Hire18 Sponsor interview: Gaurav Kataria

With technology that aggregates information from social and professional sites across the web, this Silicon Valley startup is ready to throw its hat in the ring with the top players in the race for AI recruiting supremacy.

Entelo scours the internet to automatically generate profiles of potential hiring prospects, then gets to work matching candidates to customers. Sounds simple enough, but as we found out from data scientist Gaurav Kataria, there’s a little more to it than that.

Hi Gaurav, before people start clamoring to meet you at Hire18, tell us a little about your background.

I spent the better part of the last decade at Google, leading the Data Science group in the Cloud division. In November 2017, I made the move to Entelo, a company uniquely positioned to modernize recruiting, where I lead Product and Data Science. Outside of work, I am a guest lecturer at Stanford University where I have been sharing my “Lessons from the Field” on how entrepreneurs and executives can build machine learning capability within their own organizations.

So what is Entelo, in your own words?

Entelo is the world’s leading AI-driven recruiting automation platform. It helps companies find, qualify and acquire top talent. Our technology aggregates information from more than 50 social and professional sites across the web to consolidate candidates’ social footprints. We provide employers with more than 500 million unique candidate profiles from which they can source top talent. By automating the process of locating, evaluating and contacting quality candidates, Entelo eliminates tedious manual workflows and frees up recruiters to be more strategic and personalized in their individual interactions with prospective hires.

What made you decide to not only attend but support Hire18?

We are looking forward to hearing from industry leaders on what they see as some of the biggest opportunities and potential pitfalls in the world of talent acquisition.

What is the biggest takeaway you hope to leave with?

My presentation is centered around the notion that recruiting is ripe for the benefits of automation. I hope attendees walk away with a better understanding of how AI can help them make their own jobs more valuable, by automating the tedious tasks that can be more efficiently completed by computers.

Some workers fear that technology will replace them. What would you say to recruiters who are reluctant to incorporate AI into their strategy?

I’d explain that AI isn’t out to take your job, but elevate it. It’s well documented that humans and machines are best when they team up, and my presentation will reference studies like the one reported by MIT Tech Review, in which researchers compared the ability of expert doctors and AI software to diagnose cancer. They found that doctors perform significantly better than existing software, but doctors together with software performed even better than their counterparts.

The HR industry has gotten a bad reputation for being slow to adopt new technology. Do you think AI is too forward-thinking for them?

HR professionals have made incredible strides in the past few decades. This is an industry that changes constantly, and when we look at the path from Help Wanted signs to newspaper ads to job boards to social recruiting, recruiters and HR leaders must constantly adapt. In fact, forward-thinking HR professionals are already investing in AI software to help them outperform the competition. As the Entelo 2018 Recruiting Trends Report finds, 62% of companies plan to adapt AI-powered recruiting software in 2018, and of those, 86% plan to spend on intelligent sourcing software. As this sort of thing becomes more mainstream, we’re sure to see even more recruiters becoming proficient in AI hiring tools.