Among the winners of this year’s Informatica Innovation Awards was Allegis Group, a privately held staffing and recruitment services company. Allegis partners with Informatica LLC, using machine learning and artificial intelligence on its data to innovate and change.

“For us, it’s about using data as an asset and how we want to transform our company [in the same way] we transformed the industry,” said Salema Rice (pictured), chief data officer and global head of data, data sciences, and intelligence and information management at Allegis Group.

Rice recently joined John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during Informatica World in San Francisco, California. They discussed how Allegis makes data work to its benefit, as well as what advantages data provides to help clients in their careers. (* Disclosure below.)

It’s not the data alone that’s important

About four years ago, Rice said that Allegis started seeing competition from entities without any brick and mortar presence and without recruiters. These companies specialize in bionic recruitment and have only an online presence. The differentiator between those agencies and Rice’s is while the raw data is extremely important, by itself, it has limited usefulness; it’s how that data is used to best benefits clients, she explained.

For Allegis, it’s the relationships between people that are most important, Rice added. The data is in service to Allegis’ employees and customers, not the other way around.

“We want to use data to enable our recruiters and producers so that they can become talent advisors and career coaches,” Rice said.

Allegis uses natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to really look at people, their skillsets and their work histories to predict their level of thought leadership. While a candidate can say, “I have these skills,” do they really?

“We can teach people tools, but how do you teach somebody to be a problem-solver?” Rice asked. The tools that they use, applied to the data, can help the company predict how workers will perform throughout their careers.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Informatica World 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Informatica World. Neither Informatica Corp. nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE