Hiring in the business world can be a guessing game. On one side, even if a candidate is qualified, there’s no guarantee they’re actually good at the job or will stick to it. The company side is rife with bias and preconceptions that bend the curve toward one type of applicant over another. No one wins this game. But data science is promising to change all that.

“It’s the best time to be a data scientist right now,” said Julie Yoo, co-founder and chief scientific officer of pymetrics Inc., which helps job seekers find the “perfect” job using data science models. Companies are hiring more data scientists, and the demand for pymetrics’ services is increasing, she added.

To discover how data science is reshaping the landscape of hiring, Lisa Martin (@Luccazara), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live-streaming studio, spoke to Yoo during the Stanford Global Women in Data Science Conference event at Stanford University. (*Disclosure below.)

Data-driven hiring practices

The conversation started with a look at pymetrics itself. Yoo described its services as a platform that uses neuroscience and machine learning for the purposes of career science. The career science tools out there weren’t scientific or data-driven, she mentioned. This has led to a lot of bias in hiring.

There are many biases, Yoo continued. Besides race and gender, there’s also appearance, presentation, what school someone went to and many others. “We measure things an employer would want measured,” Yoo stated. Then, pymetrics uses this objective data and data modeling to see how good a person would be in a given career.

The discussion then shifted from the what to the how. The neuroscience community uses various games to evaluate personalities. For its purposes, pymetrics took these games out of the research setting and brought them to hiring and career advising. The games measure key cognitive traits and give a snapshot of a person’s unique characteristics.

“We are in sweet spot where we get enough data but don’t make it hour-long,” Yoo said.

The Fortune 500 is pymetrics’s target market. Most of those companies hire in large volumes, Yoo mentioned. Because of that volume, it helps them to have a model for their job needs.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Stanford Global Women in Data Science (WiDS) Conference. (*Disclosure: TheCUBE is a media partner at the conference. Neither Stanford nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE