Siadhal Magos and Shahriar Tajbakhsh had been working at Uber and Palantir, respectively, after they each got here to the belief that hiring — significantly the method of interviewing — was changing into unwieldy for a lot of company HR departments.
“It was clear to us that a very powerful a part of the hiring course of is the interviews, but in addition probably the most opaque and unreliable half,” Magos instructed Trendster. “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 the whole lot they will to keep away from.”
Magos and Tajbakhsh thought that the hiring course of was ripe for disruption, however they needed to keep away from abstracting away an excessive amount of of the human factor. So that they launched Metaview, an AI-powered note-taking app for recruiters and hiring managers that information, 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 knowledge 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, cellphone techniques, videoconferencing platforms and instruments like Calendly and GoodTime to mechanically seize the content material of interviews. Magos says the platform “accounts for the nuances of recruiting conversations” and “enriches itself with knowledge from different sources,” resembling applicant monitoring techniques, to focus on probably the most related moments.
“Zoom, Microsoft Groups and Google Meet all have transcription inbuilt, which is a potential different to Metaview,” Magos stated. “However the data that Metaview’s AI pulls out from interviews is much extra related to the recruiting use case than generic alternate options, and we additionally help customers with the following steps of their recruiting workflows in and round these conversations.”
Definitely, there’s lots unsuitable with conventional job interviewing, and a note-taking and conversation-analyzing app like Metaview might assist, at the very least in principle. As a chunk in Psychology Right this moment notes, the human mind is rife with biases that hinder our judgement and resolution making, for instance an inclination to rely too closely on the primary piece of data provided and to interpret data in a method that confirms our preexisting beliefs.
The query is, does Metaview work — and, extra importantly, work equally properly for all customers?
Even the most effective AI-powered speech dictation techniques undergo from their very own biases. A Stanford research confirmed that error charges for Black audio system on speech-to-text providers from Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM and Microsoft are almost double these for white audio system. One other, newer research revealed within the journal Pc Speech and Language discovered statistically vital variations in the best way 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 current story, The Wall Road 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 had been about topics that had 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 knowledge is various sufficient to yield fashions that “surpass human efficiency” on recruitment workflows and carry out properly on widespread benchmarks for bias.
I’m skeptical and a bit cautious, too, of Metaview’s method to the way it handles speech knowledge. Magos says that Metaview shops dialog knowledge for 2 years by default except customers request that the information be deleted. That looks as if an exceptionally very long time.
However none of this seems to have affected Metaview’s capacity to get funding or prospects.
Metaview this month raised $7 million from buyers 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 firms, Magos says, together with Brex, Quora, Pleo and Inconceivable — and it’s grown 2,000% year-over-year.
“The cash shall be used to develop the product and engineering crew primarily, and provides extra gas to our gross sales and advertising efforts,” Magos stated. “We are going to triple the product and engineering crew, additional fine-tune our dialog synthesis engine so our AI is mechanically extracting precisely the suitable data our prospects want and develop techniques to proactively detect points like inconsistencies within the interview course of and candidates that look like shedding curiosity.”