Originally posted on The Horizons Tracker. Recently I looked at a fascinating study that explored whether AI could do a better job of recruiting directors than the CEO themselves. The researchers identified a number of biases that prevent bosses from recruiting effectively, and the AI technology aimed to overcome them. Suffice to say, the project isn't yet able to directly ensure that boards are more diverse than they currently are, but hopefully it will at least shed some light on the lack of diversity in boards today, and therefore encourage companies to do a better job. They do however point to a possible future whereby algorithms become more sophisticated and capable of doing a fairer and more effective job at recruiting than humans can.

Nanalyze prides itself in providing you with objective analyses of technology and the companies that are at the forefront of developing all of this cool, disruptive tech. For example, you may detect a certain amount of disdain when we talk about companies or jobs that we feel don't offer real--or at least substantial--value in the marketplace. That brings us to the ubiquitous Department of Human Resources and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in automating business processes. At best, HR is a necessary evil, like the designated hitter rule in baseball. So, while we would never cheer seeing anyone sent to the back of the unemployment line, we were quite interested to see how many artificial intelligence recruiting startups are going after Human Resources.

HiringSolved, a technology company that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to solve problems for talent acquisition practitioners, today announced a new software integration partnership with SmashFly Technologies, the leading Recruitment Marketing platform provider. HiringSolved's TalentFeed Recruiting Automation Platform has been integrated with SmashFly's Total Recruitment Marketing Platform to help enterprise recruiters increase efficiency by using AI to automatically bring qualified contacts into targeted talent pipelines who can then be nurtured for current and future job opportunities. HiringSolved's TalentFeed platform combines recent technological advances in artificial intelligence, real-time web crawling, data mining, and machine learning ─ enabling both inbound and outbound candidates to be matched to jobs automatically in seconds. SmashFly's award-winning Total Recruitment Marketing Platform proactively markets an employer brand and jobs through every recruiting channel (including career sites, social and email) while building meaningful relationships with talent leads in the customer's talent pipelines using marketing automation technology and modern marketing practices. The combination of the two software platforms makes it easier and faster to source, manage and nurture prospective candidates − HiringSolved's AI-based system automatically discovers, qualifies and matches candidates to jobs for subsequent personalized engagement via SmashFly's automated candidate relationship management (CRM) capabilities.

One of the best ways to get me into an interview is to tick me off. That's how this piece on AI and diversity began. I got a PR pitch on behalf of HiringSolved. It was about the benefits of AI to recruiting – but little on the algorithmic discrimination we've covered on diginomica ("You're not our kind of people" – why analytics and HR fail many good people). So I asked if the CEO of HiringSolved, Shon Burton, would be up for a hard look at machine-assisted recruiting.

HiringSolved, a technology company that leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve problems for talent acquisition practitioners, has introduced RAI, an artificial intelligence assistant for recruiters. RAI is built upon HiringSolved's TalentFeed search engine, which uses a layered approach to search relevance, combining multiple scoring algorithms to find the best results. Similarly, RAI's flexible Knowledge Engine provides recruiters with detailed insights about companies, skills, title concentrations and specific people that can be sorted based on location, gender and more. Specifically regarding diversity, RAI is able to predict candidates' genders through HiringSolved's Diversity Search tool, which uses proprietary data that HiringSolved has access to, as opposed to relying on published statistics as most companies do. For instance, if a recruiter wants to know Google's male-female ratio, the engine analyzes every employee working for Google, predicting their gender with an error rate of 3%, and computing the ratio.