This startup predicts whether a job candidate will be a good hire

Jay Huang and Peter Yoong first met at CtrlShift, a digital advertising company which the latter co-founded. Back then, Huang was struck by how personalized online advertisements could be based on one’s browsing history, and he saw the potential to replicate these predictive models in the human resource sector. A few years later in 2016, the pair started people analytics software company Pulsifi.

Today, as Huang sums up, they want to help “put people in roles that really fit them in terms of what they’re passionate about, what they’re good at doing, and what they can grow at.”

Pulsifi Founder Peter Yoong (L) and CEO Jay Huang (R) / Photo credit: Pulsifi

Based in Singapore and Malaysia, Pulsifi makes hiring recommendations based on a mix of hard and soft skills. Combining organizational psychology, predictive models, and machine learning, the platform comes up with a well-rounded evaluation of a prospective hire or an existing employee being considered for a promotion.

“Broken” HR hiring practices

A failure point in the hiring process, Huang says, is that HR managers are often looking for skills such as good communication, teamwork, and grit, which cannot be found in curriculum vitaes. Still, HR managers rely heavily on CVs to source potential candidates. “It’s no wonder that the HR process is so broken,” Huang laments.

Beyond the quintessential resume, information is sourced from other data points such as social media profiles, psychometric evaluations, competency tests, and testimonials. Pulsifi takes that data, runs it through its predictive models, then makes a recommendation by giving a score indicating the candidates’ potential suitability for the role.

“Sometimes it’s not about what you find in their CV. Sometimes it’s about their personality, interests, values,” Huang says.

A sample profile of a candidate / Photo credit: Pulsifi

You could think of Pulsifi’s evaluations as a holistic summary of a person. “Most people have looked at it very vertically,” Yoong says. Many companies in the hiring space are focused on either video interviews, game-based assessments, competency tests or psychometric assessments – but not all of them.

“LinkedIn is really good at understanding skills, psychometric companies are good in understanding the psychological makeup of a person… there are companies that solve for culture fit, things that map performance planning, or performance management,” Yoong observes. “But all these are separate silos of data, and we’re trying to merge this data, put this in a framework to understand people, and apply it all across the organization.”

One of Pulsifi’s strengths is how it can combine externally available information about candidates – which, apart from CVs, includes their public social media presence and online footprint – with internal employee data such as performance results and training records.

Yoong is quick to stress that the algorithm is gender-neutral. Other elements such as age and ethnic background do not factor in either.

Pulsifi has its own team of psychologists and data scientists that create psychometric evaluations, but it has also teamed up with companies that design such assessments. It also has partnerships with software company SAP through which it’s able to harness vast amounts of internal employee info, and Astronaut, a video interview platform. Pulsifi is now looking at working with professional network LinkedIn, one of its data sources.

Targeting multinational corporations

A focus on scale and going global