UNTAPT

CASE STUDY - 2
Reducing "False Positives" in Candidate
Searches

MAR 2019 // PREPARED BY DR JON KROHN

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PROBLEM
A global recruitment agency mines a large database of candidates against thousands of open
opportunities that they work each year. Their search identifies excessive “false positives”, misses
high quality candidates, wasting revenue opportunity and time.

REQUIREMENT
The client wanted a way to reduce the time wasted by its recruitment teams scanning through
resumes that were not suitable for the given requisition and have an algorithm to automate this
process.
The client had a vision to run a tech lead recruitment business where much of the manual
process of sourcing and matching candidates is removed. The idea is to free up resource to
focus on building relationships with both client and candidate.

PROJECT TIMELINE &

ACTIONS TAKEN
This was a 4 month project
Weekly meetings took place between data scientists, recruiters and client innovation team
New results were delivered every other week, and daily communication took place via project-
specific Slack channel
Six in-person visits were made to the client in their New York and London offices
In-house recruiters were interviewed to identify “best practices”, enabling custom feature
development for model
Iterative improvements were made to model results with feedback from in-house experts
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DATA PROVIDED TO
UNTAPT
220,000 candidates profiles/resumes
6 job descriptions, all for software
developers working in financial services

RESULTS
When the client kept their existing search simple (1 factor only), results captured 60% to 100%
of the top decile of candidates, but also included thousands of unsuitable candidates.
When“I have
3 or never
moreworked
factorswith a vendor
were thatinto
entered went above
the and search, under 10% of the bottom decile
Boolean
madebeyond” as untapt
it through, butdid".
barely over 50% of the top decile did.

To assess the reliability of the untapt candidate search, the client performed a “Turing test”
where by a human recruiter and the algorithm had to rank a sample of 10 candidates for a given
position. The untapt model’s ranking of candidates proved indistinguishable from the specialist
recruiters’. The model rankings were instant while the human recruiter required 15 minutes

This culminated in embedding the untapt model within a custom-built two-sided marketplace for
semi-automating the management of candidate applications and clients’ job descriptions