Mercor CEO Brendan Foody joins Josh Lipton on Asking for a Trend to discuss how the company uses artificial intelligence (AI) to make the hiring process more efficient.

Foody explains, “Mercor is able to automate all of those [HR] processes with [large language models (LLMs)] not only far more scalably but also far more effectively. We've processed over 300,000 candidates, conducted hundreds of thousands of verbal interviews asking nuanced questions about people's backgrounds, and matched thousands of people with jobs.”

The platform has “been mainly focused on, right now, is staffing use cases where people are hiring for from anywhere from a few weeks to a few months and are okay with this lower touch approach,” but Foody says “very soon we're going to see the technology also applied in a more significant way to traditional full-time hiring, where people are using it for every role because it just quantitatively performs better than humans at assessing talent.”

Mercor trains LLMs, predominantly OpenAI’s GPT series and Meta's (META) Llama models, on “all the proprietary data we have on candidates to best understand who's going to perform well at a given job, for what reasons,” Foody says.

The CEO says that the tech could contribute to some displacement in HR roles but highlights that “better HR systems that are able to talk to every candidate [and] are able to give these incredible experiences to each person and that's going to be this collaborative process between humans and machines.”

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Asking for a Trend.

This post was written by Naomi Buchanan.