Getting Recruitment Right with Proven Aptitude Testing & Data – with Stephane Rivard of HiringBranch

In this week’s episode of the Outsource Accelerator Podcast, Derek Gallimore is joined by Stephane Rivard, the CEO and Co-Founder of HiringBranch. HiringBranch is an AI-powered hiring assessment platform.

Derek and Stephane discussed HiringBranch, measuring recruitment success, and artificial intelligence.

About HiringBranch

HiringBranch, formerly LearningBranch, started as a language training platform. Initially, it created “courses for accent reduction and English language training.”

Stephane noted that he and his business partner were “fascinated by digital technology,” and the training courses they created “evolved into customer server support, the basics of customer support, cultural training, soft skill training.”

Now, HiringBranch is “a platform that evaluates your language skills, your soft skills, your employability skills.”

Stephane added, “It’s using the latest artificial intelligence, and it correlates extremely well to performance. It’s a platform that eliminates interviews and [it] really improves performance.”

When talking to early clients, the HiringBranch CEO recalled, “One of the challenges we had at the beginning is that a lot of our partners and customers were terrified that they would get [fewer] candidates by using this kind of approach…

[But] the opposite actually happened. The flip side is that you’re getting candidates that you would have never looked at, and all of a sudden, you’re giving opportunities to people who may be from underprivileged environments and you’re getting all these candidates [who] have great skills.”

He added, “You really have to open up the [recruitment] pool, not eliminate them. Open up the pool to anybody who potentially has a skill.”

As for the firm’s mission, Stephane said, “The core mantra of the company is trying to change the talent game and give everyone an opportunity to [a] fair shot at getting a job.”

Further, despite using AI throughout the organization, Stephane assures that humans are “still extremely important in any kind of transaction around the world.”

He added, “You’ll still need humans everywhere for every kind of job, whether in retail or restaurants or call centers and contact centers and BPO. Communication is the key, and we want to use AI to elevate humans to be the best they can be.”

HiringBranch’s skill-based assessment

How do HiringBranch’s assessments work?

Stephane explained, “The way we’ve looked at the problem [in the hiring process] is, we take that candidate, and they have to do the work anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes, depending on the type of assessment.

It’s not easy to answer these questions. It’s a very time-constrained assessment and you’re taking [both] difficult and easy questions. You need to have some kind of persistence. You need to have the right attitude. You need to have the right understanding.

It’s two-point beneficial: For for the candidate, you’re setting expectations. We’ve constantly surveyed the candidates [that go] through the assessment, and they really liked the job experience.

For the employer, the benefit is that it’s like you’re measuring that candidate doing the job.

Instead of trying to predict using a variety of different assessments and interviews, you’re really measuring them on the job. 

The evidence why [employees] tend to stick around and [retain] lower attrition, and you’re reducing bad higher rates is partly because we’re looking at that problem that way: Language, soft skills, employability plus the job preview.

It’s very tailored to the job, which lends itself to getting these great results for our customers. So it’s not like there’s one magic bullet. I think it’s a combination of all these things that lead to these kinds of results.”

With HiringBranch, you’re taking a lot of guesswork out of the hiring process. You’re getting better outcomes and better-quality employees who want to be there and perform for you.

Measuring hiring and recruitment success

HiringBranch assessments are comprised of open-ended questions. Stephane cited an example:

“We put the candidate in the scenario of answering a question. It could be any kind of question. For example, a telco [account]:

“Let’s say someone calls in and says, “I just bought this new phone downtown. The Internet doesn’t work and I want to quit your company.” 

The candidate would then have to come up with a possible answer and understand what the question is. From that, we can extract hundreds and hundreds of different metrics and those metrics are then correlated to the job performance.”

The HiringBranch CEO explained, “This is where the science is. We’ve been able to do that because we’ve been collecting data for well over 10 to 15 years because of the training aspect of our platform.

Therefore, you’re getting something. We were able to come up with some very good conclusions, and it’s really based on the skills that [the] candidate has.”

To learn more about HiringBranch, visit their website or email Stephane at [email protected].