Matching millions of candidates with millions of job openings is at the heart of the value proposition offered by staffing, recruiting and talent acquisition professionals collectively. Making a suitable match is such a simple idea in concept, but in practice it can quickly become complex and toilsome for employers to achieve their goals of filling their job openings with the desired speed, cost and quality.
Fortunately, current advances in computing power, process automation and artificial intelligence offer the prospect of game-changing improvements in the ability to match candidates with job openings. Eightfold.ai is a firm that is pioneering the use of AI in talent acquisition and talent management. It was founded in 2016 and has raised $51.8 million in investment capital. As part of its offering, Eightfold leverages cutting-edge technology in several distinct solutions. Here are some examples.
Eightfold seeks to provide employers with a larger and richer candidate pool through technology that combines multiple internal databases of candidates (de-duplication and aggregation), supplements this database with candidate information from external and public databases (enrichment), and then uses inferential statistics to add additional information to each candidate profile, such as filling in “missing” skills, interests, and aptitudes that were not explicitly stated, or such as adding variables that help predict the type of job a candidate may be interested in next.
Eightfold also offers employers more sophisticated ways to source from that pool. Instead of traditional manual keyword searches or searches of past job titles and employment history, more sophisticated search and match algorithms (leveraging AI) can be used to mine for desired candidate skills, aptitudes, interests, availability, and dozens of additional variables. These searches have the potential to find better matching candidates as well as to unearth qualified candidates who may be missed through more traditional searches. AI searches can also be “trained” by leveraging in-depth profiles of high performing employees at that employer.
Once a shortlist of candidates has been identified, Eightfold offers process automation technologies to help employers engage those candidates efficiently. Technologies include chatbots and the use of AI and automation to optimize the timing and format of email outreach campaigns.
The opposite side of the coin to employer sourcing and recruitment is candidates searching for jobs and evaluating their job options. Here, Eightfold offers a “Personalized Career Site” solution that enables candidates to upload their résumé, and then leverages AI to produce personalized messaging and marketing of the company jobs most relevant to them.
While this article has focused on talent acquisition, Eightfold markets its offerings more broadly as talent management. Eightfold offers AI solutions that use masking (removal of data on gender, age, ethnicity, etc.) to reduce bias in recruitment and to enable achievement of workforce diversity goals. Eightfold also has AI solutions for talent management such as predictive analytics to assist with career planning.
The Buzz
Eightfold.ai leverages automation and AI technologies at multiple points in the talent acquisition process to enhance efficiency and effectiveness. Key technologies include aggregation of internal and external data sets, inferential statistics to augment information in candidate profiles, AI-enabled sourcing that leverages data-rich candidate profiles, and AI-driven candidate engagement and recruitment.
