Interview: The future of talent acquisition

With only four months in operation, Hitch entered the market to revolutionize the way talent is acquired and retained thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning. 

Gabriela Ceballos, José Arreola, Raúl Arrabales, Jordi Greenham, Daniel Fernández and Alejandro García Santos have a mission: to help thousands of companies in the coming years to hire better. On this occasion, Jordi Greenham gave us an exclusive interview where he tells us more about Hitch.

 

What is Hitch? How was the idea of creating a platform specialized in talent acquisition born? 

Jordi Greenham: We are a team of serial entrepreneurs. Before starting Hitch, a couple of us worked at Michael Page, a large headhunting company. This experience gave us the opportunity to understand the pains of attracting new talent and recruiting people. Sometime later we experienced it in our own projects.

In a company I founded previously, I went from 30 employees to 200 in just one year. That growth in such a short time made us realize that there were many opportunities in the industry. These are processes that have not been touched by technology and this was definitely an opportunity. The idea of Hitch is to use the tools that technology puts at our disposal in different areas to design a more efficient and faster recruitment process, but above all, a more accurate one.

We want you, as a company, to hire the right person for the position, for the company’s philosophy, to integrate into the team, and adopt the organizational culture. Sometimes we don’t look at that, recruiters focus on hard skills and not so much on aligning the person with the company and the other way around.

 

What does Hitch mean by talent acquisition 4.0? 

J.G.: It’s just talking about the use of technology. We are using technology to empower the human resources industry. In fact, we like to call it talent or people. Using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning we make processes more efficient and more accurate. Although the use of AI is very important, the human factor will always be in our processes.

We give companies a shortlist, they interview candidates in person and we always come back to this human factor. What AI allows us to do is to eliminate bias. When you meet a person you get a very subjective impression. Through technology and an automated process, you can hire better, generate more diversity and inclusion in work teams.

 

What do you think are the most frequent vices in the recruiting industry?

J.G.: Without a doubt, bias. Many times people are left with what is written on the resumes and from there the biases start. Even in interviews, we face recruiters or companies that discard employees because they didn’t like them in the interview. This has nothing to do with their performance within the team. We generate a totally objective process, we understand the needs of the company and the vacancy. Through an automated process, we select the people we think are suitable based not only on hard skills but also on soft skills.

 

Do you specialize in any industry? 

J.G.: For now we are focusing on technology because those are the industries that need to hire more people today. This does not mean that we do not serve more traditional companies; perhaps they need our help more because they do not have that technological DNA. Currently, the time to hire for a traditional company is one and a half to two months. With Hitch, in one week you already have a shortlist of finalist candidates.

 

How do you envision the future of recruiting? 

J.G.: I don’t see an industry without people. This is a key factor in the processes. What I see is a way to streamline processes by providing information to the people who will eventually make the decision. Our model will totally change how it works today.

Currently, the recruiter does everything. He posts the vacancy, selects the profiles he likes, interviews potential candidates, passes them on to a second round. With Hitch, this will change completely. The recruiter will publish the vacancy through our platform and, as if by magic, after a week or two, he will receive a shortlist with the finalist candidates and will concentrate only on meeting the tip of the iceberg.

If you are interested in contacting them, write to [email protected]


Tania Garay.

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