Affintus solves a major pain point for businesses
Have you ever tried to put a monetary value on the hiring process? A software as a service (SaaS) product, Affintus has, and they feel they’ve designed a system that is going to streamline your hiring process by eliminating up to 90 percent of the time it takes to choose candidates, by focusing your interviews on truly applicable prospects, and by ultimately making a surer hiring decision.
It’s an algorithm. Like a dating site or one of those ACT interest inventories from high school, Affintus measures a candidate’s application against the job and the other candidates applying for the job to see who of all the resumes you’ve received is the best fit for the interview process. Sounds ingenious.
Proof that this idea works
There is a prototype for this type of hiring process – the civil service industry, whose job opportunities are posted on a site called USAJobs.gov, has been running a streamlining process for years. Because of the vast number of applicants for state and federal positions, USAjobs.gov runs a software matching program against its applicants highlighting certain buzz words in a resume that are applicable to the position in question. It gives points to the applicant for each word match. It also scans applications for information like prior military service or civil service, retired military, war veterans, and disabled vets, and it gives a certain number of points to applicants for each of these categories as well. The top five to ten scoring candidates are identified, so a hiring manager begins the process with only qualified candidates.
It is a valid system in that it measures what it was designed to measure, but is it reliable –is it consistently correct in its suggestions for highly qualified candidates? To test that information, one would need to use the system several times and compare the outcomes. It is likely to be spot on repeatedly for some companies –perhaps those with more objective products that deal with numbers, statistics, etc., while it is likely to be inconsistent for companies whose products are more subjective like writing, service industries, and human relations.
With the claims that using the SaaS Affintus can cut your costs exponentially, it is a service worth trying out, particularly as it addresses one of the major pain points for businesses: hiring. It may save you money, land you the best of the best employees, and therefore enhance your business. Just don’t skip the whole interview process and automatically hire the system’s first suggestion—because a person invented a perfectly valid machine, but a machine can’t invent a person.
Kristyl Barron holds a BA in English Education from the University of Central Oklahoma and an MHR in Counseling/Organizational Management from the University of Oklahoma. Barron has been writing professionally since 2008, and projects include a memoir entitled Give Your Brother Back His Barbie and an in progress motivational book called Aspies Among Us.