Filtered
Reimagining the Fundamentals of Recruiting

Acquisition of top technical talent has never been tougher. As the war for talent rages on unabated, organizations embarking on digital transformation are beginning to rethink their recruitment strategies. A thought that lingers on is whether they have the right people, consulting partners, and processes in place to attract, assess, hire, and retain people talented in emerging technology. Filtered addresses this dilemma, a novel firm positioned to help clients win the talent acquisition war.

Filtered’s ingenuity can be best exemplified by the way it helped a Fortune 500 company that was struggling to hire over 1,000 recruits in domains they hadn’t hired for before, reduce time-to-hire and total cost-per-hire by more than 20x and 100x, respectively. The client needed to hire machine learning engineers, data scientists, cloud architects, and more. Even after being supported by various staffing companies and the internal talent a c q u i s i t i o n team, the interview-to-hire ratio was a mere four percent on a base of 1,627 final round i nt e r v iews . To add to their woes, 23 percent of candidates that were offered a job said: No, thanks. Naturally, this drove the cost per hire to a whopping $40,000 per candidate and, as Filtered later discovered, a 17 percent interview fraud. The talent acquisition manager felt that things were spiraling out of control and the situation demanded swift action.

Filtered entered the scene, the results: the interview-to-hire ratio improved from four percent to 58 percent, by pushing all candidates through the “Filtered interview” as the first step in the process. The interview was a combination of video interview questions and a coding exercise or a job-related task. Interview scheduling was done via interview channels and whenever a candidate passed the Filtered test, a link to the interview was sent to the channel for the internal team to review and an interview was scheduled within 48 hours.

“The candidates were added to the client’s talent pipeline only if they met or exceeded the scoring threshold based on benchmarking against internal teams,” explains Paul Bilodeau, CEO of Filtered.

Filtered clients have reduced time-to-hire by an order of magnitude while saving many thousands of dollars in the process

Consequently, the cost-per-hire went down to less than $400 by eliminating three processes and blocking over 10,000 unqualified and under qualified candidates from entering the funnel. With this approach, the time taken to hire came down to five days from 127 days. Rejected or withdrawn candidates dropped from 23 percent to less than three percent. Furthermore, the occurrence of interview fraud declined to less than one percent as Filtered had spent close to 6000 hours on developing fraud detection tools, utilizing machine learning, computer vision, plagiarism detection algorithms, and authenticating candidates’ identity via LinkedIn, Bitbucket, GitHub, and GitLab. Filtered can also be bolted onto an online application Interview Now to increase velocity at the top of the funnel.

“Filtered is finally addressing real problems for HR because the fundamentals of hiring have been reconsidered,” says Bilodeau. “Our customers have used us for improving their hiring process and metrics for full-time and contingent labor, extending their campus recruiting arm, and assessing their consulting partners or SOW vendors.”

The top initiatives of 2018, according to Bilodeau, are upskilling, reskilling, and rethinking how to assess, scale, and hire talent. Filtered benchmarks internal teams as a point of reference and subsequently identifies their individual strong points and weaknesses, in order to address the shortcomings with future hires.

Filtered is the first company to explore tests for emerging skill sets like data science from an automated standpoint and has created a paradigm shift with their innovative recruitment solutions that give their clients a reason to turn to the company.