Skillate: Reshaping HR Operations with AI Based Talent Acquisition Innovations

Artificial Intelligence is incorporated within the core of many businesses and across various departments. One of the most intriguing roles of AI can be seen in Human Resources (HR) and the recruitment process. The technology is transforming how recruitment and employee management is done today. The AI in Recruitment market is growing at a fast pace owing to the increasing demands of the industry. Many industry pioneers have emerged in the past few years glorifying how recruitment is being done with new-age technologies. One such pioneer which helps in identifying, interviewing, and hiring the best candidates at scale is Skillate.

In an interview with Analytics Insight, Bipul Vaibhav, Co-founder, and CEO, Skillate shares how the company is automating the repetitive and tedious work of recruitment team while focusing on better candidate experience with higher conversions.

Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization and the services that your company offers.

Skillate is an AI recruitment platform, making recruitment easy, fast, and transparent. The product helps in optimizing the entire value chain of recruitment, beginning from creating the job requisition, to resume matching, to candidate engagement.

Skillate platform helps enterprises in AI-powered job posting, job candidate matching, candidate screening conversations with the help of chatbot, automatic interview scheduling, and on boarding a candidate. Its product can be used standalone or can be integrated with existing enterprise recruitment software.

Skillate reduces the screening time by 93 percent and brings in a 2X increase in the candidate's conversion rate. The chatbot also helps keep internal databases updated; this, in turn, reduces cost. It can also make an existing Applicant tracking system (SuccessFactors, Taleo, etc.) smarter by the smooth API integration without ATS replacement and hassles.

With the power of AI, Skillate has already processed 3.5 million resumes and this continues to increase at the rate of 10% every month. Our's SaaS product is industry agnostic and currently has clients including Yes Bank, OYO Rooms, L&T Construction, L&T Financial Services, Saint-Gobain, Bigbasket, and others. Skillate has raised US$1.4 million in funding from Incubate Fund, Mynavi Corporation, Whatfix Founders, and angel investors.

With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

In January 2015, I was working for an analytics software company in Chennai. Unhappy with my role, I contacted various organizations with openings, but to no avail. The frustrating part was not that I was getting rejected, but that often I would simply not receive any response from the recruiters. I had no clarity on what stage my applications were getting rejected, or even if they were noticed at all! This got me thinking about the lack of transparency prevalent in the recruitment process. I realized that even though candidates desperately want a response from the company on the stature of their candidature, large corporations often don't have the time and bandwidth to respond to every candidate at each stage of the hiring process. With corporates receiving millions of applications every year, the unstructured hiring process not only keeps the candidates in the dark but also deprives organizations of the best talent.

This led me and my co-founders – Sambhav and Anand to form Skillate, an AI-based platform that makes recruitment easy, fast, and transparent with its cutting edge technology.

Identifying the need of the hour, the company promotes diversity in hiring by removing any kind of human biases. The Skillate engine masks personal identifiable information (PII) like – name, age, gender, email, phone, ethnicity, geography, etc. so that companies hire the best talent based on capabilities alone.

Brief us about the proactive Founder/CEO of the company and his/her contributions towards the company and the industry.

At Skillate, I am responsible for AI, Investment, and overall business growth of Skillate. Prior to founding Skillate, I worked as a Data Scientist at DataWeave Software Pvt Ltd and developed a machine learning model to classify the product categories of e-commerce products. I have also worked as an advanced software engineer with Burning Glass Technologies for a little less than a year. I hold a B. Tech degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from IIT Guwahati and co-authored a paper on an autonomous river cleaning robot and a model for video classification using semantic keywords.

I also have research publications in the field of Artificial Intelligence at International Forums like SPIE and IEEE.

Tell us how your company is contributing to the AI industry of the nation and how the company is benefiting its clients.

In Human Resources, most Indian companies are still using SAP, Oracle, or Workday Products for their HR operations. But they have their challenges of speed, UI, transparency and are extremely difficult to be replaced. So, the biggest opportunity is to integrate with those global products and provide the latest technologies on top of it. We, at Skillate, have seamlessly integrated with these applications (SAP SuccessFactors, Taleo, etc.) and help the companies in optimizing the entire value chain of recruitment with the power of Artificial Intelligence. But the biggest challenge is Indian enterprises are still in the beginning phase of adopting the SaaS product as compared to the developed world. But it is getting better, and especially after COVID-19, there will be a surge in HR Tech product adoption for automating processes like digital remote hiring.

Some of our results are:

• Reduce the time to hire by more than 50%

• Cost per hire reduced by more than 30%

What are some of the challenges faced by the industry today?

Some of the major challenges that Skillate has faced, include:

1. A pause in hiring from many sectors especially: aviation, tourism, and hospitality.

2. Cynicism from candidates in changing jobs, who want security and stability in this time of uncertainty.

3. No face-to-face interviews – makes it challenging for hiring managers to take the final call.

However, the epidemic is not without its opportunities for recruiters and organizations. Those who will adapt and evolve with the latest technologies can gain critical talent advantage during these times.

The industry is seeing a rising importance of Big Data Analytics and AI. How do you see these emerging technologies impact the business sector?

The adaptability of technology has increased many folds, even with traditional enterprises. A few years back things like online assessments and video interviews would have seemed like a dream. With the current situation, every company is forced to do it, and most are reaping the rewards as well.

Enterprises now understand the value of AI and tech in their recruitment processes. The important factor for them now is the scalability of these technologies.

Can you throw light on the latest employment trends in key sectors?

The current pandemic will certainly have a long term impact on recruitment trends. Remote hiring and video interviews are quickly becoming the norm. Also, as teams work further apart, transparency and accountability in the process will become increasingly more important.

What does your technology and business roadmap look for the rest of the year?

One of our key focuses is international expansion, especially in the US. As we expand, we are making our product multi-lingual and more scalable so that it can handle even more volume.

AI is projected to be the next market. How is AI contributing to the making of your products and services?

Skillate is envisioned as a product that can consistently address recruitment inefficiencies and help companies build stronger teams. Our AI-based solutions include:

Automated resume parsing: AI and Deep Learning-based model trained on 120 million profiles to understand the semantics of each and every statement present in the resume.

Job v/s resume matching: Persona Matching rather than Keyword Matching. Recommendation based on Industry, desired skills, roles, and responsibilities to get the best candidates in a click.

Smart Chatbots: Unique on its own as enterprises are automating the entire pre-screening conversation with the help of a bot. Some of the important questions like Notice Period, Location Preference, Flexible to work in shifts that are not there in resumes become very important for the recruiters to take the candidates forward.

Job Description Assistant: To help enterprises in attracting great talent and position themselves in employer branding.