Newton Labs

Most new companies and start-ups are under pressure from their investors and clients to deliver results in stipulated time frames and often find themselves short staffed on many fronts. The search to find the right personnel for a vacant job is often hard, and recruitment sites bombard HR personnel with candidate lists, which in most cases may not be even relevant to the position that they are trying to fill. Helder Silva, CEO, and Rui Costa, CTO at Newton Labs, are taking their company’s software to places where no recruitment agency has been before, by redefining the approach to recruitment as it is known. “I think that AI will have a huge impact not only in terms of the reducing the gap in the recruitment market and make it more efficient but also could have a huge social-economic impact in a macroeconomic level,” explains Silva. The two colleagues have a rich experience in artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, and data crawling space, and have re-purposed their knowledge and expertise to create an offering that helps companies to curb their time for shortlisting and hiring well-suited candidates massively. The team of developers at Newton Labs has created a set of robust algorithms capable of scanning through thousands of employee profiles in a matter of minutes, a process which would take hours with traditional, manual methods for shortlisting potential employees. “We are not trying to take the jobs of HR professionals. We are trying to make it easier and less time-consuming for them,” states Silva.

The software deployed by Newton Labs can easily classify employee profiles based on the requirements of the recruiter. A client needs to only provide the details of their vacant position, and the program does the rest of the work. It takes the content that the customer delivers, and runs it on top of a list of potential candidates best suited for the job, and then shortlists the most eligible ones for the job. Besides, the offering also leverages an AI-powered bot to contact shortlisted professionals to find out if they are interested in a job change, and if they are satisfied with the recommendation.

As a result, clients are provided with a well refined and deserving candidate list. The offering also uses natural language processing, and deep learning to fine-tune its search capabilities and have it aligned to the evolving needs (criteria) of the clients. Newton’s algorithms rank candidates based on elements that are relative to client job offers.

The recruitment marketplace is filled with big players, and platforms that house huge databases, which can make it tedious for typical HR personnel to gain access to, analyze, research, and finally, shortlist matching profiles. “What we do is we run our technology on top of these databases, and try to be more effective,” says Costa. Newton Labs adopts a very holistic approach in delivering solutions to their clients, and primarily deals with technology companies. The success story of one such client best exemplifies Newton Labs’ value proposition. In a matter of 48 hours, the company’s team was able to develop and execute a program that could output a list of personnel list that best aligned to the client’s specific job description, which ultimately saved them a lot of money and time.

We are not trying to take the jobs of HR professionals. We are trying to make it easier and less time-consuming for them

Newton Labs’ value proposition has not gone unnoticed by investors. The company recently raised four hundred thousand dollars from their largest investor, a major HR recruitment agency. Furthermore, they are looking forward to another round of funding to execute an expansion plan into Japan. The company is currently making changes to their NLP codes to accommodate the Japanese language and make the shift into the Asian market by March of this year.