IVP's Future Of Work Podcast: Eightfold.ai CEO & Co-Founder Ashutosh Garg on Technology's Role in Finding, Hiring, and Retaining Talent

Welcome to a special edition of IVP's Future of Work Podcast. In this series, IVP investors talk with experts from the fastest-growing companies and discuss the ins-and-outs of the future of work in the ever-changing environment.

In our last episode of a three-part future of work series, IVP Partner, Cack Wilhelm, talks with Eightfold.ai CEO and co-founder, Ashutosh Garg, about technology's influence on the future of hiring.

Ashutosh is a founder and former CTO of BloomReach and has held research scientist roles at Compaq, IBM, and Google. Over the years, he's produced over 6000 research citations, 50 patents, 35 peer-reviewed research publications, and claimed the Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis Award from UIUC for Machine Learning. He's also a published author of the book What's Next for You - The Eightfold Path To Transforming The Way We Hire And Manage Talent. Quite simply, he's a preeminent expert in machine learning.

IVP invested in Eightfold's Series C in April of 2019 to help companies improve talent management, recruiting, and retention achieving diversity goals and improving employment accuracy at scale. Eightfold is founded on the mission of empowering organizations to transform how they hire, train, and retain a diverse workforce.

Here are a few podcast highlights to help company leaders with talent management:

Shift From Employer to Employee-Centric

If you focus on employees, you will do better as a company than if you just focus on the company, not the employees.

In the past twenty years, the world has materially changed, given technology's influence on communication and interaction. This shift has also changed employment, with employees switching jobs every two or three years and careers every seven or eight years. To stay successful, companies have moved away from treating employees as a resource to an actual human with goals, aspirations, and motivations. This shift creates respect, retention, and nods to the changing workforce, underlining key learning: if you understand people, put them in the right place, and allow them room to grow, they thrive - and so does the company.

Recognize Bias in Hiring and Take Steps to Address It

One of the biggest differences between machines and humans is the ability to forget and ignore.

Strategically using AI in business operations comes with an inherent ethical responsibility. Eightfold understands this responsibility and takes a multifaceted approach to address it. Using career data from more than one billion people, the company is ensuring they're using a large enough data set. They then use equal parity algorithms to make sure that, at every step of the process, the behavior of algorithms is independent of people's characteristics like race, gender, ethnicity, age, and other characteristics. With enough audit and monitoring processes in place, a transparent system emerges with functionality, like masking, to improve results. Eightfold puts all of these levers into place to measure how a candidate moves through the hiring process, while significantly reducing the potential for bias in the hiring process.

Eightfold.ai Creates Talent Exchange for Those Impacted by COVID-19

Amid the mass layoffs driven by the pandemic, Eightfold is connecting displaced workers with the right jobs. Talent Exchange is a nationwide marketplace connecting HR and business leaders to immediately employ associates whose jobs are impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. It understands skills and job requirements on a large scale. Eightfold, in partnership with The Food Industry Association (FMI.org) and supported by McKinsey & Company, is providing the platform free of charge.

More from the full conversation in the transcript is below.

To hear more, listen on iTunes or SoundCloud.

TRANSCRIPT

Narrator: Welcome to IVP's Future of Work Podcast. In this series, we talk with experts from the fastest-growing companies and discuss the ins-and-outs of the future of work in the ever-changing environment. If you like what you hear, consider following us on SoundCloud or subscribing to our podcast on iTunes. Thanks, and enjoy the show.

Cack Wilhelm: Welcome back to a special edition podcast on the future of work. In this third episode, I talk with Ashutosh Garg, who's currently the founder and CEO of IVP-portfolio company Eightfold. He is the second time founder having started BloomReach, and also a former research scientist at Compaq, IBM, and Google.

Cack Wilhelm: Ashutosh, thanks for joining us. Let me quickly give your bio. So you graduated from IIT, Delhi, and you're in the IIT mafia, followed by a Ph.D. at Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. You then held a number of illustrious research positions, first at Compaq, then IBM, then Google. Now Eightfold is your second startup. You're originally a founder and CTO at BloomReach, where you stayed for almost nine years, and most recently the founder and CEO at Eightfold. Let's do this; if you could take a minute and explain Eightfold in your words, I think that would be helpful for our audience.

Ashutosh Garg: Eightfold is a company focused on the mission of providing the right career to everyone in the world. We started the company three years back, and today we have built a talent intelligence platform that is being used by some of the largest employers in the world to hire, engage, retain, and build a diverse workforce.

Cack Wilhelm: Okay, great. So, I mean, let's start broadly. I think Eightfold really emphasizes the early stages of talent management, starting with hiring, all the way through to employee management, and then the ongoing experience once you're hired. Another company in our portfolio, Humu, who's also on this podcast, is focused heavily on taking what is the existing talent base and then creating that stronger purpose and pro

LINK:	https://www.ivp.com/news/podcast/ivps-future-of-work-podcast-eightfold...
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