Frustration with recruiters triggers start-up’s robotic response

15 Sep 2016

Opening was born of frustration at how tech companies would manage CVs from applicants

Fed up with the haphazard approach to hiring by tech recruiters amidst a major skills shortage, two seasoned tech executives have taken to artificial intelligence and data science to help recruiters sharpen their game.

“Opening was born of frustration with the recruitment processes in the Irish tech market,” explained Opening CEO Andreea Wade who co-founded the company with CTO Adrian Mihai.

Both Wade and Mihai are originally from Transylvania in Romania.

A software prodigy, Mihai won the first place at the Romanian Programming Olympiad and was heavily involved in the development processes of entities like Lufthansa, National Geographic, Magnum Photos, WWF and the Rational Group of companies.

‘We want to look not only at skills, but also culture and behaviour’
– ANDREEA WADE

Wade, a start-up mentor who has worked in all the major incubators and accelerators in Dublin but also London, Tel Aviv and Berlin, said that when Mihai moved to Ireland the haphazard approach to managing CVs by HR departments at tech companies left a lot to be desired.

The icing on the cake was when a company approached Mihai for the same position he applied for six months previously.

“It is clear companies are struggling with the management of CVs and the process of matching ideal candidates with positions. We’re a technology company that has come up with the artificial intelligence to help companies discover the top 20 out of a list of 20,000 or 2m people.”

A data science-first company

One of the company’s first products, Recruit, is a kind of black box AI that automatically classifies incoming resumes on the skills of the applicants.

Another product called Match uses artificial intelligence to root out sufficiently qualified candidates from large databases of applicants such as job boards, job aggregators and applicant tracking systems.

“We will continue to develop as a science-first company in the talent space,” Wade said.

“We will move out of IT and apply our science on generic industries but at the same time maintain a focused approach on certain industries. We have our eye on biotech and pharma.

“A year from now our black box will be plugged into a number of job boards and the algorithms will be able to tell you, ‘You know Java? Learn Scala. You will earn €20,000 more and you will be able to go for these specific jobs and work for these exact companies.’

“We want to look not only at skills, but also culture and behaviour.”

Robot image via Shutterstock

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com