ZipRecruiter’s Job Seeker Profiles uses AI to improve candidate matches

We’ve all been there: You’ve just submitted your resume, work samples, and job profile to a list of moonshot employers, but your satisfaction slowly turns to horror as you realize you left blank a few crucial forms. If ZipRecruiter has its way, you’ll soon be able to kiss that anxiety goodbye.
On Tuesday, the Los Angeles-based online employment platform took the wraps off of Job Seeker Profiles, a new feature available on ZipRecruiter’s mobile app for iOS and Android. It prompts candidates to enter information they might have otherwise missed, and leverages the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to extract relevant data automatically from uploaded resumes.
Why roll out Job Seeker Profiles first on mobile? It’s one of ZipRecruiter’s most popular channels. More than 9 million users have installed the iOS and Android apps, the company said, and 70 percent use a mobile device when searching for new job opportunities.

“We launched Profiles to help job seekers tell their whole store,” Ian Siegel, cofounder and CEO of ZipRecruiter, said. “Work, and the way people find it, is evolving … With Profiles, we’ve built a flexible, intelligent product that maximizes their chance to find the right employer, and vice versa, thus drastically reducing time to hire.”
Profiles are like an application in brief, basically. They’re summaries that include skills, certifications, desired salary, and career objectives, all of which can be manually entered or generated from a resume. But there’s an intelligent layer to them, too — Profiles alert users of missing information and suggest additions and enhancements.
Information job seekers provide feeds ZipRecruiter’s AI matching algorithms, improving the quality and number of matches for candidates and would-be employers alike.
ZipRecruiter says that job seekers’ applications are typically viewed within 48 hours, and that 80 percent of employers who post a job get a quality candidate by the end of the first day. It saw more than a million candidate signups per month in the first quarter of 2018 and about 7.5 million active job listings.
The launch of Job Seeker Profiles follows hot on the heels of ZipRecruiter’s $156 million funding round. (To date, it’s raised $219 million in funding.) The eight-year-old company, which is one of the most popular employment platforms in the U.S., says it’s helped over 1.5 million businesses find employees and received 430 million applications.
ZipRecruiter’s invested heavily in AI as of late. It uses machine learning to inform would-be employees of new job listings via email and text message (more than 64 million via email alone), and it rolled out an AI tool in June — Candidate Calibration — that surfaces job posts to candidates in its database of 10 million monthly users based on signals from recruiters.
ZipRecruiter now has 200 engineers developing AI-powered candidate matching and searching solutions, including 50 working out of its new Tel Aviv-based research and development center.
Altogether, the firm counts more than 1,000 employees (up from roughly 150 four years ago) among its staff across offices in the U.S., U.K., and Israel. More than 1.5 million companies, including Ford, Netflix, Wells Fargo, and Burger King, have used its recruitment software, and ZipRecruiter estimates that it’s accounting for about 10 percent of activity in the U.S. recruitment market.
Source: VentureBeat
To Read Our Daily News Updates, Please visit Inventiva or Subscribe Our Newsletter & Push.