retrain.ai — empowering the world’s workforce with AI-driven, skills-focused intelligence

AI has forever transformed the relationship between people and technology. It’s also changing the role of HR when attracting, engaging, and developing talent.

Recruitment teams implementing AI-driven solutions use data-informed decisions to streamline the sourcing and screening of candidates. Employees benefit from AI that reveals skills-focused internal mobility opportunities like projects, gigs or mentorships. Professional development and personalized career-pathing powered by AI opens doors to workers looking to upskill or reskill through learning and development opportunities.

It’s no wonder why, according to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), 85% of companies globally use AI in some way for HR.

If you’re looking for AI-driven talent acquisition and management services to help your organization find the right people in half the time, look no further than retrain.ai, a Talent Intelligence Platform designed to help enterprises hire, retain, and develop their workforce, intelligently. Leveraging Responsible AI and the industry’s largest skills taxonomy, enterprises unlock talent insights and optimize their workforce effectively to lower attrition, win the war for talent and the great resignation in one, data-driven solution.

In conversation with Dr. Shay David co-founder and CEO, Isabelle Bichler-Eliasaf co-founder and COO, Avi Simon co-founder and CTO, at retrain.ai

Q. Why was retrain.ai founded? How has the company grown over the years?

The global skills emergency is like nothing we’ve seen before. At first glance, having more available jobs than talent to fill them may appear positive, but in truth, the disparity represents a darker reality for individuals and organizations. Digital transformation, accelerated by COVID-19, has created a new landscape for skills demand, accelerating the expansion of an international skills gap.

Skills must become the new common language for enterprises in search of finding the right talent for the right roles and nurturing the talent within their existing workforce.

Based on this belief, retrain.ai is focused on matching 10 million people to the right roles by 2025. Through skills-based hiring, upskilling and active career-pathing, we envision a world in which today’s workers can remain relevant, while the economy can be rejuvenated with newly skilled and energized workers.

Q. Can you speak a little about retrain.ai’s DNA?

retrain.ai designed a world-class Talent Intelligence Platform by first building the most robust and granular skills taxonomy in the market, based on over 300 million job descriptions from myriad publicly available sources. 

Our skills framework was constructed by aggregating and analyzing over 1.5 billion data points from industry, census, public/private, social media, compensation, and learning course data sources. Using robust taxonomies, retrain.ai can determine the best skills–not just qualifications–for each position.

Additionally, retrain.ai is designed to support DEI goals through skills-focused talent matching.

Our platform meets the five pillars of Responsible AI: Explainability and interpretability, Bias mitigation and fairness algorithms, Data robustness, Data quality and rights, and Accountability.

Q. How does the company innovatively use AI to help clients hire and develop talent?

Our Talent Acquisition module uses the power of Responsible AI to source and screen hundreds of CVs at scale, uncovering and ranking each candidate’s skills and aptitudes to connect them to in-demand positions.

Based entirely on skills-matching, retrain.ai masks demographic and other factors that can invite unintended bias and derail DEI efforts. As a result, our customers can cut the time to hire by 55%, boost acceptance rates by 45%, and increase candidate pool diversity by 39%.

Our Talent Management module uses our sophisticated AI-powered matching engine to connect employees with challenging, stimulating positions in their organization, including roles, projects, mentorship, learning opportunities, and gigs.

A Pew Research Center study reported that 63% of people who left their job in 2021 did so because they didn’t see clear growth opportunities. In solving to fill that void, retrain.ai increases career satisfaction and keeps employees with their employer longer. Our customers have been able to increase employee engagement by 62%, internal mobility by 57%, and retention by 30%.

Q. retrain.ai innovatively employs AI to assist HR personnel. Therefore, how important is innovation at the company?

Our innovation is driven by our diverse and inclusive international workforce. We believe it takes varied viewpoints to create the best vision. We also have a deep bench of innovators leading the company. From the expertise of our founders to our developers bringing a myriad of talents to our effort and the passionate, driven scientists who form the very basis of our innovation, we are a stacked team rich with proficiencies. Every one of our driven, committed team members plays a role in keeping our product on the cutting edge of HR technology every day.

As part of our larger commitment to innovation and moving the AI industry forward, retrain.ai works with the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Institute (RAII), a leading non-profit organization building tangible governance tools for trustworthy, safe, and fair artificial intelligence.

Q. What are retrain.ai’s plans for the future?

Our vision is to put 10 million people not just back to work but in a position to grow within better, more meaningful careers. In providing a solution that aims to put more people into best-fit roles and emphasizes upskilling and reskilling to continually develop talent, retrain.ai is supporting that future of work. In the near term, retrain.ai will further enhance the Talent Acquisition and Talent Management modules. To grow in parallel with the ever-changing world of work, we will also continue to expand our Skills Architecture and grow our Talent Marketplace–an expansive candidate database created to supplement our customers’ active and passive candidate funnel.

Helping employers and employees make better AI-based decisions

Dr. Shay David is a retrain.ai co-founder and the company’s CEO. Shay says he gains inspiration from building things in the real world that solve actual problems and that cater to the human spirit. retrain.ai exemplifies his belief in the capacity to put technology to good use in the hands of a lot of people who might not otherwise benefit and to make technology consumable by large enterprises as well as individuals.

Isabelle Bichler-Eliasaf is a retrain.ai co-founder and the company’s COO. Isabelle says she’s always had a passion for connecting people with the right job for them, starting with her previous CEO role at Tohar, an Israeli placement company she co-founded and which was successfully acquired. Most recently, Isabelle further enhanced her expertise by earning a Masters of Science in Risk Management from the Stern Business School at NYU, focusing her research on Identifying Risk in DEI & Artificial Intelligence.

Avi Simon is a retrain.ai co-founder and the company’s CTO. Prior to retrain.ai, Avi was the Chief Data Officer of the Israel Defense Forces where he oversaw the IDF’s R&D in the areas of software, data, and artificial intelligence. Avi also served as the CIO and CTO of the Israeli intelligence corps. While there, he established a program highlighting a collection of professions for people on the autism spectrum. He brought the concept to retrain.ai, where he integrates people on the spectrum onto his team.