What can recruitment learn from dating apps?

Dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge have been a real boom for single people looking for love.

Not only are they the perfect solution for busy and tech-savvy generations, but they enable individuals to find and match with potential partners they most likely would never meet organically, particularly in huge cities like London or New York.

So why can’t similar technology be used to help companies tap into top-quality talent and for job seekers to find the right organization to work for?

The short answer is: it can.

This is exactly what UK-based HR tech startup OnSkil, which is founded by recruitment experts husband and wife Nick and Jane Brand, is aiming to do with its AI-based recruitment platform.

Applying dating app tech to recruitment

OnSkil’s AI assistant – Virtual Internal Consultant – works 24/7 to match candidates with open roles based on their skills and experience. Then, like Tinder or Hinge, the candidate and the company’s recruiter can only have a conversation about the role once they have both expressed an interest.

This means that OnSkil cuts out the middle person – such as agency recruiters – and brings back an element of “control” to the hiring process, according to OnSkil co-founder Nick Brand.

Brand tells UNLEASH this makes hiring more “responsible” “by protecting candidate identities and removing all forms of unsolicited contact, clients can be assured those candidates applying to their open roles are genuinely interested in working for them and have not been harassed by pushing recruiters into the process”.

For Brand, ensuring there is “reciprocal interest” and avoiding “time wasted on potential mismatches” is central to what makes OnSkil stand out from other recruitment tech platforms on the market.

Supplementing AI with HI

While AI is core to OnSkil’s offering, “AI alone is not enough”, according to Brand. So OnSkil also relies on HI (or human interaction); this is a “a fact that cannot be ignored when dealing with people. It is about blending tech with the personal touch”.

“Many people view AI with a fair bit of trepidation, particularly when it comes to very personal and important issues, such as finding a job,” explains Brand.

This HI element, therefore, sits between OnSkil’s algorithm and AI workflow. This gives “the candidate ability to approve matches before any details are shared, ensure a higher degree of success”.

However, as part of OnSkil’s focus on helping companies to build diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplaces by stamping out any bias, conscious or unconscious, “we have moved the HI for clients further down the process to the interview stage”, explains Brand.

This means that companies are only assessing potential candidates based on their skills and experience identified by the AI platform.

The future for OnSkil

Since Jane and Nick Brand have spent their twenty-year recruitment careers focused on the IT space, OnSkil was initially launched in this sector in November 2020.

This was also because the company “felt that IT savvy professionals would be best placed to navigate our advanced matching technology and ultimately help establish the platform in the mainstream”, according to Brand.

However, now it has reached 2,000 active users in the past year, OnSkil is “targeting…clients in the financial, telecoms, pharma and manufacturing sectors”. Brand tells UNLEASH this is because “we believe the core values of OnSkil apply equally to [these] other sectors.”

Looking to the future, OnSkil has big ambitions to expand beyond the UK market and into new regions, such as the US and Europe. This would enable it to match the right candidates and companies across the world.

Hiring from anywhere is the future of work; could dating app style recruitment be the future of hiring?