Finding the right job candidate isn’t easy. About 42 percent of employers are worried they won’t be able to find the talent they need, according to a survey conducted by CareerBuilder, and 72.8 percent say they’re struggling to find relevant candidates. But artificial intelligence (AI) can help — or at so thinks Greenhouse Software, a New York-based B2B talent acquisition startup.
It today announced a partnership with IBM that’ll customers of both Watson Talent and Greenhouse integrate the two services.
“Greenhouse has always seen success with companies that have high-volume hiring needs,” Daniel Chait, Greenhouse CEO, said. “Our partnership and direct integration with IBM Watson marks an important innovation in our solution suite to enable customers to scale their teams while delivering an excellent candidate experience.”
New and existing Greenhouse clients, which include more than 2,600 companies such as Warby Parker, Airbnb, and Cisco Meraki, will gain unfettered access to IBM Watson Candidate Assistant, a suite of AI-powered tools that match jobs to candidates (and vice versa) based on their personalities, skills, and interests. That’s in addition to Greenhouse’s existing dashboard, of course, which lets companies collect data on various funnels (such as whether an employee submitted a work sample through LinkedIn or GlassDoor) and generate candidate “scorecards” to help interviewers sort through applications.
June 5th: The AI Audit in NYC
Join us next week in NYC to engage with top executive leaders, delving into strategies for auditing AI models to ensure fairness, optimal performance, and ethical compliance across diverse organizations. Secure your attendance for this exclusive invite-only event.
Among the Candidate Assistant features on tap is a chatbot that integrates directly with career pages and answers basic questions about the application process, and Watson Rank, a natural language processing and predictive platform that matches resumes with applicable jobs.
According to IBM, Candidate Assistant drives on average to a three times increase in application conversion rate and reduced candidate abandonment, and its users are 64 percent more likely to secure in-person interviews.
“Greenhouse’s clients are high growth and have a need to engage high-quality job seekers in a more personalized manner,” Bob Schultz, general manager, IBM Watson Talent and Collaboration Solutions, said in a statement. “Partnering, we’re helping Greenhouse and their customers provide an exceptional candidate experience and quickly guide job seekers to the right position with the help of AI.”
Greenhouse and IBM aren’t the only ones applying AI to the problem of recruitment. Hiretual recently raised $5 million for its automated candidate sourcing tech. Vervoe in August unveiled an AI platform that evaluates applicants’ on-the-job skills and automatically recommends the top scorers to hiring managers. And market incumbent ZipRecruiter early this summer debuted Candidate Calibration, which has employers rate potential matches for jobs to find similar candidates in its database.
But at least so far, Greenhouse’s strategy has been enough to win over investors like Riverwood Capital, which in July participated in a $50 million funding round. The startup has raised $110 million altogether since 2012.
At the time of the fundraising announcement, Greenhouse CEO Chait said the company would use the new capital to scale its diversity and inclusion feature, which organizes demographic data and suggests ways users can act more fairly when they’re writing job postings, conducting interviews, and making referrals.
