Introduction
Far too much work related to human resources relies on qualitative assessments. This is especially true when it comes to comparing one’s organization with others. You might have precise data on one’s own workforce, its composition, skills, and backgrounds, but how can you compare with other companies, or industry norms? There also may be hiring trends outside your firm that one should be aware of. Perhaps a rival is hiring growing numbers of people with a specific professional profile? Companies with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs may want to know how their own organization compares with others in a given market or industry. Peer-to-peer comparisons are nearly impossible. Presently the best information available comes in the form of published government data or self-reported information. Both usually are short on detail and precision.
Rhetorik’s advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven analytic tools bring quantitative data regarding the composition of the workforce where most make do with qualitative impressions. Rhetorik offers unique capabilities that provide unrivalled insights into human resources. It identifies and quantifies the distribution of people with specific job functions, skills, and backgrounds—including gender, ethnicity, and race—within any specific industry, market, or location, or any combination of the above. It also detects various “signals,” including intensity within profiles, related to experience and skills. This is a powerful tool that allows hiring managers, marketers, and human resource professionals to aggregate data related to human resources—who does what, with what skills and backgrounds, and at what levels—to compare their own organizations with peer organizations in a chosen market, industry, or location, or to identify who in fact may be responsible for certain activities, or detect new trends such as increases in the number of people with a specific skill or background.
How does it work?
At the heart of Rhetorik’s capabilities is Neuron360, a powerful tool that combines data mining with AI-driven analytics. Neuron360 includes a database of roughly 800 million professional profiles, which includes 300 million unique job titles across 900 job functions, pulled from multiple global sources including LinkedIn. It translates non-English profiles (47 languages currently supported) and normalizes the data; pulling out and decoding from job titles, descriptions, and other information provided by people’s profiles insights into what people do, at what level, and with what skills and backgrounds. Neuron360 understands that some job functions can be labeled multiple ways, and that certain functions or titles imply doing various things at different levels. Often job titles do not accurately or completely communicate the skills people possess. Neuron360 factors in “intensity indicators,” i.e. information that sheds light on how intensely someone might have been engaged in a particular activity or skill. It also implements a skill hierarchy that allows it to scrape data and capture a complete picture of individuals’ skills.
Neuron360 identifies how many people within any given set of people, e.g. within a specific organization, an entire industry, or a geographic location, perform a specific job function or has what skills or backgrounds. These backgrounds can be educational or professional, but Neuron360 can also infer gender, ethnic and racial backgrounds, which can be invaluable for DEI practitioners.
A major advantage of Rhetorik’s analysis is that it is both tailorable and scalable. One can use Neuron360 to search for broad categories or narrow ones, and it can do so for people within a specific organization, a geographic location, an entire industry, etc., all depending on the client’s needs.
Examples
Neuron360 can observe concentrations of signal detections in profiles. For example, it has noted that people with expertise in AI Responsibility, AI Ethics, and AI compliance are particularly prominent among members of the workforce with AI-related jobs. Similarly, it can detect industry trends. For example, it has recognized a trend wherein compliance solutions in AI had become particularly prevalent in educational institutions and startups, indicating a growing focus on regulatory adherence in these sectors. Similarly, Neuron360 can see how this trend manifests itself in particular industries, particular companies, and in correlation with particular skills. A recent search revealed that Microsoft, for example, was an industry leader in terms of having employees who were expect in “Responsible AI,” with roughly twice the number of hits than Accenture, Google, and Meta. Most of those people with Responsible AI profiles were in the software engineer field (well ahead of IT services, business consultants, and financial services). The top skills associated with Responsible AI people were Python, project management, leadership, data analysis, machine learning, and management.
Conclusion
Rhetorik provides the data companies need to compare themselves with whomever they consider relevant. The data can enable them to identify hiring trends even within specific job functions at specific levels. It enables them to see into other firms and learn, for example, that their rivals are doing well or poorly regarding diversity at specific levels, or within specific job functions. They can see how many women or members of a certain ethnicity occupy what sort of jobs at what levels in other organizations, and they can draw from that data whatever conclusions they may.
