Bengaluru-based Talview ditches traditional hiring process, uses IBM Watson to create nextgen platform

Songwriter Bob Dylan, who received the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature, appeared in a TV commercial last year in which he is seated in front of a laptop that tells him that it could read 800 million pages per second, and also had read all of his lyrics. The computer then adds that it had analysed all of his lyrics and determined Dylan’s major themes as ‘time passes’ and ‘love fades’.

Dylan, with his straight-faced expression, replies, “Well, that sounds about right.” After that, the computer says, “I have never known love.” Dylan responds, “Maybe we should write a song together.” As the machine proceeds to sing, Dylan picks up his guitar and walks away. The words, ‘IBM Watson^TM thinks with us to outthink the limits of creativity’ appears on the screen.

That was an ad for IBM Watson, a key technology service built to mirror the same learning process that we humans have - through the power of cognition. It works on the same cognitive framework that humans use to make informed decisions - observe, interpret, evaluate, and decide.

It is not hard to imagine how disruptive cognitive technology can be, if tech start-ups adopt Watson services. Talview, the Bengaluru-based recruitment solutions start-up is one such company which is revolutionising the recruitment process with the help of IBM Watson™, disrupting the $500 billion global Human Resources industry.

Talview's video interview and talent assessment platform - Talent Viewer - uses multiple IBM Watson APIs and IBM Cloud Services to harness the power of advanced data science and machine learning algorithms to help clients expedite hiring and reduce turnaround time. It also uses video-audio analyses, social-media analytics, psycholinguistics, and speech recognition to enable companies build better teams and gain a competitive advantage.

On the one hand, the platform helps candidates by providing convenience and a superior experience as they do not have to take a day off or spend time travelling to a recruiter’s location for preliminary interviews. On the other, it improves the quality of hiring significantly, by enabling companies to conduct a more holistic evaluation of potential candidates. Thus, it helps fill vacancies faster and reduces recruitment costs considerably.

“Many of the capabilities which we were trying to build in-house to provide value-adds on top of the existing Talview platform (for customers) were readily available on Watson. By using some of the APIs on Bluemix, the prototypes that we were trying to build for six months were built in just two weeks,” said Sanjoe Jose, CEO and co-founder, Talview.

“We thus built a next version of our product ‘Talview Talent Insights’ which leverages many of the Bluemix APIs significantly. This has gained very good traction in the market. Using the tool, we were able to significantly differentiate ourselves in the market from the competition - not just by delivering assessments and interviews on the platform but by helping them (customers) derive insights at both candidate and aggregate level. It helped increase the overall quality of hire, and aided in automation which significantly reduced the cost and time involved in hiring,” Jose added.

Talview also provides tools that clients (HR teams) can leverage to enhance a company’s brand image and inspire potential candidates. Also, with Watson Analytics, companies can derive critical insights about past, current and prospective employees - all on their own.

IBM is transforming the HR process by adding cognitive analytics to the art of talent management. To learn more about how start-ups in India are redefining the digital hiring using cognitive technologies, signup for the IBM India Onward event.