.

Eightfold.ai can put exemplary candidates in the space that businesses want to ideally mirror; the system will look at what the applicant has achieved throughout their career and how relevant their experience level is in the current role.

This ranking system of matching has been developed through parsing and analyzing countless pieces of data to create a model of any business, regardless of the industry. Once the job has been calibrated, that’s where the magic happens. The first step that most people ignore during the recruitment process is inbound applicants.

This caused me to analyze how I can arrive into my system, examine the list of 150 people, and find the one significant person I need for this role?

We use all of this data to see who has performed advantageously in an organization. Then we build models over all of it to figure out who is capable of completing the essential responsibilities for the position.

There are two crucial functions at work: developing a business’s talent network and mapping how people have expanded from one career advancement to another. Through this process, our system cannot only match candidates to the roles they applied for, but other ones that they are perfect fits for, and the system will additionally explain why. This repairs the challenges of LinkedIn connections and can show users who their most valuable referrals would be and why.

Q. In a workplace that has no more extended functions on human interaction, the only way HR personnel can ensure employees have a smooth experience is through the adoption of tech tools. What are some areas that will see high adoption of work tech technologies?

The most crucial HR breakthrough is going to be about hiring for potential. Select a candidate who is not just the right fit for the job description as it currently sits, but what the role will look like in five years and if they have the skills to grow alongside it. Finding those fits will be a crucial differentiator for the most successful companies in the world.

Q. What future directions are you planning to follow regarding the AI/machine learning technology you’re using in your product?

We are constantly working on making our offering brighter by collecting data from more data streams, making our AI smarter, and presenting the results in the best understandable format. One of the significant pain points today is guidance and direction around the learnability of new skills for the candidates. Technology is changing every day, and people are on the lookout to expand their skill set.

Eightfold’s AI technology already understands a candidate’s resume in detail, and this will be expanded to bring a Personalized Career Coach to every individual. Recruiters can apply the same idea to hire candidates who don’t possess a required skill but are capable of acquiring it. This will create a new search paradigm where recruiters start searching for candidates who can quickly develop the skills in the job requirement.

We are working on deeper integration with the HR performance evaluation systems for recruiters and hiring managers. This will help our AI systems understand what makes a candidate successful in the long term within the company. Today’s recruiting systems are optimized to bring in candidates the company will interview.

Eightfold’s deeper integration with the HR systems will let companies interview candidates who will be successful in the company. This will also help understand the skill composition of successful individuals and teams within the company. This will lead to Eightfold AI helping build successful teams within a company.