The company uses a custom AI tool that analyzes interview transcripts and scorecards. By providing the AI with context on company values and philosophy, it can identify thematic signals of alignment, moving beyond simple keyword matching to a more nuanced evaluation of a candidate.
To improve candidate experience and evaluation quality, Formation Bio structures its interview process by assigning distinct key competencies to each interviewer. This ensures every conversation is unique and valuable, preventing the common problem of candidates repeating the same stories to different team members.
The company's model is not AI drug discovery. Instead, they in-license assets that already have clinical data (Phase 1 or 2) and apply their AI platform to accelerate the drug development process. They identify development, not discovery, as the primary bottleneck in modern pharma.
At Formation Bio, the goal of implementing AI in recruitment isn't to automate decision-making. Instead, AI handles data synthesis and analysis, which allows the talent team to spend more time building deeper, more personal relationships with candidates, armed with better insights.
The future of AI in talent acquisition is moving beyond on-demand analysis. Formation Bio is working towards "agentic AI" that proactively monitors the hiring pipeline, analyzes interviews in real-time, and provides suggestions for the next steps without being prompted, thus automating strategic insight.
Despite extensively using custom AI for interview analysis, Formation Bio finds that AI for candidate sourcing is still immature. Their talent team insists on a human reviewing every resume, highlighting that sourcing remains a significant automation challenge due to the need for nuance and confidence in evaluation.