Recruiting Startup of the Year Nominee: Vettd

What do you get when artificial intelligence meets human intelligence in a space where intelligence is meant to be quantifiably evaluated? This plucky startup may have the answer.

Meet the companies vying for the title of Recruiting Startup Of The Year (RSOTY) at Hiring Success 18, in San Francisco, March 12-14. Register here!  Your vote determines which six are flying to California to pitch their ideas to 1000+ Talent Acquisition leaders and puts them in the running for the grand prize.

One of these six will be selected by a group of C-Suite experts and industry analysts for the ultimate prize of a Gold Sponsorship to Hiring Success 19, worth $10,000, which includes a branded booth and dedicated demo-room for potential customers to interact with their product.

In 2014, Andrew Buhrmann, an experienced product strategist and serial entrepreneur, founded this groundbreaking startup, with the goal of using artificial intelligence to augment human intelligence in the talent evaluation space. The result? Employers being able to automatically research and discover correlations between every job description and inbound applicant, in order to accelerate the candidate selection process.

Leading up to Vettd’s candidacy for our Recruiting Startup of the Year contest, we caught up with the University of Washington graduate to better gauge what we can expect to learn from Vettd at Hiring Success 18, March 12-14, San Francisco.

Hi Andrew, thanks for being with us. Real quick, what’s your company’s elevator pitch?

Vettd is an Intelligent Data Science™ platform designed to help enterprises develop and implement AI strategies to better understand the world of business and talent. Specializing in natural language processing, Vettd is able to combine disparate data into one universe where artificially intelligent agents work together to solve problems that were never thought possible.

I’m not sure if I’ll remember any of that. Anyway. What gave you the idea for your startup?

As a recruiter, back in 2008, the need to be educated objectively about why candidates did or didn’t matter became increasingly necessary to gain a competitive edge internally and against outside players. If something was able to normalize information in a way that I could better understand, it would have transformed my ability to perform at an even higher level on any position I worked on. Given that this technology could then be applied to multiple cases, it only increased its attractiveness to build and felt like a worthwhile goal.

Of all industries to tackle, why recruiting?

Everyone can benefit from a better understanding of how to maximize their professional opportunities, whether they are able to do that themselves, or have someone do it for them.

How do you envision your idea changing the talent acquisition landscape?

Recruiters and analysts will be able to create AI in their own image to solve problems or gain insights into areas they deem valuable and won’t have to succumb to the limitations of big box solutions or a lack of coding abilities.

What does ‘hiring success’ mean to you?

That a person has a choice in where they work and that both employee and employer are honest about their opportunities with each other.

In this new digital world, what’s the main role of technology in hiring?

The role of technology in hiring is that it needs to educate and enlighten. Automating tasks is helpful, but it doesn’t make us better. There will never be an easy button in hiring and people need to understand that AI won’t 3D print their dream candidate.