AI and the SourceCon Challenge

SourceCon is a conference where the top sourcers in the world gather twice a year to share best practices. The SourceCon team hosts an annual Grand Master Challenge to determine the top sourcer. As a person who has spent a lot of time around the SourceCon community, I’m always fascinated by what contestants do to solve the challenge. Understanding how the winners and finalists solve problems is always enlightening.

This year the HiringSolved team worked with the 2017 SourceCon Grand Master, Randy Bailey, to get a peek at how he won the SourceCon title.

Can Artificial Intelligence Compete With Talent Acquisition Experts? by HiringSolved on Scribd


Talent acquisition specialist and 2017 SourceCon Grandmaster Randy Bailey is among the best in the business with many years under his belt to prove it. For a machine to even compete with the likes of him is incredible on it’s own. While our HiringSolved sofware was not officially a competitor in this year’s Sourcecon Grandmaster Challenge, our artiﬁcial intelligence managed to unoﬃcially outscore every other human and machine except one: a man named Randy Bailey.


Bailey’s inventiveness and creativity in solving the challenge ultimately beat out the raw power and superior speed of our machine. While matching patterns found in documents with a job description is something our AI can do in seconds, Bailey leveraged strengths on the human side by improvising with techniques that a machine can’t perform quite yet.


We at HiringSolved commend Randy on his win as the 2017 SourceCon Grandmaster. It was an honor for us that he took the time to document our sofware’s performance beside his own in the challenge. We learned a lot about where our AI stands compared to an elite talent acquisition specialist and look forward to the next round!

           -Shon Burton, Founder and CEO of HiringSolved