HRTech Interview with Gershon Goren, Founder and CEO at Cangrade

How will enhanced developments in AI-powered candidate matching enable better talent acquisition lifecycles? Gershon Goren, Founder and CEO at Cangrade elaborates in this HRTech chat:

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Hi Gershon, tell us about yourself and your role at Cangrade

I’m the founder and CEO of Cangrade, the bias-free, AI-powered hiring and talent development solution. What brought me to this point was many years in the tech space, working in leadership roles for established companies, like IBM, but giving most of my energy and my passion to the upstarts like Cangrade that have a true potential to break the status quo and make a positive impact on people’s lives.

The possibility of fixing some of the biggest problems in recruitment and talent management was the biggest selling point for me in my decision to leave a stable job at IBM and dedicate myself to the raucous life of an entrepreneur.  

From the start, Cangrade’s mission was to level the playing field for job seekers, employees, and HR professionals. From the ground up, the idea was to achieve this by utilizing the latest machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, but doing it ethically and free of biases, which adds a whole new level of complexity to this challenge.

Now, a decade in, we’ve armed organizations from Fortune 500 companies to governments, and non-profits with AI-driven tools to make the right hiring and talent management decisions for over 10 million candidates and employees. From initial screening through the entire employee lifecycle, Cangrade delivers ten-fold more accurate predictions of talent success and retention than traditional methods

What about the current state of HRTech most excites you?

The most exciting thing about the current state of HRTech is that the whole industry is in transition. It’s a unique combination of a generational change, a technological change, and a market change. Each of these on its own is big enough to create disruption, but when combined, will have an even greater impact on work and society. 

I believe this could be a positive change, vastly improving the work environment and providing more flexibility and better compensation for working people, while also increasing the efficiency and output for businesses. But, like any time of transition, there’s no forgone conclusion to how the story ends. Tech companies have a big role to play in transforming the nature of work to be more productive and uplifting. But of course, industry leaders, worker unions, and governments will need to play their parts as well. It will be tragic if this unique point in time and opportunity is wasted by corporate greed and lack of imagination.

Catch more HRTech Insights: HRTech Interview with Sam Naficy, Chairman and CEO at Prodoscore

We’d love to hear about some of Cangrade’s latest product additions and how it enables end users?

Cangrade has been on a roll, remaining true to our original mission of powering the workforce with accurate and unbiased intelligence for talent recruitment, development, and management. Some of our latest innovations include providing employers with tools for the most granular optimization of employee placement in an organization. 

One such feature, Candidate Matching, was developed to streamline the recruitment process by leveraging AI to analyze existing talent networks and identify the candidates who are not just qualified, but the best fit for open roles. Via patented multi-way scoring, a candidate’s performance and retention can be accurately predicted. This significantly reduces the time-to-hire, while ensuring long-term success.

Using the same AI-driven approach, Internal Talent Marketplace was designed to improve employee engagement and internal mobility. By predicting employee fit for lateral moves and promotions, this solution ensures organizations leverage and retain their existing talent, thereby improving productivity and reducing hiring costs.

More exciting products are coming soon, enabling users to go much deeper into understanding both candidates and employees and the best ways to engage them.

What about today’s state of hiring in tech/SaaS needs an urgent fix in your view?

The most urgent change that needs to happen in the recruiting space itself, and should be enabled by the underlying tech, is to shift the focus from hard skills to soft skills and competencies. I don’t want to minimize the importance of hard skills. In many cases, they are critical. But most companies tend to over-evaluate hard skills and under-evaluate (or completely neglect) soft skills. 

Not only are soft skills a much stronger predictor of job success, but they’re irreplaceable and much more difficult to acquire. Hard skills, on the other hand, have become increasingly commoditized and many can be completely replaced by AI and automation. Soft skills are the first thing to look for in hiring.

Can you talk about some of the most seamless employee onboarding and hiring processes you’ve seen certain brands stand out for? What about their employee journeys would you like to highlight?

Our partner UKG is among the strongest platforms for powering the employee journey, as showcased through its interconnectedness. From the moment a candidate comes across a job of their liking, to applying, being assessed, interviewed, hired, onboarded, trained, developed, and promoted, every data point is strategically leveraged to power the next stage in the employee journey. This process is perfectly wrapped into a simple and modern user experience for employers, employees, and candidates alike.

When it comes to talent acquisition and retention: what can modern HR teams do better and how can they use their HRtech stack to drive these efforts more optimally?

When it comes to talent acquisition and retention, it’s important to understand the market changes that are unfolding as we speak. We have all heard about jobs lost to automation, but there are also global employee shortages. Different industries are facing different challenges, but there is one major common denominator: the value of an employee increases significantly for an employer. 

The importance of choosing the right employees and retaining them is paramount. What HRTech can and should do is help promote stronger engagement, as well as deeper personalization and a better understanding of each candidate and employee. In other words, one size no longer fits all.

Can you comment on the future impact of AI on HRTech?

I’m not going to break any news when I say AI brings forward completely new possibilities to all industries and all tech—HR Tech is no exception. What I do see as a mistaken view is AI as a replacement for people. There is no question that technology will reduce the need for human employees in some jobs, but this isn’t its main value. 

AI’s true value lies in its ability to supercharge people and make them better at what they do. It should also give them more flexibility and perhaps free them up from the most mundane parts of their jobs. In the context of HR, that means the job of AI is not to replace all recruiters and HR folks with bots, but rather give them the power to focus their attention on more important things. This includes uncovering the most promising candidates, giving them better insight into each individual applicant or employee, and connecting managers and their reports on a deeper level, all while providing them with a better understanding of each other.

We should never lose sight of the simple fact that Talent Management is about people, and it’s a human job to engage and connect with them. The strength of any organization will continue to be, for the foreseeable future, the strength of its people. I really hope that every leader (in HRTech and beyond) takes this idea to heart and finds ways to use AI for powering their workforce and not replacing it.

Read More on Hrtech : HRTech Interview with Louise Willoughby, Chief People Officer at Beekeeper   

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