Employees are the lifeblood of every enterprise. The contributions of passionate and engaged team members can help organizations achieve their vision and build their brand. However, as the corporate world gets more and more competitive, recruiters feel they’re often caught up fishing in an ever-diminishing talent pool. Most recruitment teams follow candidate sourcing approaches based on keyword searches, which are slow and inaccurate. Fragmented, siloed, and manually developed people datasets are often susceptible to errors and result in inadequate visibility into people insights for making strategic people decisions. With companies like Findem, finding the right talent and making key people decisions are no longer an uphill battle. By harnessing the power of People Intelligence, Findem empowers HR and talent leaders to close talent gaps faster and make smart, unbiased people decisions.

In an interview with the editorial team of Manage HR, Hari Kolam, co-founder and CEO, discusses at length how his company’s proprietary AI-based People Intelligence platform helps companies make data-driven hiring decisions.

Could you provide a brief overview of Findem?

Findem is a People Intelligence platform that helps to make all people decisions data-driven. Be it sourcing candidates, promoting an employee or developing talent within the company, people decisions today are littered with subjectivity and bias. Our platform uses AI and deep data analytics to fundamentally change how HR leaders search for candidates and manage their workforce, and removes bias from the equation. On the sourcing front, our platform uncovers the best active and passive candidates for the job by replacing keyword or Boolean searches with attribute searches. Attributes can be tangible, such as whether someone is an open source contributor, past founder, female or has experienced an IPO, as well as intangible, such as whether someone has an entrepreneurial spirit, embodies the company values or is a go-getter. These attributes provide a data-informed picture of each individual and can be used to find the exact fit to fill talent gaps, to reveal unbiased insights on individuals or teams, and to benchmark organizations against their competitors.
What are the major pain points companies face today, and how does Findem solve them?

Most of our customers broadly use our People Intelligence platform for three different classes of applications. They leverage it to build a robust, high-quality pipeline of candidates interested in joining their company. By delivering active, interested candidates as the output, we solve the entire sourcing problem that entails defining the intent, searching for candidates and engaging with them all processes that were traditionally carried out manually.

Next, Findem helps identify high-performing employees within the organization and understand the attributes that contribute to their success. Once they’re armed with these insights, they can search for and hire candidates that possess the same attributes. This enables them to build a superior workforce where they’re employing the best talent in every role. For instance, say a company wants to hire people who are very successful at remote work. They simply need to identify one of their remote employees who has proven to excel in a virtual work environment, and then they can search for “copycat” candidates who possess that individual’s same attributes.

We also provide them with tools to benchmark the attributes that are pertinent to their business goals against their competitors and peers. That could be anything from evaluating the diversity of their executive suite or the skills that their development team possesses. When data can clearly show companies their talent and diversity gaps, and uncover the attributes needed in candidates to fill them, they can move quickly and confidently on a plan to ferret out those individuals and recruit them into their workforce. In short, we’re connecting the internal and external parts of the company to consistently develop a diverse, high-quality pipeline in a highly scalable way.

Could you shed light on your people intelligence platform?

Findem pioneers attribute-centric search, which is more advantageous than traditional word-based search. Today, the search for talent usually starts with a job description, which is a shopping list of the qualities desired in a candidate needed for the role. A resume, on the other hand, describes the candidate experience—be it a LinkedIn profile or typical resume. However, as the intent of a job is often abstract, all the critical attributes of a candidate are impossible to find in a resume in a comprehensive manner. To this end, recruiters often try to understand these attributes and break them down into searchable keywords to build a consolidated pipeline. We allow recruiters to search for candidates based on over 1 million attributes. This approach enables them to build a candidate pipeline that’s higher quality and better matched because they’re sourcing isn’t restricted by the information displayed in a resume. Articulating the attribute allows recruiters to express some inexpressible traits of the candidates, thereby raising the quality bar and going beyond the barriers of a typical resume.
Customers use Findem to search using a combination of attributes. At the top of the funnel, high-quality matches are described as a collection of attributes. This pipeline is further fed into the campaign machinery. A fully automated and personalized drip-campaign management platform engages with all the short-listed candidates through email and text to yield qualified introductions for the recruiter when they want to contact potential candidates about an open role.

Findem also integrates with our customers’ applicant tracking system (ATS), and not just searches within the ATS, but also trues up an outdated profile within the ATS to make it current, runs a match and identifies captive audience inside the ATS. The platform also runs the same match on internal employees to find qualified candidates from within the organization who are well matched for the position. So, in a single click, Findem holistically integrates all people data sources to identify and engage the pipeline. Building a search on the Findem platform is as simple as essentially referring to someone who a recruiter would want to clone.

How does the future look like for your company?

We have built a paradigm where hiring, which one of the most impactful people decisions, is solved in a very efficient way using attributes. By automating the sourcing stack end to end and optimizing it with attributes, we allow companies to scale it as a sub-function. In parallel, we are working with our enterprise customers to leverage the attributes for other significant aspects of people decisions within the organization. It could be to enumerate the productivity problems among employees or identify superstar employees and the attributes they possess. We look to expand the capabilities of our platform to fuel critical people decision-making functions apart from hiring.