PRO Unlimited and Eightfold AI Announce Exclusive Partnership to Bring AI and Diversity & Inclusion to Modern Workforce Management

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 26, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- PRO Unlimited, the pioneer and leading modern workforce management solution provider in the industry, announced today an exclusive partnership with Eightfold AI, a talent intelligence pioneer and leader. Under the terms of the partnership, PRO will embed Eightfold's AI technology into its contingent workforce management platform, including SaaS solutions, such as Wand Vendor Management System (VMS), Direct Sourcing and Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) offerings, to optimize its customers' contingent hiring practices. Eightfold's AI-driven talent intelligence, coupled with PRO's 30 years of data and technology, will also increase the power of PRO's contingent workforce management platform. It will enable the Global 2000 to more effectively and intelligently identify, engage and secure the best contingent talent in the world, while attaining diversity goals.  

As the economy rebounds, organizations will be hiring contingent workers ahead of the recovery while prioritizing areas within hiring, such as retention and D&I initiatives. However, many organizations lack the ability to harness machine-based learning, data and intelligence to not only source the best candidates, but also to drive their businesses forward. Eightfold AI's talent intelligence and PRO's contingent workforce management platform, including the world's largest global market rate data repository, aim to solve this problem, which is one of the biggest pain points for companies today. 

PRO will embed Eightfold's AI technology into its software to provide customers with features that enable more informed hiring, diversity and redeployment of workers anywhere in the world. This real-time matching and ranking of candidates drives faster, smarter hiring decisions at scale. This helps organizations secure the best talent, while reducing costs and increasing D&I. Managers eager to reduce manual tasks and increase efficiency will be able to more quickly and effectively identify candidates that align with a job's requirements. Leading-edge job calibration capabilities and intuitive UI design offer these managers an easy, at-a-glance way to compare candidates side-by-side based on unbiased empirical data.

Using Eightfold AI's technology, PRO will also be able to offer direct sourcing to its customers. This dramatically improves the experience that contingent specialty-skilled, white-collar workers go through during the hiring process, and will ultimately improve the Global 2000's contingent worker brands. 

"Today, the modern workforce is massive, with roughly 43% of all skilled white-collar workers being contingent vs. full-time employees. Many organizations are aggressively and strategically pushing that number to 50% or 60% while simultaneously shifting to more and more diverse candidates. Within this expanding workforce segment, there is a huge opportunity to harvest the enormous amount of PRO's data, deploy world-class machine-based learning to that data, and ultimately utilize it to make the process, quality, intelligence and cost of this massive modern workforce far superior than it is today," said Kevin Akeroyd, CEO of PRO Unlimited. "We are excited to partner with a company that uses industry-leading AI technology to truly understand a candidate's skill set or D&I attributes while generating recommendations to help inform hiring decisions." 

Akeroyd added: "This is truly a game changer for our space. It will transform how our customers, which include some of the largest brands globally, source, develop and redeploy their workforces while lowering costs. Partnering exclusively in the contingent industry with this innovative talent intelligence company is something we are incredibly excited about."

Eightfold AI's talent intelligence platform brings together billions of anonymized data points, algorithms and domain expertise to make a reliable, scalable impact for enterprise organizations. The platform combines internal data with publicly available insights to predict future roles, as well as identify validated skills, likely skills and missing skills – speeding up the process substantially. Its AI technology uses the career paths of more than one billion profiles. This results in 90% less time screening, 80% faster time to interview, 70% more top candidates, 60% lower cost to hire, and due to its gender/anonymous evaluations, 0% bias. This is critical as Eightfold's demographic-masking capabilities and its unique diversity analytics help block the biases in traditional hiring, understand barriers for candidates and create accountability. With the addition of the Eightfold partnership, PRO will offer an unparalleled suite of diversity offerings for the contingent workforce. 

"Partnering with PRO Unlimited is perfectly aligned with our mission of providing the right career to everyone in the world," said Ashutosh Garg, Founder and CEO of Eightfold AI. "Together, we are able to bring Eightfold's unique expertise and capability working with full-time employment to an entirely new, critical segment of customers in the rapidly growing, strategic, contingent workforce space."

PRO's embedding of Eightfold AI's technology will roll out initially in Q1 2021 and iterate rapidly, driving continuous improvement and value creation, and be available for all PRO customers. 

About PRO Unlimited
PRO Unlimited offers the industry's most comprehensive and holistic platform for contingent workforce management, and helps organizations around the world address the costs, risks and quality issues associated with managing the non-employee workforce. PRO's platform consists of integrated SaaS software and services solutions that are built on the world's most robust contingent workforce data set, spanning over 30 years. A pioneer and innovator in the industry, PRO's platform provides solutions for the procurement and management of contingent labor, global rate intelligence, direct sourcing, 1099/co-employment risk management, third-party payroll, and diversity and inclusion. http://www.prounlimited.com

About Eightfold AI

Eightfold AI® delivers the Talent Intelligence Platform™, the most effective way for organizations to retain top performers, upskill and reskill the workforce, recruit top talent efficiently, and reach diversity goals. Eightfold AI's deep learning artificial intelligence platform empowers enterprises to turn talent management into a competitive advantage. For more information, visit www.eightfold.ai. 

SOURCE PRO Unlimited