RIYADH: You might think you are good at interviewing, but you’re probably not.
Interviews, it turns out, are not a very good way of vetting candidates. According to Ron Friedman, a psychologist and author of “The Best Place To Work”, 80 percent of people lie during interviews and the person asking the questions tends to carry a whole host of biases into the meeting that they are not even aware of.
For instance, good-looking people are generally perceived as more competent, while tall candidates are seen as having greater leadership potential. Those with deeper voices are considered more trustworthy.
Dr Ahmed Khamis has experienced the pain of recruitment firsthand.
“I was a private equity professional for almost 18 years, who used to face a hard time in hiring the right talent,” he said in an interview with Arab News. “It costs time and money if things go wrong.”
Faced with few alternatives to the traditional hand-sifting of CVs and face-to-face interviews, Khamis and his partner Eyad took things into their own hands and in 2016 founded Bloovo with the aim of harnessing the growing power of artificial intelligence for the task of improving the recruitment process.
While traditional CV filters look for key words to pull out the most promising candidates – or at least get rid of the least appropriate – Bloovo focuses on the relevant experience with the aim of finding a candidate who is “functionally fit” for the role, said Khamis.
Bloovo is not stopping there. The company wants to revolutionize the hiring process from A-Z, starting from job-posting jobs to hiring, including interviews and talent evaluation, through to on-boarding.
The next product it is planning on launching, in the first quarter of 2022, is an AI-powered interview tool.
Currently in the final phases of testing, it aims to look beyond the hard skills to measure personality and emotional intelligence.
“Hard skills are easy to measure – you just give them a test or an exercise and you be able to tell whether they fit or not – but cultural fit is something different,” said Khamis.
Developing such tools does not come cheap. Bloovo has 35 technologists, including data scientists, on staff working on the AI systems that power its systems, according to Khamis.
So far, its investment in technology is paying off: in 2017, Bloovo was chosen by Forbes Middle East as one of the most promising startups in the Arab world; one year later it was ranked among the 50 most promising startups in the MENA region.
Its solutions have attracted clients across the Middle East, North Africa and the U.S., including Riyad Bank, Zamil, Tawuniya, Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority and Flynas.
“Today, the Saudi market constitutes around 70 percent of our business,” said Khamis. “Although globally we have seen some sort of down trend in hiring, Saudi has been one of a very few countries where hiring picked up, supported by Vision 2030.”
Saudization is a focal point that helped the Saudi economy progress during the pandemic unlike other countries around the world, he said. All the way through 2030, huge numbers of jobs will be created in Saudi Arabia.
“It’s all about talent,” he said. “If you have the right talent, you can do miracles.”