In the race for top talent, Garry Ma (BASc 2011, Software Engineering), is giving recruiters a head start.
Ma is the co-founder of Brilent, a data science SaaS startup in California that uses machine learning to bring the deep insights of big data to the recruiting industry. Brilent (a mashup of “bright” and “talent”) is the brainchild of a group of data scientists who have each spent considerable time in the trenches of some of the Valley’s top tech companies. They also know the pain of finding the right people before their competitors snap them up.
“We all needed good people (data scientists) whose skill sets included technical skills, basic statistical understanding, communication skills and strong business acumen, but we found that a lot of people have two or three of these categories, but not all four,” says Ma. “So, in our spare time, we started a boot camp to help people obtain the skills they were lacking. We had experienced mentors from within the industry, assigned projects based on real problems for both team and individual work.”
About 80 people - engineers, business and financial analysts, project managers, PhD students and undergraduates - signed up for the Big Data Analytics Boot Camp.
Machine Learning
So successful was this boot camp that soon recruiting companies were calling up Ma’s group looking for data scientists to hire. That’s when Ma, along with Weihong Zhang, Peter Zhu, Charlie Marshall and Yihua Liao decided to create a company - Brilent - that leverages big data analytics to automatically analyze the fit of any person to any data science role. Brilent later generalized their solution to work with many other types of job roles beyond just data science. Their current offering is a SaaS product that helps companies identify top talent and recruit them quicker - up to a 100 times faster than the usual methods recruiters use, says Ma. To see the technology in action, visit https://www.brilent.com/uwaterloo-alum (a link especially created for University of Waterloo alumni).
Using the power of big data in recruiting has been talked about for years, but the missing element has always been the ability to identify the more subtle details in the relationship between people, their skills, their professional experiences, their aspirations, and the employer. Precisely interpreting these relationships with data science is the key to more effective recruiting; with hundreds of thousands of data points, Brilent acts as a pre-screening for rapidly uncovering the candidates that fit the job parameters.
Understanding Relationships
“Our product goes way beyond keyword search - it performs semantic analysis which means our software actually understands for example what a particular skill is and its importance in relation to a particular job or industry. Our software analyzes a large variety of real and potential relationships between a candidate and a job to derive a fit score,” says Ma. “We aim to match and rank candidates to jobs not only based on qualification but actual fit. Just because a candidate is qualified doesn’t mean he or she is a fit for the job or employer.”
Ma says it was his time spent at Waterloo Engineering and co-op specifically that helped him succeed in Silicon Valley. “Waterloo Engineering is well known here and the name carries weight,” says Ma. He credits co-op for teaching him “how to adapt to new situations quickly and start problem solving immediately as new challenges arise.” Co-op also showed him early on in his engineering education what real world problems were of interest to him, allowing him to focus on those studies.
“Like everyone down here, I talk about Waterloo Engineering all the time,” laughs Ma. One of Brilent’s key engineering hires is another Waterloo alumni, Tony Zhang (BMath 2011, Computer Science). Zhang who worked with Ma at Facebook (but on different products) has championed the Waterloo co-op program since his early days in Facebook. “Tony alone must have mentored a dozen co-op students in his career at Facebook” says Ma.
Right now the Brilent team is focused on helping tech recruiters find the best talent fast, which is the industry’s greatest need, but Ma says the technology can easily be used for other applications as well such as for job seekers to auto-rank jobs that would be a fit for them.
For Waterloo Engineering alumni interested in trying out the Brilent SaaS to help them find top talent, Ma is offering an exclusive alumni extended trial period. Contact Garry Ma at uwaterloo@brilent.com or visit https://www.brilent.com/uwaterloo-alum. For alumni interested in rewarding opportunities in the US, please contact uwaterloo@brilent.com as well.
