Vinodh Kumar Ravindranath will share learnings from his experience of building high performing teams as CTO at couple of startups (Belong, Bloomreach) as well as Google. He will also share interesting learnings gleaned through data science algorithms analyzing career data.

1. The Art and
Science of Hiring
Vinodh Kumar, Head of AI, Eightfold.ai
vinodh@eightfold.ai
Team Building

2. Eightfold®
Confidential. Copyright© 2019, Eightfold AI Inc.
As leaders, we build organizations - organization of
people. Not just a business or a technology.

3. Eightfold®
Confidential. Copyright© 2019, Eightfold AI Inc.
#1 Startup Conundrum?
You have managed to roll out an offer to this awesome talent working at this
big company XYZ.
And now you are biting your nails as whether she / he will join?
How many of you have been in this situation?

4. And people don’t join many a time ...
I need to get married
and I need the tag of
“XYZ”
My spouse was supposed
to join this big company
“ABC”. Thats not
happening - so I cannot
risk joining a startup now.
Network
Unreachable!

5. What would make people jump from big to small
companies?

6. The Pattern I discovered
Most of big company folks I
managed to successfully hire
had worked in a startup or
smaller company earlier!

7. ML model
Next Step
Predictor
Career Journey Next Step

8. What’s Next?
Skills:
Roles:
Companies:
DNN + Transformers
• Trained on 1B+ career trajectory points
• JDs, Resumes, Public profiles, Industry data
BA –
English,
History from
SJSU
MBA from
Kansas State
Senior BDR
@Autonomy
Manager,
Sales
Enablement
@eFolder
Education Experience
Resume to
Predictive
Model for each
individual

9. What does the career journeys of everyone tell us?
Probability of people with prior “experience of working in
open-ended environment” is 3x of people without such
experience.
1
Open-ended environment = Startups, NGO, PhD

10. ● Look for evidence of working in open-ended
fuzzy setups
● Talk to candidates to evaluate their appetite
for startup environments in exploratory
calls

11. Flipside Conundrum?
The jump from small
to big!

12. ML model
Current
Tenure
Predictor
Career Journey
Duration of
current tenure

13. Will they leave?
The Data Science Perspective
The tenure of people who did the
jump from small to big is ~30%
shorter!

14. Startup folks in big companies?
● Create environment to accomodate folks with startup appetite
○ Reduce bureacratic barriers in their work
○ Shield from over-arching process / big company setups
○ Challenging / open-ended charters

15. Eightfold®
Confidential. Copyright© 2019, Eightfold AI Inc.
#2 Hire for Potential vs Hire for Skills

16. Python vs Java
Java developers are more in number than
Python in 2014. How would you be hiring a
python developer if you were at that point of
time?

17. Whats winning the
race?
Keras or Tensorflow
or Pytorch????

18. Eightfold®
Confidential. Copyright© 2019, Eightfold AI Inc.
Hire for potential and not skills!

20. Keyword search of skills will not work!

21. Eightfold®
Confidential. Copyright© 2019, Eightfold AI Inc.

22. What’s Next?
Skills:
Roles:
Companies:
DNN + Transformers
• Trained on 1B+ career trajectory points
• JDs, Resumes, Public profiles, Industry data
BA –
English,
History from
SJSU
MBA from
Kansas State
Senior BDR
@Autonomy
Manager,
Sales
Enablement
@eFolder
Education Experience
Resume to
Predictive
Model for each
individual
Machine Learning Models can come to the rescue!

23. Going for potential can yield you a team of highly passionate, culturally fit
team.
Going for potential can yield you a team of highly passionate, culturally fit and
a “winning team”.

24. #3 Find your biases and get rid of them
Previous Companies, Academic Institute/Degree
Gender
Age, marital status, kids, sexual orientation
Part-time or full-time degree
Work Gap in resume
Disabilities

25. #4 Keep a diversity meter running in your mind
Is my team diverse enough on each of these axes?
And remember diversity is not charity!

26. Gender Diversity

27. Diversity in India
- Gender
- Linguistic
- Religion
- Social
- Economic

28. Eightfold®
Confidential. Copyright© 2019, Eightfold AI Inc.
As leaders, we build organizations - organization of
people. Not just a business or a technology.