Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Javid Muhammedali, VP of Artificial Intelligence at Bullhorn (Part 1)

The recruitment industry is ripe for massive automation. This discussion deep dives into the topic.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Bullhorn. 

Javid Muhammedali: I’m the VP for Artificial Intelligence at Bullhorn. Bullhorn is the largest provider of applicant tracking solutions, time-tracking, and payroll management solutions for staffing companies worldwide.

We are, by far, the leader in the space providing solutions for a majority of the top companies in the staffing industry. It’s been growing pretty rapidly in the last five or six years. Bullhorn is a 20-year-old company. We’re backed by a private equity firm called Insight Global.

I have a pretty significant track and record and background in artificial intelligence, semantic search, and search in general. I’m starting up a brand-new business unit within Bullhorn that is primarily focused on artificial intelligence solutions for our customers.

The idea is, how can we improve the customer experience whether it’s the candidate or recruiter by building out easy-to-use solutions that help anticipate the needs of our users.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about use cases. Take whatever use cases are pertinent to your business and walk us through who is the customer, what is the problem you’re solving, and how are you solving it using AI.

Javid Muhammedali: There are three major pillars from the use case standpoint. Our customers spend a lot of time and money sourcing candidates. That takes a lot of effort and money. There’re a lot of gaps in terms of the intelligence that’s applied to that.

For example, a Java engineer with a particular skillset. Oftentimes, people are still using keyword search to go find that. With keywords, most of the time you’re just matching whether the word exists or not on the person’s resume.

What we’re trying to do is help customers understand the job requirement first. What is it that the client is asking for? What are the key requirements? Find out how many candidates you should reach out to. For some positions, you might reach out to 20. For a senior level position, you might reach out to a hundred. Then when you do reach out to them, how do you work them through the funnel?

The second use case is for candidates who have responded to a recruiter, how quickly can you move them through the funnel and how efficiently can you move them through the funnel or pre-screening, screening questions, interviews, and then submission to the end client.

If the client wants to move ahead with the candidate, then we’re involved in walking through the offer, background checks, and all those processes to get them on the job. Then there’s the workflow beyond that. Once they’re in the job, are they happy? Are they satisfied?

The third bucket is around the theme of actionable insights. When you do the first two things well, are you applying that insight when that role opens up at the same company? Are you able to leverage the past work you’ve done and be a little smarter? 

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Javid Muhammedali, VP of Artificial Intelligence at Bullhorn
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