Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder...

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Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co- Founder and CTO, Synerzip

Transcript of Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder...

Page 1: Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder and CTO, Synerzip.

Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning

December 18, 2014

Presented by

Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder and CTO, Synerzip

Page 2: Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder and CTO, Synerzip.

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Discussion Topics

1. The Problem

2. Lean Hiring

3. Resume Ranking - Choice of Algorithm

4. Data Acquisition and Cleaning Challenges

5. Initial Results

6. Improving Accuracy

7. The Road Ahead

December 18, 2014

Page 3: Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder and CTO, Synerzip.

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Needle in the Haystack Situation1. Waste in the process of hiring =

resumes reviewed but not selected + candidates interviewed but not selected.

2. Every candidate “hypes” the resume to a certain extent. Much time is wasted reading pages of hyperbole to discover the grain of truth.

3. Hiring managers have other priorities - their precious time is wasted in interviewing unsuitable candidates whose resumes look good.

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Page 4: Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder and CTO, Synerzip.

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Can I see some more resumes?

Send Some more

Some more please

Is this all you have?

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Feedback after 4 weeks

Myth: More choice = better selection

Reality: More choice = waste + delay + confusion

More Choice Isn’t Always Better

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Make Them Jump through Hoops1. Common response to the

problem is to have a strict filtration process consisting of series of tests and interviews.

2. Good candidates are often not actively looking for a change. They get turned off by the long evaluation process.

3. The evaluation process is often flawed with too much stress on specific skills than abilities. Tests are susceptible to gaming.

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Page 6: Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder and CTO, Synerzip.

1. The Problem

2. Lean Hiring

3. Resume Ranking- Choice of Algorithm

4. Data Acquisition and Cleaning Challenges

5. Initial Results

6. Improving Accuracy

7. The Road Ahead

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Discussion Topics

December 18, 2014

Page 7: Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder and CTO, Synerzip.

Kanban• Extensively used in automobile industry.

• Principle: Any process consisting of a workflow can’t run faster than the bottleneck.

• All sub-processes that run faster than the bottleneck produce waste.

• Kanban ensures all sub-processes march to the drum-beat set by the bottleneck.

• Kanban is pull-based. A sub-process can’t pull more work than a pre-set WIP limit.

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Page 8: Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder and CTO, Synerzip.

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Solution: Lets Limit the Choice!

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Challenge: Ranking Resumes

Job 1 Job 2 Job 3 Job 4

Expected Pay

Experience

Education

Job Switches

Soft skills

Location

Lead Time

It took half a day for an experienced recruiter to rank a few resumes. He kept asking what was more important: Was it pay, soft skills or experience? The answer is that it depends on the job. Each job needs a different weightage to be assigned to each one of these attributes. Thus ranking reduces to assigning appropriate weightages to the attributes.

December 18, 2014

Page 10: Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder and CTO, Synerzip.

1. The Problem

2. Lean Hiring

3. Resume Ranking- Choice of Algorithm

4. Data Acquisition and Cleaning Challenges

5. Initial Results

6. Improving Accuracy

7. The Road Ahead

Confidential

Discussion Topics

December 18, 2014

Page 11: Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder and CTO, Synerzip.

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Why Logistic Regression?• Training a machine learning algorithm for resume ranking would

require a significant number of resumes that are pre-ranked by a human expert.

• It is very difficult for human expert to rank resumes.

• On the other hand we have a lot of resumes that are classified as suitable or unsuitable which can be used to train the logistic regression algorithm.

The graph here shows how the probability of a resume being suitable depends on the attributes (X) and the weights assigned to them (θ) hθ(X)=1/(1+e-Z) where

Z= θ1X1+ θ2X2 +…+ θnXn where

X1,X2,..,Xn are various attributes and

θ1,θ2 ,..,θn are the weights assigned to

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Page 12: Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder and CTO, Synerzip.

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What is Decision Boundary?

• x1 = experience and x2 = pay

• 1 = suitable and 0 = unsuitable

• Observation 1: More pay reduces the probability of selection and more experience increases the same

• Decision boundary is an imaginary line that separates suitable & unsuitable examples

• In this case the line is x1-x2-3=0

• Points below the line are likely to be suitable

• Points above the line are likely to be unsuitable

• Points along the line have equal probability of being suitable or unsuitable – hence hθ(X)=.5 & θTX=0 along this line

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Training, Test & Validation Sets

Testing is the measure the accuracy with which true positives and true negatives are predicted by the algorithm. In tests like cancer

detection; false negatives can prove to be fatal.

InputSupervised Learning Algorithm

Training Set(60%)

Output

Validation

Testing

Validation Set (20%)

Test Set (20%)

Over/ under fitting?

Valid

Test

Validation

Training

Available Data

}60%

}20%

}20%

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Implementation Challenges

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Decision Boundary

• Very difficult to manually rank/ grade resumes thus we can’t use standard ranking algorithms.

• Small training sets, even smaller test sets.

• There are more than 13 attributes - experience, education, pay, location, availability, stability, current job, etc. based on which a candidate is selected or rejected. Many of these attributes are subjective and need to be quantified.

• There is no clear decision boundary.

• We addressed these challenges by using data from our ATS about 20 job openings for which more than 3000 resumes were considered and more than 400 candidates were found suitable to be called for interview.

• We used a sixth degree polynomial that lends itself well to render a decision boundary with an irregular shape.

• We quantified the subjective attributes like education, stability etc.

• We used every 4th record to test and others to train the algorithm.

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Page 15: Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder and CTO, Synerzip.

1. The Problem

2. Lean Hiring

3. Resume Ranking- Choice of Algorithm

4. Data Acquisition and Cleaning Challenges

5. Initial Results

6. Improving Accuracy

7. The Road Ahead

Confidential

Discussion Topics

December 18, 2014

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Results and Analysis• When we used the values of weightages delivered by the

algorithm to predict, we could correctly predict 89% of the examples in the training set that was used to train the algorithm.

• The same algorithm could predict 65% of the test examples.

• We improved the accuracy by 9% when we used the sixth degree polynomial.

• We used the weightages to assign ranks and the ranking was well accepted and appreciated by hiring managers within Synerzip.

• We started practicing Kanban and lean hiring as ranking enabled us to put WIP limit on the number of resumes entering the hiring process.

• The hiring efficiency improved and we were able to fill in more positions without adding any new recruiters.

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Example Weightages - AnalysisIt turns out to be a fairly distributed set of values for weightages for various attributes. Each job opening uses independent assessment of resumes.

This job opening gives extremely negative weightage to “current compensation” – this means that candidates earning well are not suitable; while its just the opposite case for most other job openings.

This position assigns positive weightage to total experience but negative weightage to relevant experience. The requirement was for a broader skillset beyond just C++.

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Comparing Results

Before After

Hiring Cycle Time 6 to 8 weeks 3 to 4 weeks

Hit Rate Less than 10% Almost 50%

Hiring Manager’s Time per hire

15 to 25 hours per position

Less than 10 hours per position

Recruiter’s time per hire

Close to 100 hours per position

Less than 40 hours per position

Hiring Mistakes Low confidence High confidence

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Page 19: Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder and CTO, Synerzip.

1. The Problem

2. Lean Hiring

3. Resume Ranking- Choice of Algorithm

4. Data Acquisition and Cleaning Challenges

5. Initial Results

6. Improving Accuracy

7. The Road Ahead

Confidential

Discussion Topics

December 18, 2014

Page 20: Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder and CTO, Synerzip.

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Improving Accuracy• We tried using regularization to avoid over-fitting. However it did

not yield any improvement in accuracy. As we have the accuracy at 89% while predicting the training set itself, it can be intuitively concluded that over-fitting doesn’t need to be addressed.

• We need to get more training data to improve accuracy. Also the training data should pertain to a period over which the job requirements are constant. It’s very hard to find job openings where more than a hundred candidates are screened. As we plan to implement lean hiring and Kanban, the chances of having large training sets is very low.

• We tried seeing if principal component analysis can be used to reduce the number of attributes to 2 or 3 to be able to plot. We could not get the “retained variance” anywhere close to 99%. (In fact, it was close to 50%.)

December 18, 2014

Page 21: Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder and CTO, Synerzip.

1. The Problem

2. Lean Hiring

3. Resume Ranking- Choice of Algorithm

4. Data Acquisition and Cleaning Challenges

5. Initial Results

6. Improving Accuracy

7. The Road Ahead

Confidential

Discussion Topics

December 18, 2014

Page 22: Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder and CTO, Synerzip.

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Future Roadmap• Create search engine app with ranking on the

fly to limit the number of search results that fit within the smartphone screen with no need to scroll.

• Try using sixth degree polynomial with more attributes. Currently we are using it only on expected compensation and relevant experience. This will most likely improve the accuracy.

• Using NLP for information extraction and more precise attribute values.

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Page 23: Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder and CTO, Synerzip.

•2384

www.synerzip.comHemant Elhence

[email protected]

December 18, 2014Confidential

Page 24: Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder and CTO, Synerzip.

Synerzip in a Nutshell• Software product development partner for small/mid-sized technology

companies– Exclusive focus on small/mid-sized technology companies, typically

venture-backed companies in growth phase– By definition, all Synerzip work is the IP of its respective clients– Deep experience in full SDLC – design, dev, QA/testing, deployment

• Dedicated team of high caliber software professionals for each client– Seamlessly extends client’s local team, offering full transparency– Stable teams with very low turn-over– NOT just “staff augmentation”, but provide full mgmt support

• Actually reduces risk of development/delivery– Experienced team - uses appropriate level of engineering discipline– Practices Agile development – responsive, yet disciplined

• Reduces cost – dual-shore team, 50% cost advantage• Offers long term flexibility – allows (facilitates) taking offshore team

captive – aka “BOT” option

December 18, 2014Confidential

Page 26: Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder and CTO, Synerzip.

Next Webinar

December 18, 2014Confidential

Agile Leadership: Want to change your results?Change how you lead.

Complimentary Webinar: Wednesday, January 21, 2015 @ noon CST

Presented by: Niel Nickolaisen, Chief Technology Officer at OC Tanner.  He also co-authored

“Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility”

which gives you the agile leadership tools you’ll need to achieve breakthrough levels of

performance.

Page 27: Lean Hiring Aided by Machine Learning December 18, 2014 Presented by Vinayak Joglekar, Co-Founder and CTO, Synerzip.

Call Us for a Free Consultation!

Hemant Elhence [email protected]

469.374.0500

Thanks!

@Synerzip_Agilelinkedin.com/company/synerzip

facebook.com/Synerzip

December 18, 2014Confidential