From reading countless resumes and cover letters to scheduling interviews, the talent management process can feel like it never ends. In addition, the traditional employment process can lead to a lack of diversity and inclusion and biased hiring recommendations.
But a Cambridge-based startup says it has a hiring solution that reduces bias and improves employers' talent acquisition pipelines. Founded in 2014, Cangrade uses AI-based technology to provide companies with predictive models for employee success.
“Our philosophy is that everybody deserves an equal shot at a job and it’s soft skills that are really going to drive most folks' ability to thrive there. Sure there are some qualifiers and disqualifiers in terms of hard skills, but by focusing on soft skills, you're really going to be able to not only diversify your hiring funnel, but just get the best person for your organization that will help drive your ROI or return on your investment,” said Dr. Liana Epstein, chief operating and analytics officer at Cangrade.
In April, the company launched its Job Description Decoder—a free tool for organizations that identifies which soft skills to include in their job ads in order to find the right fit for the position. The Job Description Decoder focuses on competencies, which can range from time management to organization to attention to detail.
Here’s how it works: a company answers a survey about the requirements for an open position and based on the answers, Cangrade determines which soft skills are most important for the job. The tool also provides companies with language to use in hiring ads to attract candidates and creates sample interview questions and guides based on the competencies selected.
“We're trying to identify the people who will thrive in your workplace scenario. If they get a low score on our assessment, it's not that they're bad at work, or bad workers," Epstein said. "But in your particular environment, they don't have the soft skills that are going to set them up for success.”
Let’s define soft and hard skills. Soft skills are characteristics or personality traits, for example, being dependable, empathetic, or an effective communicator. Hard skills on the other hand, comprise technical knowledge like being multilingual, having search engine optimization comprehension, or possessing experience in Microsoft Suite.
Cangrade is focused on hiring for soft skills because it increases hiring equity. “If you’re focusing on more of a pedigree angle and less of a soft skills angle, you're going to hire carbon copies of folks you already have now, you're going to hire folks who know people, who went to the same university...And you're going to end up with a really homogenous workforce," Epstein said.
"It's about having a diversity of perspectives, a diversity of ways of thinking," Epstein added. "It's about making sure that, especially in this move to remote work, that you're not discriminating against people who have kids, for example, or people who maybe don't have English as their first language,” said Epstein.
The company also has pre-hire assessments, which provide recruiters with a predictive analysis on a candidate’s potential success, have bias protection built into it. Cangrade spent time testing each question against a wide variety of demographic categories—from ethnicity to gender to whether or not a person is married—in order to make sure every candidate has an equal opportunity for the job. For example, if the results of the tests show that one group systematically scores higher than another, that can put them at an advantage, and Cangrade will remove the question in order to eliminate the advantage.
Recently, the company closed a round of bridge funding for an undisclosed amount. With these funds, Cangrade plans to aggressively market and sell its solutions.
“Our goal is to dominate our space," Epstein said. "We would like to be the top player in HR tech...We are science led, we're scientists led, and for us, the top priority is the quality of the product we're providing...We want to become a household name, maybe not this year, that might be a little ambitious, but we want to cut through the noise in our space and we want to keep delivering great results for our clients."
