Revolutionizing healthcare staffing: interview with Helge Bjorland, founder & CEO of Globus.ai

Helge Bjorland is the founder and CEO of Globus.ai, a software company that delivers an AI-powered candidate deployment solution for healthcare staffing agencies. Globus.ai empowers candidates to reach their full potential by automatically assigning them to tasks that match their skills, experience, dreams, and aspirations. With roots in Scandinavia, the company focuses on human centric technology that improves quality of life.
Why have you decided to found Globus.ai?

The vision of Globus.ai is to improve quality of life by empowering people to reach their full potential. I remember a time when my son was three years old and we visited a hardware store. He was wandering around looking at things and I was paying at the cash register. There was an automatic lawn mower demoed and when I turned around my son was on the floor with his hand outstretched towards the mower. The mower turned and drove over this hand and cut three of his fingers almost off. He was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery. Luckily, he made a full recovery and can now move his fingers. This was possible because one of the best plastic surgeons in the country was on duty that day to operate on my son. This really stuck with me. At the time we needed it, the best person for the job was there to care for my son. I wanted to use my experience with technology and AI to make sure the right person is in the right place when needed.Me and my co-founders recognized that there was a great potential to improve the deployment process in healthcare staffing agencies. With AI it is possible to remove all the manual steps and automatically assign candidates to the right assignment.

Prior to leading Globus.ai, you worked as a Senior Data Scientist for Equinor for more than 8 years. How did you manage to transition to the CEO role?

My previous positions provided me with technical and managerial and leadership experience. I love challenges and the transition to the CEO role delivered on this. But I learn something new every day and meet so many interesting people so it is definitely worth it.Can you tell us more about the technology behind Globus.ai?The technology behind Globus.ai is very exciting. We read all incoming assignments automatically using natural language processing. This turns unstructured text into structured data we can feed to the AI. With our Scandinavian AI, we match candidates with assignments in a unique way. Understanding the skills, experience, availability, interests and aspirations of candidates, enables us to provide them with the most suitable assignments. With continuous learning, the system keeps getting better with increased usage. Deployment process automation means that staffing agencies can work faster and place more candidates.What role does AI play in your technology?Globus.ai is an AI-first company. This means that all software components have been developed with the mindset of generating training data to improve the AI. Traditional software companies have a body, AI first companies also have brains.

Where does the data come from and how do your algorithms help to make the right business decisions?

The data comes from both understanding the customers, candidates, and assignments. With smart algorithms, we process a huge amount of data in order to present the best candidates instantly. This way staffing agencies always get the best candidates for each assignment.How does your company help avoid hiring bias?We ensure equality by matching candidates with unbiased selection criteria. We are continuously monitoring our AI to ensure fair and equal treatment of candidates.

What was the most significant-tech challenge that your engineers had to overcome while building Globus.ai?

The interface between software development and data science is a big challenge. Not many people have the necessary competence. Ensuring that data is captured in the right way to train AI algorithms needs the right architecture. In the same way, getting machine learning models in production is also a big challenge.

Amid the intensifying war on talent, what advantages does the technology behind Globus Staffing provide to its clients?

Globus.ai empowers candidates in healthcare staffing agencies with work that aligns with their skills, experience, and interests. It enables staffing agencies to do the deployment of candidates automatically, so staffing coordinators do what they are best at, i.e. talking to consultants, giving personal follow-ups, or engaging with customers. Globus.ai streamlines the deployment process and for the consultants this means more personalized opportunities and assignments.

How specifically does Globus.ai technology impact your clients business and operations?

A great example that immediately springs to mind is the case of the leading healthcare staffing agency in the Nordics – Dedicare. A life-long partner of Globus.ai, we began working together when Dedicate wanted to improve the efficiency of placing healthcare workers across Sweden and Norway.Using Globus.ai, candidates’ experiences and qualifications are automatically validated and the Dedicare team is recommended pre-selected candidates based on these competencies. This drastically cuts the time taken to manually find suitable candidates for a role with up to 90%. Dedicare can respond quickly to incoming orders and utilize their candidate database better which has shown to increase revenues by as much as 30-40%.

What opportunities has COVID-19 created for your company?

Globus.ai is a critical supplier to healthcare staffing agencies, so it was extremely important that our system kept working during the crisis. We make sure the healthcare staff is delivered as fast as possible where it is needed to save lives.

Now, as you very well know, there is a certain unease among people about AI replacing jobs. What do you personally think about it?

We are always going to need unique human skills, like critical thinking, empathy, and strategic decision-making skills. 72% of business decision-makers expect to see AI used to enable humans to concentrate on more meaningful work. So, instead of replacing human intelligence, AI complements it. For instance, when looking for candidates, an agency can quickly find matches with the use of AI and then have candidates checked by humans. Similarly, predictive analytics can assess the risks around each candidate and predict future skills shortfalls. Allowing organizations to avoid high-risk candidates and proactively resource skills gaps before they impact the day-to-day. With AI, organizations can boost productivity and provide more creative, strategic work for human employees. They will have more time to spend on value-added tasks and growing the business, with AI doing much of the manual, time-consuming, and mundane work.

Credit: Yuliya Sychikova from Data Root Labs.

Cover up more assignments every day

Globus significantly reduces the time and effort spent on manual tasks, allowing recruiters to focus on more strategic aspects of the hiring process and human touch

5X

Faster response time

30%

More candidates available

40%

More orders processed
Source: Globus.ai research

FAQs

Can I integrate Globus.ai with my existing solutions?

Yes. Globus.ai can be integrated with existing solutions to ensure the flow of data between all systems. Our implementation team will support you in identifying the best approach.

Is payroll and invoicing a part of the system?

All required information related to payment and invoicing is posted to you ATS system in the right format for quick auto processing. Information related to trust/customer/department/project, assignment and salary information, including dates and working hours, is registered to your ATS system in the right format for further processing.

Do you integrate with Microsoft Outlook and Office 365?

Yes. To ensure that all job orders from your customers are seamlessly funnelled into Globus.ai and prepared to be fulfilled.

Can you read job requirements and orders from portals?

Yes. We capture orders and job requirements from the largest portals in the Nordics. For other countries, please contact us for a free exploration session, our technical representatives are here to help.

Can you read job requirements and orders from emails?

Yes, we capture all relevant information about the assignment(s) from emails and email attachments (spreadsheet, documents, PDFs, and weblinks), and automatically match relevant candidates from your database.

Is our data safe with Globus Staffing, and are you GDPR compliant?

Yes, we are fully GDPR compliant. Protecting your data and keeping it safe is our priority. For more information, please refer to the security measures in our Data Protection and Privacy notice.

Do we implement Responsible AI approach?

Addressing GPT and Data Privacy Concerns

Scope of GDPR with GPT: GDPR primarily governs GPT when personal data is processed.  

Our use cases

1. AI-based Email Extraction: limited to extracting information from emails and signatures.

2. Email Enhancement: generalized email drafting for candidates, doesn't involve personal data. Hence, GDPR concerns are minimal here.

Data Safeguards

Private GPT Instance: We utilize a private GPT instance via Microsoft Azure. This ensures:

- Your data is not available to other customers or OpenAI and are not used to improve OpenAI models or Azure OpenAI models - please see MS dedicated webpage.

- Data storage exclusively within our Azure environment - the Azure OpenAI Service is fully controlled by Microsoft; Microsoft hosts the OpenAI models in Microsoft’s Azure environment and the Service does NOT interact with any services operated by OpenAI (e.g. ChatGPT, or the OpenAI API).

A distinct advantage over US services that might use OpenAI indirectly, as we can opt out from storing prompts and completions, ensuring enhanced data privacy.

Signature Data Trimming

We actively remove personal data from email signatures. While not foolproof, it's rare for personal data to be present in the main email content.

Future Considerations

We're exploring the deployment of a self-hosted model (like LLama 2) in a cloud. This guarantees that only we can access and manipulate user-generated prompts and parsed emails, further enhancing data privacy.

Have questions?