#40 - Ashutosh Garg, CEO of Eightfold.ai - On how AI transforms the recruitment process in a win-win for everybody

The focus on this week’s podcast is product innovation in the area of recruitment, and my guest is Ashutosh Garg, CEO of Eightfold.ai – a company that has the idea and potential to transform the way we’ll look at recruitment forever.

Eightfold has recently been designated by Gartner as a cool vendor for human capital management in Talent Acquisition. This is what happens if you build your company around a strong vision – remarkable things will happen. Ashutosh understands this like no one else.

He is a true guru of all things AI, with 10 years of information retrieval, machine learning and search experience.

Previously, he was Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of BloomReach. Prior to that, he was at IBM Research. He is also a prolific publisher/inventor, with a book on machine learning, 30+ papers, and 50+ patents.

Ashutosh holds a Bachelor of Tech from IIT-Delhi and a PhD from University of Illinois UC.

He has won numerous awards, including best thesis award at IIT Delhi, IBM Fellowship, and outstanding researcher award at UIUC.

What triggered me to invite Ashutosh was the phrase on their website: “Uncovering the Future Potential of Talent”.

The company was founded around the belief that employment is the backbone of our society and everyone deserves the right job. What Ashutosh and his team realized is that up to today, you get the job based on who you might know and not what you are capable of doing. Eightfold is solving this problem and thereby changing the paradigm by intelligently augmenting the recruiter as well as the applicant.

Here are some of his quotes:

“When people are looking for a job, they are not switching the job to do the same thing they have been doing. They want to do something more, something different, they want to grow in their career.

And through AI, what we can do today is we can predict what someone is likely to do next in their career.

This helps us understand who will be a good fit for this role in which organization. And then we connect people to those opportunities.

So, we've changed the paradigm: Instead of people applying for a job we go and recommend them: John and Lisa, these are the three jobs in our company that our most relevant to you.

If you're only looking to hire people, based on what they have done, not what they are capable of doing? Losing value proposition.

Everyone deserves the opportunity and we want to enable that in people.”

By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

1. That a lot of value potential in any solution is locked up because we neglect to connect the dots between various data points.
2. How you can change the paradigm with your solution by doing the opposite of the norm.
3. Why business could run a lot better if we take the bias out of decision-making.