My journey through founding, funding, and exiting successful startups has taught me a valuable lesson: The hiring process is broken, and so is the way we look for jobs and develop our careers.
This epiphany marked the start of my quest to develop recruiting technology that puts people – and by that, I mean job seekers – first.
Career seekers in crisis – how did we get here?
Ah, job hunting. Anyone who’s been there knows it can be a time-consuming, solitary, and often exasperating endeavor.
Applications disappear into black holes, never to be seen again. There seems to be an endless supply of dashed hopes and dead ends. It’s no wonder that job hunters often feel annoyed, lost, and confused.
This is precisely why I created a job board. I wanted to get people out of that endless job search “holding pattern” and into suitable and rewarding roles. And I realized that traditional approaches used by job boards and recruitment sites were simply not fit-for-purpose.
My rationale was this: A perfect job fit boils down to more than just your education, qualifications, and work experiences. Your unique background, personality, life experiences, short- and long-term career goals, and even how you respond to certain situations also carry a lot of weight when it comes to matching with the right job.
These elements rarely feature in any depth in traditional candidate evaluation criteria. So, I set out to explore the possibilities beyond this one-dimensional approach.
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Strange bedfellows: HR and AI
As someone who’s lived and breathed technology for decades, I started wondering if it was possible to bring the power of AI and analytics to bear – creatively – to find a better way to job search. Could people and technology intersect to meaningfully impact the lives of frustrated job seekers?
Fast forward to today. Our company has used the power of AI to analyze and gather billions of data points from tens of millions of job seekers over the past five years via their online applications. Advanced analytics engines process this data to intelligently and precisely match people to positions based on their personality traits and backgrounds.
The outcome? Candidates get far more accurate and relevant suggestions for jobs.
And we’re learning as we go. We find that crowdsourcing is a great way to get honest feedback on what we’re doing well and where we could improve. This allows us to course-correct in real-time and iteratively grow our platform’s intelligence.
AI – re-imagined and democratized
AI is more human than you think. Another way of saying this might be, “AI is only as good as the people who create it and embrace it.”
Yes, AI is unstoppable at this point. But there’s still much work to be done to eliminate the biases inherent in it, and that task falls to humans.
We should remember that, ultimately, AI is just a bunch of algorithms. While that’s powerful, it’s incomplete without the personalities and dreams of the people who create and use it.
If we hope to reap the full benefits of AI in both our personal and professional lives, we should take responsibility for learning how to use it intelligently rather than being suspicious or afraid of it.
There’s absolutely nothing stopping you from putting AI to work for you. And, if you’re a job seeker, its intrinsic power can accelerate your career ambitions more than you might imagine.
