Optimising AI To Transform Companies' Approach To Hiring Job Candidates

At a time when companies approach recruitment as well as commit to so much of HR's hype about diversity and inclusion practices leaves so much to be desired, AI can yet be a better way of identifying and hiring great talents.

Intuitively, in today's story, we are examining this subject matter through the prism of a researcher who had an epiphany about hiring. 

CEO and founder of Moonhub, Nancy Xu, was studying for her computer science Ph.D. at Stanford when she had an epiphany about hiring, and this became the prelude to her founding Moonhub. 

Based on her convictions, around 90% of the candidates who are supposed to be the best fits for advertised job opportunities are not being identified by recruiters owing to recruiters' resort to tools that are too fixated on a set of less-than-adequate keywords to find the best people. 

These skewed tools and keywords are, at best, serving to deepen the unspoken lazy dispositions of some HR practitioners to holistic talent hunt practices.

Nancy set out to change this with an AI-driven approach that looks beyond the typical kinds of attributes and prejudiced parameters, just to be able to find candidates that might otherwise be missed, and do that in a cheaper, faster way than current methods. 

Her research effort culminating in a great pitch has already attracted a whopping $4.4 million seed to her startup company, Moonhub.

“We’re building Moonhub and at the core, we want to be recruiting AI for fast-growing companies.

"And what we do is we have a core platform that allows companies to find the best talent for any given opportunity and work with in-house experts to actually hire people and engage them for those opportunities,” Xu said.

Xu goes on to say that the traditional way of recruiting involves searching for a set of five to 10 keywords in someone’s LinkedIn profile, for example, such that if these words are missing, an otherwise perfectly viable candidate would be overlooked. 

“You aren’t finding people, for example, who are passionate about working in the company in the healthcare space because you can’t identify so many of what we call ‘unstructured signals’ in a person’s profile.”

According to Xu, the AI platform built by Moonhub traces billions of data points of individuals from the public web, and then builds an AI layer on top to analyze all that information. 

“So we know we see you for who you are versus the five keywords that actually show up in your profile.”