Siadhal Magos and Shahriar Tajbakhsh have been working at Uber and Palantir, respectively, after they each got here to the belief that hiring — notably the method of interviewing — was changing into unwieldy for a lot of company HR departments.
“It was clear to us that an important a part of the hiring course of is the interviews, but additionally essentially the most opaque and unreliable half,” Magos informed TechCrunch. “On high of this, there’s a bunch of toil related to taking notes and writing up suggestions that many interviewers and hiring managers do every little thing they’ll to keep away from.”
Magos and Tajbakhsh thought that the hiring course of was ripe for disruption, however they wished to keep away from abstracting away an excessive amount of of the human aspect. So that they launched Metaview, an AI-powered note-taking app for recruiters and hiring managers that data, analyzes and summarizes job interviews.
“Metaview is an AI note-taker constructed particularly for the hiring course of,” Magos stated. “It helps recruiters and hiring managers focus extra on attending to know candidates and fewer on extracting information from the conversations. As a consequence, recruiters and hiring managers save a ton of time writing up notes and are extra current throughout interviews as a result of they’re not having to multitask.”
Metaview integrates with apps, telephone programs, videoconferencing platforms and instruments like Calendly and GoodTime to robotically seize the content material of interviews. Magos says the platform “accounts for the nuances of recruiting conversations” and “enriches itself with information from different sources,” equivalent to applicant monitoring programs, to focus on essentially the most related moments.
“Zoom, Microsoft Groups and Google Meet all have transcription in-built, which is a potential various to Metaview,” Magos stated. “However the info that Metaview’s AI pulls out from interviews is way extra related to the recruiting use case than generic options, and we additionally help customers with the subsequent steps of their recruiting workflows in and round these conversations.”
Picture Credit: Metaview
Actually, there’s loads unsuitable with conventional job interviewing, and a note-taking and conversation-analyzing app like Metaview may assist, not less than in concept. As a chunk in Psychology As we speak notes, the human mind is rife with biases that hinder our judgement and resolution making, for instance a bent to rely too closely on the primary piece of data provided and to interpret info in a method that confirms our preexisting beliefs.
The query is, does Metaview work — and, extra importantly, work equally effectively for all customers?
Even the very best AI-powered speech dictation programs undergo from their very own biases. A Stanford research confirmed that error charges for Black audio system on speech-to-text companies from Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM and Microsoft are almost double these for white audio system. One other, more moderen research printed within the journal Laptop Speech and Language discovered statistically vital variations in the way in which two main speech recognition fashions handled audio system of various genders, ages and accents.
There’s additionally hallucination to contemplate. AI makes errors summarizing, together with in assembly summaries. In a latest story, The Wall Avenue Journal cited an occasion the place, for one early adopter utilizing Microsoft’s AI Copilot software for summarizing conferences, Copilot invented attendees and implied calls have been about topics that have been by no means mentioned.
When requested what steps Metaview has taken, if any, to mitigate bias and different algorithmic points, Magos claimed that Metaview’s coaching information is numerous sufficient to yield fashions that “surpass human efficiency” on recruitment workflows and carry out effectively on standard benchmarks for bias.
I’m skeptical and a bit cautious, too, of Metaview’s method to the way it handles speech information. Magos says that Metaview shops dialog information for 2 years by default until customers request that the info be deleted. That looks like an exceptionally very long time, and candidates would most likely.
However none of this seems to have affected Metaview’s skill to get funding or clients.
Metaview this month raised $7 million from traders together with Plural, Coelius Capital and Vertex Ventures, bringing the London-based startup’s whole raised to $14 million. Metaview’s consumer rely stands at 500 corporations, Magos says, together with Brex, Quora, Pleo and Inconceivable — and it’s grown 2,000% year-over-year.
“The cash will probably be used to develop the product and engineering group primarily, and provides extra gasoline to our gross sales and advertising and marketing efforts,” Magos stated. “We are going to triple the product and engineering group, additional fine-tune our dialog synthesis engine so our AI is robotically extracting precisely the suitable info our clients want and develop programs to proactively detect points like inconsistencies within the interview course of and candidates that look like dropping curiosity.”
