Rainbird worked pro bono with CodeYourFuture to power an automated candidate assessment tool. The tool saves CodeYourFuture 900 hours’ worth of manual applicant reviews for each course while preserving applicant privacy and promoting fairness and transparency.
Challenge: assessing 100s of applicants fairly and quickly
CodeYourFuture is a non-profit organisation that trains the most disadvantaged groups in society. They help them to develop skills to find a career in the tech industry.
Founded in 2016, the organisation has seen dramatic growth in the popularity of its courses.
For its founder Germán Bencci and its community of employees and volunteers, increased popularity meant facing a new challenge: a high volume of applicant assessments. Because all course applicants were manually processed, they were racked in large spreadsheets and agreed as a team. This took one to three hours of the team’s time – per applicant.
Experience levels were inconsistent across those judging applicants. Also, despite giving all volunteers training, Germán was worried that a greater scale would mean increased inconsistency in the selection process. He knew the organisation needed to process and record applicant outcomes in a fair, consistent and scalable way.
In 2021, the number of applicants for the London cohort exceeded 100 people, and with new courses starting in South Africa in 2022, Germán and the team knew it was time to do something.
Sally McGrath joined CodeYourFuture as its new Director of Education. She immediately identified a key problem with the current process because they had been analysing every applicant with the same bar on the poverty level. There was a particular focus on the applicant’s household income and geographical region.
While reviewing how each person’s eligibility and suitability were assessed, Sally realised that all the decisions were fact-based. For instance, how much money an applicant has, how much time they have, and where they live. “It seemed really clear that that was something we could systematise,” Sally said.
Approach: create an automated applicant eligibility and suitability decision-making tool
With the idea of a tool that would be able to assess applicants based on important factual information, Sally teamed up with Nirmeet—a CodeYourFuture graduate—and Rainbird.
Over the course of a few sessions with Rainbird, Sally and Nirmeet built a Rainbird knowledge graph in the no-code Rainbird Studio. Using further resources, documentation and support available via Rainbird Community, Sally and Nirmeet created an automated decision-making solution that tells applicants if they’re eligible to apply for a CodeYourFuture course, and why.
The tool enables applicants to answer a series of questions via a simple online agent and then determine whether they are eligible and/or suitable for a given course. Each applicant is returned a yes/no answer and a level of confidence for each answer as a percentage.
The tool was made possible because of the Rainbird Decision Intelligence platform.
Decision Intelligence powered by AI the world can trust
Rainbird captures people’s expertise as extended knowledge graphs and combines them with data. This is at the core of how Rainbird automates complex decision-making.
Results: 900 hours’ worth of manual reviews saved per course
We use a lot of human resources. However, we want to optimise how we use that human resource. We value people’s time. So, when we mix the community effort and knowledge with the tech that Rainbird offers, we can create a system that makes the most of that community.
Germán and Sally estimate that the applicant eligibility and suitability tool is saving their community 900 hours per course. The selection process is now streamlined because the team needs only needs to get involved if they will truly make a positive difference to the outcome.
Two other key objectives were met because of the Rainbird platform.
Privacy assured
To protect privacy, it is important that the eligibility and suitability tool uses sensitive applicant data to make its judgment. Rainbird provides a distinct advantage in this process because the automated tool no longer exposes sensitive data to a group of volunteers.
An individual’s application history is stored in a database that only admins have access to. If a decision is later challenged, the reason for a decision can be anonymously exposed. It can do this without attaching names to personal circumstances (like health conditions, income, or refugee status).
Transparency and fairness maintained
The candidate assessment tool has also allowed the CodeYourFuture team to embrace transparency in the application process.
Being able to explain all of our decisions to our community and to our candidates was one of the most important things about changing our interview process.
Sally McGrath
A further important feature of the candidate assessment tool is that, since all decisions are based on facts, all decisions can be challenged and, if necessary, changed. Because Rainbird makes decisions based on human decision logic, every automated decision is interpretable and explainable. “It’s really important for us so that our community trusts in this process. It must be able to challenge it at any time,” said Sally.
Intelligently automate standard and enhanced due diligence processes, on an ongoing basis
Faster, more accurate onboarding.