More About Hari Kolam :
Findem is the only talent data platform that combines 3D data with AI. It automates and consolidates top-of-funnel activities across your entire talent ecosystem, bringing together sourcing, CRM and analytics into one place. Findem’s 3D data connects people and company data over time — making an individual’s entire career instantly accessible in a single click, removing the guesswork and unlocking insights about the market and your competition no one else can. Powered by 3D data, Findem’s automated workflows across the talent lifecycle are the ultimate competitive advantage. Enabling talent teams to deliver continuous pipelines of top, diverse candidates while creating better talent experiences, Findem transforms the way companies plan, hire and manage talent. To know more: www.findem.ai
Welcome, Hari; it’s great to have you here. Tell us more about what inspired you to co-found Findem and your vision for the company.
My journey into the world of HR was a blend of academic exploration and a growing curiosity about the dynamics between employees and employers.
I was an engineer before I became an entrepreneur. Both my journeys started with the desire to tackle the most challenging problem that could have the largest impact. The idea for Findem actually began with a problem I had as co-founder of Instart. Any entrepreneur will tell you how critical it is to get the right people into your key positions, and it becomes exponentially more difficult when you’re in high-growth mode.
To grow at Instart, we had to build and scale the team in short order. Usually, this effort involves brute force along with a human component. However, I began to realize that, at its core, it was a data problem and that’s how it should be approached. Could we use deep learning to make connections from all of the publicly available people and company data? Could that multidimensional or 3D data be used with AI to raise the level of decision making possible by people in leadership? What started as a kernel of an idea transformed into a passion project and eventually evolved into Findem.
Our vision at Findem is to be at the forefront of AI-first transformation, to automate everything that can be automated in talent acquisition and management, while equipping humans with the context and insights to handle the rest. That automation gives people the confidence and capacity to more effectively build and scale their teams. This approach works in both a growth market and a contracting market, which makes it even more compelling in times like these.
Talent teams that embrace AI-first transformation will be way ahead of competitors in realizing their full potential of efficiency and value-creating outcomes that drive business success. The entire talent organization gets elevated. Instead of focusing on sourcing talent, people will dedicate their time to qualifying sourced candidates. Instead of managing nurturing campaigns, they’ll spend time coaching candidates and hiring managers to improve speed and quality of hire. Our Talent Data Cloud is strongly positioned to support this tectonic shift.
How does Findem use AI and contextual logic to find candidates based on their attributes rather than keywords?
When I talk about brute force vs. data problem, people search is a perfect example. Most talent sourcing tools use broad match or keyword match and, in these cases, you’re matching exact words rather than intent. That’s why the best recruiters have massive Boolean strings that they have tested and refined over the years or extensive networks. However, their reach is a small subset of the vast world of talent and the massive datasets available.
Findem approaches people search using attributes rather than keywords. If you want product marketing managers who worked at Google, you don’t want an intern at an agency on a Google account who is now a product manager at a 10-person company, which is what you’re likely to turn up with keyword-based searches. Our 3D data – data on people and company over time – connects the dots for you so you can search by intent instead of keywords.
Here’s how it works. Our Talent Data Cloud ingests and continuously refreshes 1.6 trillion data points on people and companies from more than 100,000 sources, such as Census, education, code contributions, publications and funding announcements. Machine learning contextualizes and time orders this data to generate entirely new talent data called attributes from the skills, experiences and characteristics of individuals and companies. This 3D data, which is impossible to glean from resumes and LinkedIn, enables HR teams to search using practically any criteria for candidates to find the exact matches for their open positions.
Attributes can be tangible, such as “has worked as a software engineer,” or intangible, such as whether an individual has seen a company to a successful exit, builds diverse teams or is mission driven.
Because Findem brings data together, we’re able to conduct an attribute search across multiple channels at once. Again, the brute force approach is to conduct a search across separate systems and then manually consolidate the results. But, if you connect your internal systems to Findem, it’s all available – internal employees, alumni, referrals and past applicants, as well as external talent. Our customers have found that this approach to talent search leads them to the perfect candidates in a fraction of the time, and enables them to prioritize outreach to the warmest leads first.
How does Findem leverage generative AI in its talent acquisition and management platform to create personalized and engaging candidate outreach messages?
Generative AI (GenAI) gives people this incredible way to ask questions and get answers from the world’s data. We see lots of talent acquisition professionals using GenAI to help with outreach, email and other parts of their work. But, there are three main limitations of using public large language models (LLMs): privacy, context and hallucinations. Findem helps companies address these limitations by using our own 3D data and providing context to questions by integrating GenAI prompts into workflows. This approach protects data privacy and enables a human-in-the-loop approach to validate intent.
From what I’ve seen in the market, Findem has one of the deepest integrations of GenAI to date in talent acquisition and management. GenAI functionality is integrated throughout our workflows rather than being a bolt-on. Through our foundation of 3D data and responsible AI approach, talent professionals can get trusted AI-assisted answers to questions that no one else can answer about talent pools, candidates and the market.
Our AI assistant for candidate research is a great example of what can be done with GenAI in context with the right data foundation. We want people to have the confidence to ask Findem these types of questions:
1. Show me senior software engineers with the highest rated code on Github with the propensity to consider another opportunity
2. Who are the people within my organization who have been with the company one year and would be great for this job?
3. Does this executive build diverse teams?
4. Where are the bottlenecks in my current recruiting process?
5. What companies are our former salespeople at?
6. What are the attributes of software engineers at FANG companies?
We are excited to know how you enable diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) in hiring.
We have found that our technology empowers more diversity in hiring, plus it can give candidates a more level playing field in their job search process. It does this by reducing bias in the hiring process, which has long boxed out qualified and diverse prospects, particularly those from underrepresented groups (ethnic backgrounds, different genders, older adults, veteran status, etc.)
Central to our process is the establishment of a Culture & Policy Committee, a collective body that embodies cross-functional collaboration. Comprising not only HR leaders but also business leaders and dedicated representatives focused on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), this committee ensures we have a spectrum of viewpoints and experiences shaping our policies.
Findem automatically and compliantly prioritizes qualified underrepresented candidates based on a company’s diversity definition. But we know that diversity comes not just from a more diverse talent pool, but a more equitable process. With our data-driven approach and visibility across all channels in the funnel, we can show you diversity at every stage and within each channel. That visibility helps companies address issues and promote fair and inclusive behavior.
One of the areas we’ve seen Findem really make a difference is in the conversations recruiters are having with hiring managers. With real-time talent pool insights, a recruiter can show a hiring manager whether or not requirements expand or reduce diversity in the hiring pool. Location maps identify areas for expansion or outreach to attract a more diverse candidate pool. One of our customers is using diversity information about competitors available through Findem to attract candidates.
Can you share some customer stories or use cases that showcase Findem’s impact and value proposition?
Yes, I always welcome the chance to talk about our customers’ successes. We love to see what we’re doing to help them meet their goals.
One that immediately comes to mind is Path. Within just four weeks of deploying Findem, Path doubled the size of its engineering team. They were able to hire 4x faster than before. This immediate success was the flywheel for the company’s success in achieving its growth goals. With Findem at the center of the recruiting stack, the time-to-fill open positions now averages four weeks from start to finish. This results in an incredible 70-80% acceleration. Recruiters have more confidence that they will be able to achieve their goals and offer hiring managers top talent to grow their teams. Plus, Findem is driving gender balance on the engineering team, having already boosted the response rate from female candidates from 5% with their previous online platform to 28%.
One that immediately comes to mind is Path. Within just four weeks of deploying Findem, Path doubled the size of its engineering team. They were able to hire 4x faster than before. This immediate success was the flywheel for the company’s success in achieving its growth goals. With Findem at the center of the recruiting stack, the time-to-fill open positions now averages four weeks from start to finish. This results in an incredible 70-80% acceleration. Recruiters have more confidence that they will be able to achieve their goals and offer hiring managers top talent to grow their teams. Plus, Findem is driving gender balance on the engineering team, having already boosted the response rate from female candidates from 5% with their previous online platform to 28%.
Another customer who we’ve seen have tremendous success is Boulevard, a SaaS company that provides fintech and scheduling for the self-care industry. Their VP of talent acquisition wanted to uplevel the candidate experience, knowing that a stellar experience makes people feel valued and wanted. Boulevard’s talent team was getting frustrated with their broad-match searches that generated candidate pools that took a lot of time and effort to validate, plus recruiters were working with disconnected tools and had to sync on candidates with hiring managers using Google Sheets. They needed better search capabilities and more automation to free their time to engage with the right talent.
Our precision search, which surfaces rich, 3D candidate profiles, provided immediate success for Boulevard. They’re confident that they’re reaching the right people, and their recruiter-hiring manager collaboration is better than ever now that they’re able to identify and engage with top-quality candidates in a highly efficient way. By applying data and automation for search, hiring manager coordination and outreach, Boulevard had more time to focus on the human touch at the bottom of the funnel, and that’s enabling them to win over top candidates.
What are some of the trending issues and innovations that excite you in the HR technology landscape?
There’s so much transformation taking place right now and it’s been really fun to be in the center of it all. I think talent will see extraordinary advancement thanks to AI because it’s been historically behind other business functions when it comes to digitization and digital transformation.
The most exciting trends to me involve GenAI and AI-first transformation of talent teams, hyper-automation of talent acquisition and management processes, and the growth of talent communities to support in-flux hiring.
How do you foster a culture of innovation and collaboration within your team and the company?
It’s important to prioritize and build a “we’re in it together” culture that permeates each team and across the entire organization. The positive energy of everyone pulling in the same direction sets the tone for a collaborative and trusting work environment that people want to work within over the long term. Findem employees know that their colleagues have their back and will be there to help navigate through any issues that may arise. We also have a company-wide process to celebrate every win – no matter how large or small – including a very active Slack channel for team shoutouts and an office gong that we strike when we have a big success.
If you were to give three takeaways from this interview for people who are aspiring to be entrepreneurs, what would they be?
They would be:
1) Prioritize building a great team from the start
2) Put innovation at the forefront of your business
3) Focus on diversity because it leads to more creativity, innovation and business success
