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Riminder: Artificial Intelligence and Technology to Find the Right Employee

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The field of human resources is evolving quickly. While recruiters previously spent hours perusing thousands of resumes, they are now discovering these tedious parts of their job can be streamlined with sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Enter Riminder, a new recruitment technology for HR that uses deep learning to sift out candidates who are not likely to be a good match. The AI technology analyzes data while learning with each interaction to find candidates most qualified with the required skill set, culture fit, and career pathway that matches the job title and description. The company’s founder and CEO Mouhidine Seiv says the software can help recruiters hire up to 60 percent faster, with 80 percent fewer interviews.

How Riminder Works

At its core, Riminder’s process seems simple: The AI software compares candidates’ resumes against the resumes of current employees at the company, along with other workers with similar job titles. From there, it generates candidate rankings, permitting recruiters to choose from a short list of applicants to contact for an initial interview.

The AI Technology Behind Riminder

The AI algorithms behind Riminder employ Deep Computer Vision and Deep Natural Language Processing methods to extract personal information, experience, education, skills, and interests, along with a candidates’ identifying information (such as email address, phone number, and past employers).

It then generates a computer model of what an ideal candidate would look like, and compares resumes to the ideal model. The unique Neural Network architecture that comprises the AI solution exhibits reasoning capabilities to understand the evidence behind conclusions, so it’s not just matching facts but applying logic to understand the “why” behind the choices.

Riminder shows recruiters the data points that might make a candidate a good fit, including a particular skillset or a certain college degree.  Because Riminder analyzes and compares resumes from all over the world, it can correct for regional discrepancies, helping recruiters consider candidates beyond their own geographic circle to successfully draw from a worldwide talent pool.

The software learns by analyzing job market trends specific to the recruiter’s industry, as well as adjusts assessments based on the recruiter’s feedback so accuracy improves with each interaction.

Advantages for Recruiters and Candidates

Riminder is designed to aid recruiters in the most cumbersome, yet least intuitive aspect of their job. “Talent assessment is very time consuming and ineffective,” explains Seiv. To streamline the process, Riminder uses deep learning technology to analyze millions of career pathways, applicant resumes, and successful employee resumes all in milliseconds.

It also helps candidates refine—or even re-define—their career path by matching people with the best possible job—which may not necessarily be the one for which they applied. In a rapidly changing, increasingly diverse job market, the software helps employees get on the right career path to find a better fit, increase job satisfaction, and improve retention.

The New Role of Human Recruiters

“It’s almost impossible to fine-tune criteria to assess people in a very exhaustive way,” says Seiv, pointing out some of the issues with traditional recruitment technology and techniques. That’s why Riminder strives to eliminate human errors that can occur due to recruiter fatigue or human bias.

It’s important to remember, however, that Riminder is a recruitment “assistant.” This HR technology is designed to allow recruiters to focus on the “human” parts of their job. Recruiters and HR directors can spend more time attracting top talent through innovative recruitment strategies, face-to face interviews, and making final decisions based on a small pool of highly qualified candidates that Riminder delivers directly to the recruiter’s desktop or mobile device.

Photo Credit: HaticiSosyal Flickr via Compfight cc

This article was first published on Converge.xyz

Talent Acquisition Technology: Reinvention And Innovation

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Last time, in Why We Don’t Need To Reinvent The ATS, I disscussed the common frustrations companies experience with Applicant Tracking Systems. In this installment, we’ll consider if we should now look to reinvent the ATS?

Should We Reinvent the ATS?

There have been a number of new ATS companies sprouting up over the past year or two, and many have received positive reviews from early adopters. But I’d suggest that much of the praise is from small- and medium-sized businesses that require less functionality and in many cases have different needs.

The majority of the large organizations I’ve talked to still require established ATS solutions that have built necessary functionality over the past 10 years, especially due to compliance and legal reasons. So I ask these four questions before answering the big one:

Can We Live Without Many Of The Features Provided By Legacy ATS solutions?

Consider the crucial features and functionality that are needed for large organizations to gain supreme value from these solutions. How quickly can we build this functionality (and other new-age features) into a reinvented ATS?

From talking to the people who have actually worked to build these technologies, it will take a years upon years to match what many solutions have today, and a majority of this functionality is integral to meeting the legal demands the government requires from organizations. It would be great to make this process easier, but if we can’t report and remain compliant to the federal government (one of the major benefits of the ATS) then what’s the point? There’s a give and take around what’s inherently needed and what’s not.

What Would We Be Improving?

Many are looking to reinvent the entire concept of what an ATS is – and that can be a worthy goal. This reinvention is happening mostly on the recruitment marketing, candidate attraction and relationship side of recruiting. How do we better capture candidates as applicants and provide recruiters with ways to better engage these candidates in the ATS?

However, many ATS tools aren’t just for hiring, but flow into talent management with onboarding, training and other modules to facilitate processes downstream in the talent process. Much of the innovation has gone in this direction, and there’s a lot of value to having a system that starts at the application and bridges the gaps to your core HR systems.

So let’s think about what the ATS should truly be and where value is ultimately created. It can’t do everything, but what should it truly do? Where should it fit in our talent acquisition process?

What’s The Opportunity Cost?

By spending time, resources and money reinventing the ATS, what opportunities are we unable to tackle? We can’t do everything, so where can we provide the most value in today’s technology ecosystem? Does the industry need a better mousetrap? Or does it need better bait to ensure the mousetrap works more efficiently and can worry more about disposal vs. attraction?

Where Are We Today?

When I look at the ATS, I see a solution that serves its purpose. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have qualms about the issues inherent in these systems. I just believe that we will never truly be satisfied with the status quo, and we’ll always find ways to try to improve how we do things. But we have to understand the motivations behind this urge.

It’s easy to say, “yes,” of course we should try to reinvent the ATS, given its widespread use and the need for additional solutions in talent acquisition now. But the better question is: “Why do we want to reinvent the ATS?”

Where Else Can We Focus Our Talent Acquisition Technology Innovation?

You’re right, I haven’t provided an alternative to a better ATS … yet. Hopefully, I’ve provided a good cliffhanger as we look to explore where else we can pour our energy and innovation to improve talent acquisition.

In my next TalentCulture post I will tackle how I see the trends in talent acquisition technology and the pros and cons of transforming our thinking on how we use technology to attract, engage, nurture and hire qualified candidates.

Image: Bigstock

 

Smashfly is a client of TalentCulture and has sponsored this post.

Why We Don't Need To Reinvent The ATS

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There are a lot of opinions, many conflicting, on how recruiting technology can help us innovate; how we find, attract, engage and nurture candidates in the recruiting process.

One idea I hear a lot is that we need to reinvent the Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Make it more about relationships and less about process flows. Improve all the candidate-facing elements like job search and apply process. Build a better one from the ground up that’s more intuitive, candidate friendly and connects better with all your efforts to attract candidates to apply in the first place. If we can do one thing, this would be it.

But I pose this question: Is this really the best use of our time and energy? And is this where technology can make the greatest impact on talent acquisition?

What I Know About The ATS Today

Hey, don’t get me wrong, a better ATS would solve some problems. But in many cases, the ATS solves many more problems than most give it credit for. The ATS is not a mobile app built to do two or three things really well – it is an enterprise system built to be a full compliance and process flow manager for thousands upon thousands of applications.

Few remember the mess that recruiting was before the ATS, as it’s been a mainstay for a while now. Trust me, it’s helped make talent acquisition way better and more efficient, and it’s a system that recruiting organizations couldn’t live without. Plus, from a legal and compliance standpoint, it’s a savior and necessity.

But there have been a few consistent story lines around the ATS for the past few years:

Everyone Has Issues With Their ATS

Do you hate your ATS? A question asked a little too frequently during conference presentations, but mostly because presenters know they will get a resounding, “Yes!” But why do talent acquisition professionals get annoyed sometimes with it? Here are a few reasons:

  • Feature Creep: The ATS has become an albatross in terms of features. People have a hard time wrapping their minds around everything that an ATS does, even the features they use on a daily basis. Many of these features are sorely needed and were built because organizations requested them, but in the end it makes for a system that feels cumbersome to the average user.
  • Unfair Expectations: As new candidate attraction trends like mobile, social, candidate experience and employer branding entered the talent acquisition fray, many expected the ATS to help provide solutions for these trends. The problem is that the ATS was never built or meant to solve problems on the candidate attraction side. It was meant to provide order to the application and hiring processes and them measurable. In all fairness, it became the center of our recruiting universe over the past 10 years. But now, everyone expects it to remain so, despite a lot of shifting needs in a more interaction-based and data-driven environment.
  • It’s Not “New” Anymore: Let’s face it, the established ATS vendors have lost their luster, and that comes with a more mature market. What felt innovative in the past decade feels less so now. And with more competitors in the space, it feels like every ATS or talent management suite has the same features (even though they don’t … more on this in Part II).

Switching Your ATS Doesn’t Make You Happier

I’ve spoken with a number of companies that are undergoing ATS switches in order to gain more value from their talent acquisition process. And in many cases, it’s a bad experience.

  • First, it takes a much too long to implement and switch everything over (we’re talking a year if not more). This isn’t a knock on the ATS – it;’s understandable, as these systems are compiling a ton of information and require thoughtful  processes in order to achieve what it’s meant to.
  • Second, many don’t realize the unique differences among solutions. Not every ATS has the same features (although we seem to think they do), and a crucial feature you had before isn’t always available when you switch. It’s left many angry at the sales teams for not being transparent, but really, all the key functions that an ATS helps with aren’t easily replicated.

What Next? 

So people here think: If lots of people have trouble with their ATS and switching to other established vendors doesn’t improve the process, why don’t we reinvent what an ATS is? Watch out for the next installment of my discussion of the current and future ATS.