By empowering employees through internal mobility and access to meaningful opportunities, InnerMobility will simultaneously tackle troubling retention rates for employers.
Tell us about your journey into Technology?
I’ve been a computer geek, ever since my father got his first computer in the early 90s for his university research. When my friends from school played soccer, I started to think and develop a productivity app on a multiple room chat platform. Using technology to improve all aspects of life was something I was passionate about from the beginning. I was recruited to an elite technological unit in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) where I learned one basic rule – everything is possible. I leveraged my love for technology by implementing AI solutions to improve recruitment in the military. After the army, I spent six years in various roles at IBM before I co-founded Gloat in 2015.
How did you start in this space? What galvanized you to start Gloat?
Even though I’m an engineer with a BSc in Computer Science, I’ve always been a people person and matchmaking is a way of life for me. I even have a few friends who have me to thank for their marriages.
In my professional experience, I always felt a strong connection to the HR angle of things: why people think the way they think, how to better attract the right people, what’s the best way to develop your employees, etc. I read a lot in that space and realized that there was a true need for technological innovation, and it inspired me to be the one to do it. In 2015 I founded Gloat alongside my co-founders Amichai Schreiber and Danny Steinberg. All 3 of us are engineers who want to revolutionize this space using technology, specifically Artificial Intelligence (AI).
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What is Gloat and how does it fit into the HR Technology landscape?
Gloat is a company dedicated to improving and enhancing people’s careers. We have two main platforms to achieve this goal.
The first is an anonymous recruitment platform, revolutionizing HR through AI and machine learning. Gloat’s system is capable of profiling 80% of today’s workforce, comparing a user’s skill set and career history with millions of others, to provide personalized data-driven recommendations on real-time career moves. The platform smartly matches candidates to open opportunities that will add value to their careers. The technology assesses users’ skills, experiences, and desired career trajectory, matching them to positions that are highly relevant for them based on advanced data science. Once users have received a match, they then decide if they want to shed anonymity and move forward or decline the opportunity. This also ensures employers see only relevant candidates, saving them valuable time. Gloat is currently working with over 600 leading companies including Apple, Yahoo, Mobileye, and Cisco to enhance their recruitment method.
Gloat has also recently launched InnerMobility, an AI-powered internal talent marketplace which fosters talent agility and personal development for employees while driving growth in large organizations. InnerMobility is designed to provide employees with the opportunity to grow and substantially expand their skill set within their current place of work by facilitating both traditional vertical and horizontal growth. The platform and mobile app act as an intuitive internal navigator, using AI to smartly match employees with highly targeted internal opportunities. The AI platform and mobile app offer employees the opportunity to apply for coveted positions, projects, mentorships, or job-swaps based on the skills they want to improve while also providing managers unprecedented internal visibility on their existing talent pool.
By empowering employees through internal mobility and access to meaningful opportunities, InnerMobility will simultaneously tackle troubling retention rates for employers.
What does your Ideal customer profile look like? Which businesses are the fastest to adopt HR Technology products?
When it comes to our recruitment platform and app our ideal customer is any company looking to improve the efficiency of their recruiting process by embracing AI, with an emphasis on the tech industry.
Our InnerMobility solution is currently targeted at larger companies that have the scope and capabilities to offer their staff a diverse number of internal opportunities.
What is the state of Hiring technology in 2019? How much has it evolved since the time you first started Gloat?
HR technology is constantly evolving and companies across the board are aware of the immense benefits technology has to offer – not only in terms of hiring or retaining staff but also in how companies operate.
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How can HR companies build their HR Technology stack with Gloat?
Gloat works directly with HR departments within companies. Gloat’s solutions are easily utilized by these departments, and HR professionals stand to greatly benefit from both Gloat’s recruitment and InnerMobility solutions. By utilizing Gloat’s solutions, HR teams will be able to benefit from a highly efficient process that will mean only relevant talent is suggested for all of their openings whether the candidates are internal or from outside the company. Additionally, by embracing horizontal growth, HR managers will witness a more fulfilled, dedicated, and happy workforce, increasing productivity and decreasing the costs of third-party contractors by harnessing the full power of your workforce while fostering individual growth and development.
How does Gloat leverage technology to make candidate search easier and faster?
Gloat’s advanced algorithms save HR managers tremendous amounts of time, which adds up to tremendous amounts of money as well as ensuring only highly relevant users are matched to opportunities. No longer will HR need to sift through multitudes of irrelevant resumes, but instead will only be paired with the candidates who are most suitable to the company and position. All an HR or hiring manager needs to do is give a candidate a thumbs-up and they’ll get a notification. If the candidate is also interested in moving forward, they can share their full profile and identity, if they’re not interested, they can decline and remain anonymous. This leaves hiring teams with both highly relevant and interested candidates only. Gloat’s InnerMobility platform gives HR and hiring managers unprecedented visibility on their own internal talent pool allowing them to not only find the right person at the right time but also how to best utilize their staff in a way that maximizes productivity and fosters career growth and happiness for their teammates.
Tell us more about your vision into growing revenue opportunities for HR Technology platforms?
The 2018 Deloitte Millennial Survey showed that 46% of millennials and 61% of Gen Z’s expect to leave their current role for another job within two years. The Society of Human Resource Management estimates that the cost of replacing an employee stands between 90%-200% of their annual salary– the concept of ‘every employee is replaceable’ comes at a high financial price and poses a major challenge to any company looking to grow.
HR technology provides unique solutions for companies to adapt to the modern workforce and the needs of millennial and Gen Z employees in particular. This reality means that there is an immense potential for HR tech platforms, as they are the ones being tapped to solve some of the largest workplace challenges that exist today.
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Tell us more about your new approach to building interactive Hiring dashboards and analytics. How does Gloat deliver on its promises?
Gloat is committed to constantly improving the effectiveness and relevancy of our platform. We utilize the latest analytics tools to constantly develop and enhance our platform and dashboards – to provide the greatest insights possible to our customers and ourselves to continue to improve and monitor our products.
Which Marketing and Sales Technology solutions do you use at Gloat?
We’re fans of Intercom and Hubspot.
The Crystal Gaze
Which start-ups in the tech industry interest you the most and why?
At Gloat we are interested in any AI technology startup that helps employers adapt to the changing workforce. Employers recognize that they need to be responsive to their employees’ professional wants and needs, and the latest tech can be crucial in achieving this goal. And, of course, we’re always interested in other AI solutions that help individuals enhance their careers!
What technologies within AI and HR Technology are you interested in?
Given the nature of the problem that we’re dealing with, we focus our research around NLP, where the trendy tools are NLTK, Spacy, and genism; our research relies on word embeddings, Ontology building and entity extraction; and machine-learning recommendations systems, where we focus on neural network-driven collaborative filtering.
In HR Technology, what are the new emerging markets that you see providing the biggest opportunities?
The workforce is undergoing a substantial change. Millennials are already the largest generation represented in the U.S. workforce, and they are set to be joined by 61 million Gen Z’s. This presents a crucial opportunity, as employers must engage with employers in a fundamentally new way.
Gen Z’s and Millennials place a high premium on their continued development and growth. Younger employees are not content with simply performing their roles and clocking out at 5 – they want the opportunity to enhance their skill set, broaden their workplace experiences and grow professionally. This presents an exciting challenge to employers, as they need to find a way to engage with an exceptionally eager and highly capable crop of young workers who have lots of options with a consistency low-unemployment economy. HR technology that assists employers in rising to the challenge, solutions that facilitate internal mobility and provide the structure for employees to continuously develop and grow (combating the retention crisis in the process) will inevitably thrive in today’s marketplace.
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What’s your smartest work-related shortcut or productivity hack?
Utilized AI-based solutions – we practice what we preach.
Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Cathy Engelbert, CEO of Deloitte – As the CEO of Deloitte, Cathy has her finger on the pulse of the future of work and I would love to read her thoughts and insights on how she sees the industry developing.
Thank you, Ben! That was fun and hope to see you back on TecHR soon.
Ben Reuveni co-founded Gloat in 2015 with a vision of bringing AI and data science to career development.
Gloat recently released its InnerMobility platform, enabling employees to enhance their skill sets and grow within their current place of work. Ben was a team leader in an elite technological intelligence unit (8200) in the IDF and spent six year at IBM in a series of roles.
Gloat is building the workplace of the future and pushing the boundaries of career expectations using data science and AI. Gloat Path is an AI-based career development platform matching user with personalized open career opportunities in real time while they remain completely anonymous. The platform and app compare a user’s skill set and unique career history with millions of others to provide data driven personalized recommendations for smart career moves.
InnerMobility by Gloat is an AI-powered internal talent marketplace that fosters personal development while driving growth in an organization. InnerMobility personally matches employees with a spectrum of career opportunities such as full-time positions, part-time projects, mentorships, and talent swaps, that will enhance their skill sets and ensure they meet their career ambitions. This approach simultaneously empowers managers by providing the visibility to find the right people for any opening, remarkably reducing time to staff and increasing productivity and happiness in the workplace.
Gloat was founded in 2015 and is based in New York and Tel Aviv.