Many recruiters received hundreds of CVs to look through. It is obviously a hassle, but thanks to HR Tech startup from Hong Kong, now we could skip the process.
Hiring Screen, a ten person technology startup in one of Asia’s most prestigious accelerator programmes and secured funding from Angel Investors from Asia and Europe, provides tempting services for recruiters.
As a tech startup, it is quite interesting that Hiring Screen chooses HR matter for the product. Unsurprisingly, their CEO, Richard Hanson, used to work in HR for eleven years. He said, “One day in particular for a certain role, which was an administrative assistant, I got 196 CVs to look through. Getting that many CVs is not unusual,”.
“But on that day he had that crystallising moment that so many startup founders have: this is a problem, and I can solve it.”
The problem, according to Hanson, is that a recruiter’s real job should be to meet people and try to determine which candidate has the best personality fit for the job. But before you can do that, Hanson said, “you’ve got to sift through a huge volume of CVs, and it’s pretty impossible to do that manually in a consistent and accurate way.”
Hanson and his co-founder Luke Byrne (left) realized that CV sorting could be automated with the right algorithm, freeing up time for recruiters to meet more people in person. Hiring Screen was born.
With the tagline “Recruitment meets Rocket Science”, Hiring Screen is developing in just over a year. Hiring Screen raises $800K to build algorithms that help companies find the best hires.
What is Hiring Screen
It is an HR tool that allows you to set up jobs. It will even generate a job description for you based on the job requirements you input, input applications, and then sort and rank applicants automatically based on metrics of your own choosing. Candidates’ strengths and weaknesses in relation to your job posting can be presented graphically, and when you have shortlisted candidates you can share that list with anyone and save notes on each candidate as you meet them personally.
Soon, they will implement a feature named applicant feedback. Right now, Hanson says, Hiring Screen can do basic feedback, like automatically sending an email to rejected applicants letting them know they didn’t get the job, or asking unsuccessful but shortlisted candidates to stay in touch and look for the next opening. But in six months, he says the software will offer much more than that – it will be able to analyse an individual applicant’s CV in relation to the CV of shortlisted candidates and offer specific suggestions for skills or experience they could acquire to make themselves more competitive next time.
See: Importance of Conversation v/s Automation during Recruitment
The ultimate goal of Hiring Screen, Hanson said, is “to really try and develop the product so we can give feedback to both the candidate side and the employer side that makes the whole process more efficient and informed.” He thinks that could be a game-changer, especially in Asia where he sees skill gaps and other issues leading to lots of inefficiencies in hiring.
Asia, of course, is very much on Hiring Screen’s radar. For now, the company is focused mostly on Hong Kong, since it is easy to meet potential clients face-to-face there, and the current version of the software only includes English and Chinese localisations. But in the long run, Hanson sees big potential markets for Hiring Screen in Southeast Asia, too. “The markets that would be the best for it would be the Phillippines, Indonesia, India, where there are a lot of problems with a high volume of applications for jobs.”
How it works
There are four steps to run Hiring Screen, and the less hassle you could get:
Real-time benchmarking of job applications against your requirements. Hiring Screen calculates a “Blink Score” for each candidate reflecting the relevance of their application. Every candidate, from every source, in one place, in order.
Hiring Screen’s unique interface offers in-depth analysis of candidate profiles. Make a clear assessment of strengths and weaknesses before building your shortlist with Hiring Screen’s drag and drop functionality.
A full analytics dashboard provides easy access to key metrics and statistics. Monitor your data on screen or generate comprehensive reports.
Hiring Screen’s intelligent database constantly learns from every recruitment process providing increasingly accurate insights and ever improving results.
Bottom line
Can Hiring Screen really replace the inefficient-but-time-tested human CV sorting method? No harm trying.
See also: Top 11 Modern Recruitment Marketing Practices to Attract and Hire Talent
