Trifork helps secondment agency The Employment Group with Artificial Intelligence

(Please find the Dutch version here)

How do you quickly find the best candidate for a job opening? For this task, Trifork, together with The Employment Group (TEG) and PwC, developed digital matching platform Boest. This platform uses Artificial Intelligence so that TEG consultants can make faster and improved matches between candidates and its clients.

The Employment Group is a secondment agency for technical professionals and experts. The company adopts innovative digital techniques to unite scarce talent and potential employers. The digital matching platform Boest is the latest innovation that TEG brings to the market.

Hard and soft skills

What is remarkable, is that Boest not only looks at hard skills like education and experience. The platform also focusses on a candidate’s soft skills, such as behaviour and motivations. Prior to the initial interview, candidates fill in a detailed profile and personality test via Boest. Clients carry out a specially developed ‘team scan’, which reveals the culture within a company or division.

Based on all data, Boest determines the ‘matching scores’ using Artificial Intelligence. The ‘matching score’ is a score that immediately reveals to the TEG consultants how well a candidate is suited for a specific vacancy. Via its user-friendly interface, Boest also provides TEG consultants with insights into the algorithmic considerations for determining the score. This helps TEG consultants to swiftly and effectively find the best candidates for vacancies, and vice versa.

“Our consultants subsequently have more time to comprehend and answer the specific desires and needs of both our candidates and our clients”, voices Jan-Willem Gelderblom, CEO of The Employment Group. “This ensures more depth in the talks with clients and candidates.”

Smart matching

“With Boest, we can guarantee with a high degree of certainty whether a candidate and client truly find each other, resulting in a long-term working relationship with potentially a permanent employment”, says Marc te Vruchte, CEO of Trifork in the Netherlands. This digital innovation agency was given the task by TEG to envision and develop a matching platform based on Artificial Intelligence.

“By linking motivations to previously made matches, the platform becomes increasingly better in finding the right combinations”, explains Te Vruchte. “Our supervised learning models look at the choices that the candidate, client, and the TEG consultants make. If, for example, a client decides not to proceed with a candidate, then he can easily motivate this in Boest. The platform learns from this. Additionally, the evaluation after the first month of employment also provides new data points that make the platform smarter.”

No bias

An important starting point in the development of Boest was that the platform should be without bias. Algorithmic fairness, privacy, and transparency are hence important themes within this platform. Data should not lead to discrimination based on, for instance, gender, age or work history. To address these ethical risks, PwC served as a sounding board for TEG and Trifork. Te Vruchte: “The platform should be set up in such a way that it enables ethical operations. The platform actively explains why the match was proposed. For the participants, it is a white box.”

The consultants also use the information on the match creation in the discussion with candidate and client. In addition, they can continuously follow the recruitment process via dashboards and adjust matters, if necessary. “The human interface wrapped around a solution such as Boest is crucial”, comments Te Vruchte. “It should be accessible and at the service of the user.”

Next-generation recruitment

Boest is successfully used at Voort, which is a part of TEG specialised in the secondment of highly educated technical professionals. Gelderblom expects that the platform will in the near future also be rolled out at other TEG labels: koen, Faber and Cottus. “We have already achieved fantastic results with Boest. The approach in which we, in addition to conventional, hard parameters, also consider the culture and character of candidate and client simply does the job. Boest enables next-generation recruitment.”

About Trifork

Trifork helps companies by making technology smart, responsible, and straightforward. Our solutions make change possible and enable our customers to simplify the life of end-users. Not only do we build powerful technology; we transform technology into business value.

We achieve business value through our structured innovation process. We do so by translating needs and desires into stronghold propositions. These propositions are enabled with smart technology, where the focus lies on the end-user. Trifork provides customised solutions based on Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, Drones, and Conversational Interfaces.