Using analytics to deploy data science more effectively

In 2013 Declan Murphy faced a big career upheaval after a global merger at the company for whom he worked. A redundancy cheque was offered and Murphy accepted, thinking he might use it to do something for himself.

While mulling his options he began looking for another job and quickly discovered shortcomings in the recruitment process. “I had no idea that recruiters were spending anything from 20 to 40 minutes ‘processing’ a candidate’s CV to put it into a particular format and style,” he says. “I couldn’t believe there was no software to do that and kicking the idea around with my sister Orla, who leads the Digital Humanities faculty at UCC, it became clear that here was a definite market opportunity.”

Murphy immersed himself in the world of data analytics with a view to developing solutions to enable companies in the HR, legal and financial services sectors to use data science more effectively. He ran his idea past Science Foundation Ireland and it connected him to Dr Brian Davis at the Centre for Data Analytics at NUIG who saw the potential to apply some of the centre's research in a commercial setting.

Murphy had worked in senior finance roles in the multinational sector for more than 20 years so he was well aware of how companies get bogged down in time-consuming processes that have not been digitised, such as manually reformatting CVs. In 2014, he seized the moment and set up Datalive to address this. The company now employs 23 people and is based at Nova, UCD's entrepreneurial hub. Its first product, Allsorter, was launched last July.

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Allsorter is a cloud-based formatting solution that uses AI to bring uniformity and customised branding to CVs. The B2B SaaS product speeds up candidate-to-market processing and Murphy says those using Allsorter are saving themselves at least seven hours per week per recruiter due to the automatic high-speed formatting. “Our USP is simple,” Murphy says. “There is nothing available that brings the level of accuracy and extraction of data that Allsorter does.”

In a nutshell, Allsorter increases efficiency, accelerates the shortlisting process and reduces subconscious bias by standardising CVs while also offering customers an easy way of using own-branded templates.

“Big data analytics adoption is only at 9 per cent among HR departments despite 96 per cent of HR managers considering Big Data and Artificial Intelligence to be the appropriate tools to make the HR function more predictive rather than reactive,” Murphy says.

‘Flags potential errors’

Large recruitment companies often outsource CV processing, but while this may save time and money it has a downside because it “loses all the rich data available for extraction and searchability,” Murphy says. By contrast, Allsorter is all about the data. “Our system not only extracts the data but also analyses, cleans, and categorises it while highlighting key skills and competencies,” he adds. “It provides complete transparency, flags potential errors or problems and allows the user to make edits as required.”

Allsorter is aimed at SMEs and large organisations and key customers will be executive search companies, general recruiters and talent acquisition managers in the private and public sectors. The company is also planning to launch a consumer version of Allsorter that will cost a fraction of what people are now paying for CV preparation.

Investment in the business to date is about €750,00 with funding coming from the European Commission, Enterprise Ireland, private and founder equity. The next step is finishing out a €3 million funding round to ramp up employment in sales and marketing and roll the product out to new markets. The company has been revenue generating since last year and already has customers in Ireland, the UK, Europe, China, UAE, US and Australia.