Now Artificial Intelligence Will Find the Right Job For You Let's find out how this startup is building a win-win ecosystem for both employers and employees

Sieving through resumes for a job seemed to be a universal problem for small and big companies alike. Not anymore! Gifted with technology, we now have access to many online job portals across the world claiming to find the right job for the right person. But how accurate is this service?

It is from here that an idea originated in the brains of Arjun Pratap, founder and CEO of EdGE Networks. He believed that most people are in pursuit of passion, money and status and this, they find hard to capture as a package. This, however, can be delivered seamlessly, if they better understood their goals and their capabilities. Their solution to this was bridging this gap by addressing the friction of finding a job by relating the demand and supply quotient across a platform.

Let's find out how Arjun Pratap is building a win-win ecosystem for both employers and employees.

How did it all begin?

I always wanted to start something on my own and wanted to focus on the issue of skilling youth. I started my entrepreneurial journey with a digital learning platform. However, challenges along the way made me change direction and look at the problem statement differently.

It was during my first venture, that I realized the scope and need for next gen HR technology solutions– and how it would help organizations build future ready workforces.

This led to the start of my next venture: this venture was built on the premise of search and match, how does one alleviate search friction for people and jobs. We started with resumes and Job Descriptions being the starting point and our ability to build technology to read and match the two like a fantastic hiring manager. This led to building an HR technology platform, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Science and Machine Learning as the secret sauce that would enable workforce transformation.

What problem are you solving?

The very basis for starting up EdGE Networks is the universal problem that organizations face—to connect the right person with the right job. With this as our motto, we dug deeper to unearth the underlying issues that contributed to this corporate epidemic.

Using our comprehensive skills repository and machine learning algorithms (NLP and ANN), we create sharp job descriptions armed with pertinent markers, resulting in accurate resume matches. The platform auto-sources the right fit by parsing and analyzing both structured and unstructured information from internal databases, as well as, external portals.

It eases and sharpens the process of selection as the platform throws-up resume matches by scoring and stack ranking them based on business rules set by the client. This exponentially enhances the speed and accuracy of job fulfillment and has the potential to save costs of the order of millions of dollars for large businesses. The intelligence built into our platform helps determine the career path of talent, assess skills gaps and bridges these gaps by recommending relevant learning paths.

In short, our solutions solve the toughest talent acquisition and workforce optimization challenges faced by organizations today.

Which technology backs your business?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the way we do business today and HR is no exception to this. AI is a force that will drive the new employment economy. From fiction in the movie Transformers, to an impressive reality (Watson and Deep Blue), AI algorithms are challenging human intelligence. With their inherent pattern recognition, self-learning and cognitive capabilities, AI powered algorithms have the ability to perform complex jobs with speed and accuracy.

AI coupled with analytics is gaining ground within the HR domain. From talent acquisition and workforce optimization to workforce transformation, AI can act as a strategic enabler for HR. In the talent acquisition space, AI is bringing about a sea change in the speed, accuracy and timeliness of delivery. Auto-sourcing, just-in-time hiring, and self-serve hiring are expected to improve utilization and drive revenue growth. AI driven applications can act as HR's weather man helping them analyze the engagement level of employees, determine flight risk, uncover great talent in the frontline and more.

AI can help build loyalty by acting as a career guide to employees. With AI, HR managers can realize their goal of being a strategic business enabler. Companies that espouse AI-driven solutions will enjoy significant competitive advantage in the recruitment market too. Thus, what we have is the intelligence that will power companies who are focused on the future.

This is a very exciting space and without a doubt it's the future.

What makes you different from your competitors?

A very deep and intense understanding of the problem we solve. As a niche HR technology provider, we don't directly compete with any other company. Some of our offerings or product lines are similar to specific offerings of players in the space.

We use Natural Language Processing (NLP) Algorithms with a Data Science and Artificial Intelligence approach to analyse job descriptions and profiles/resumes, and provide a scored and stack ranked set of people for the job in question.

This is further bolstered with our ability to do this for an internal workforce and to acquire talent from portals. We do this using advanced technology with minimum human intervention - the disruption we create is the value of time and accuracy, delivered consistently.

While our product and solutions are based on some of the most cutting-edge technologies, we have also worked towards creating a responsible and agile organization that is ready to partner with customers to build game changing HR tech solutions.

Are your consumers happy with the services that you are offering?

Our customers are very satisfied with our offerings, as we provide an efficient workforce management approach that includes demand generation, talent acquisition, allocation, learning and analytics to deliver a robust talent connect. In short, this is an end-to-end AI driven solution that provides the intelligence for workforce transformation.

We cater to a wide array of clients, large IT services companies in particular. Our clients include Wipro, Microland, HCL, Dell and more. Our products and solutions have a layer of analytics built into them which allow us to measure the business impact juxtaposed with data shared by the client.

We have impacted both revenue and profits of companies, resulting from improved time, cost and accuracy of talent management. Some of the benefits include: a 4-time increase in supply visibility; 36 percent increase in allocation via Project Manager; 51 percent reduction in allocation failures; 33 percent improvement in fulfilling external requisitions with internal people; 30 percent reduction in Workforce Management Group; a 300 percent increase in portal utilization; 58 percent reduction in time taken to shortlist candidates; 28 percent conversion rate from recommendation to actual joinees and 100 percent resume/profile coverage.

Anything particular you remember?

Having a customer like Wipro sign up as our first customer and use us at the nerve centre of their people supply chain business, I think that's a crazy risk, I'm sure calculated but still out there!