RITIKA SHARMA

1910120028

GROW: CASE LEARNING

GROW is an artificial intelligence platform and mobile app to evaluate job candidates. It is
developed by Tokyo-based people analytics startup “Institution for a Global Society’s GROW”.
It was founded by Masahiro Fukuhara.

This AI platform provided various opportunities to its clients to efficiently recruit high potential
applicants for their respective firm. The platform had 74,000 users including students from both
prestigious and lesser known universities, as of June 2017, including Mitsubishi Corporation,
All-Nippon Airways, Septeni, Dena and many others. IGS developed an iOS and Android app,
GROW, which collected data of two proprietary components i.e. competency assessment and
personality assessment. The platform collected this data by employing a pre-feedback tool to
reveal 25 specific competencies or undergo the Implicit Association Task (IAT) to assess
personality. GROW used AI learning algorithm to analyze every spot of assessment data that has
been collected from candidates and evaluators to look for patterns to improve its ability to
accurately screen candidates over time. Companies used this platform in unique, interesting and
even unexpected ways as per their needs.

For example, Septeni Holdings used GROW’s candidate’s evaluation data collected from peers
throughout a student’s time at university, which fit well with Septeni’s internal evaluation
criteria which focused on personality traits and on capabilities an individual demonstrated as he
or she worked with others over time. Septeni also provided IGS with prior year candidate’s data
and interview outcomes to help IGS train the algorithm to accurately predict which candidates
i.e. past and future would pass Septeni’s group interviews. The platform’s prediction not only
closely match the outcomes of Septeni’s internal evaluation, but it doubled the talent Septeni
sourced from outside Tokyo. They also saw a 90% reduction of the overall process effort while
their year-over-year acceptance rate of its job jumped four-fold.

All Nippon Airways (ANA), Japan’s largest airline, was consistently rated amongst most popular
rated companies for students seeking jobs after graduation. Since, they had a limited HR staff,
ANA feared that they will miss the potential future leaders but were screened out too early in the
recruiting process.
ANA worked with IGS to prioritize ten competencies that ANA would highly value in its new
recruits. Students interested in ANA then used the GROW app to have their competencies and
personality traits assessed and create an individual “total score.” ANA used this data combined
with GROW confidence score of a candidate to invite top candidates for an interview. The ANA
HR realized that by using GROW data in a supervised machine learning manner, GROW could
help surface promising candidates ANA would have missed otherwise.
For Mitsubishi Corporation (MC), GROW’s greatest value was as a tool to help discover talent
who had not discovered them. MC used the data collected by GROW to invite top candidates
who had not registered with MC hiring database to attend their information session about MC.
Of the fifty candidates who attended their information session, number of them applied for open
positions and eventually decided to join MC after passing the interviews.
With growing data base from recommended hires and increasing number of users, GROW’s AI
is capable of delivering more robust hiring recommendations to clients.

GROW’s algorithm helps eliminate unfair discrimination in employment. The user is rated by
multiple evaluators based on list of competencies and personality traits; the AI algorithms
analyzes the data collected from candidates and evaluators to develop a customize HR-related
services for clients and users. First, a user receives ratings from multiple evaluators, however
each evaluation is not weighted equally. GROW employs a patent-pending probabilistic
(Bayesian) machine learning algorithm that uses data of how that competency had been
evaluated historically along with many data points about an evaluator to determine such an
evaluation was genuine and calibrated to reality. The weighted score also takes into account the
speed in which an evaluator answers the assessment questions. If an evaluator gave more diverse
ratings over time – some 1’s, 2’s, 3’s and 4’s – he or she might be deemed more discerning and
therefore much more reliable.

GROW also uses Implicit Association Task to reveal attributes and biases people have. It’s
patented mobile IAT utilizes unsupervised machine learning to reveal anomalies in patterns of
swiping behavior and better predict personality. GROW’s platform provides an unbiased user
data to its clients using AI algorithm and machine learning to help reach candidates who would
otherwise fall through the cracks. All the companies mentioned in the case has shown a positive
impact of the platform in recruiting top candidates.

In organizations, GROW was used as a software-as-a-service (SAAS) tool, where applications

were tremendously increasing with the arrival of online resume submission, digital outreach, and
apps designed to help students apply effortlessly to many potential employers using B2B2C
strategy. But this approach was still not successful as they still heavily relied on laborious
resume screening and several time-consuming rounds of face-to-face interviews. Due to which,
the quality of new hiring was getting suffered. After GROW presenting a very attractive solution,
as firms adopted it, they were using this tool in different and unexpected ways.

Developing the platform further by implementing “reinforcement machine learning” AI such that
the AI would be able to overrule some of the client-defined characteristics of an “ideal”
candidate that had not worked well in the past would further improve the performance of
candidate recommendations.

As a part of future scope, artificial intelligence would help in recruiting and avoiding mismatches
between job and the applicant. It will help in identifying those applicants who were earlier not
able to apply due to location or any other issues. It will help the applicants find their true
capabilities and then applying for the jobs after matching their competencies.
I would recommend that a hybrid approach to hire employees should be used as the targeting
peers of ideal clients can be misleading as sometimes peers may not have similar competencies
or may not want a similar job. GROW and its uses should be taught to clients to avoid improper
use of the software that would hinder the process of hiring appropriate candidate for the job.