Inside Ribbon: How AI is Revolutionizing Hiring with CEO Arsham Ghahramani, PhD

Background and Expertise of Arsham Ghahramani

Arsham Ghahramani, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Ribbon, brings a unique blend of expertise in artificial intelligence and biology. Originally from the UK and now based in Toronto, his experience spans high-frequency trading, recruitment, and biomedical research. He began working in AI around 2014, completing his PhD at The Francis Crick Institute where he applied early generative AI techniques to cancer gene regulation long before the term “generative AI” became popular.

The Inspiration Behind Ribbon

The idea for Ribbon emerged from Ghahramani's firsthand experience scaling teams at Ezra, where he worked alongside his co-founder Dave Vu. They faced pressure to hire quickly but lacked efficient tools. With Ghahramani's early AI background, they recognized the inefficiencies in traditional hiring and decided to create a platform to drastically accelerate recruitment through AI and automation.

Leveraging Machine Learning to Improve Hiring

Ghahramani’s previous roles at Amazon, Ezra, and algorithmic trading shaped Ribbon’s AI approach. At Ezra, he focused on unbiased AI in healthcare, a critical area where fairness can be life or death. He transferred these bias mitigation techniques to Ribbon, ensuring their AI interviewer promotes equity and fairness in hiring.

Candidate-Centric Design

Understanding the challenges faced by junior candidates, Ribbon emphasizes empathy. The platform’s Voice AI provides a consistent point of contact throughout the hiring process, helping candidates feel comfortable and building trust. This consistency contrasts with traditional recruitment where candidates often get shuffled between multiple interviewers.

Ribbon’s Adaptive Interview Technology

Ribbon combines five proprietary machine learning models with four public models to create an interview experience that adapts in real-time. The AI continuously evaluates conversations, integrating contextual data from company information, career pages, resumes, and public profiles to emulate a human recruiter’s understanding.

The Power of Voice in Hiring

Ribbon highlights that five minutes of natural voice conversation can yield as much insight as an hour of written answers. Voice captures communication skills and language proficiency with a high density of information, making the hiring process more efficient and less tedious.

Transparency and Fairness through Interpretability

Interpretability is fundamental to Ribbon’s AI. Every score is linked back to its source—whether job requirements or specific moments in the interview—giving recruiters transparent and concrete data to support decisions. This transparency fosters fairness and trust in AI-driven hiring.

Combating Bias in AI Hiring Systems

Ribbon actively addresses bias by focusing on measurable skills and competencies, auditing AI for fairness, using balanced datasets, and incorporating human oversight. This multi-layered approach helps ensure equitable hiring outcomes.

Flexibility and Accessibility for All Candidates

Ribbon’s always-available interview platform allows candidates to interview at any time, including late night hours. This flexibility is vital for democratizing access to jobs, especially for underserved communities facing scheduling challenges. Notably, 25% of interviews occur between 11 pm and 2 am local time.

The Future of Hiring and Career Mobility

Ribbon envisions a future where technology removes barriers between talent and opportunities. By enabling faster internal mobility and reducing friction, employees can find roles suited to their skills and ambitions, leading to lower turnover and better outcomes for companies and individuals.

AI’s Impact on the Job Market in the Next Five Years

AI is expected to automate repetitive hiring tasks, allowing recruiters to focus on meaningful candidate engagement. Enhanced candidate-role matching will speed up hiring and improve experiences. However, success depends on prioritizing transparency, fairness, and ethics to build trust and equity in employment.

For more information, visit Ribbon.