Name: Every Recruiter’s Best Friend: Meet Your AI Companion [Live Demo]
Uploaded: 2025-07-16T16:00:15.198Z
Duration: 1 h 8 s
Description: Every Recruiter’s Best Friend: Meet Your AI Companion [Live Demo]

Transcript for "Every Recruiter’s Best Friend: Meet Your AI Companion [Live Demo]": Alright. Thank you so much everybody for joining us today at our AI webinar. I see everybody is already, putting into the chat where they're dialing in from. My name is Christine, and I am also, Shelley, joining from New Jersey, specifically the Jersey Shore. So let's dive right in. So we have some quick housekeeping items before we get to our content today. So we always have an active chat stream, which we already have going today. Thank you so much for that. We'd love to keep it that way, so please continue to connect with one another right there. And, we are going to kick off the webinar today with a poll, so be sure to participate as it pops up. And then finally, the webinar is being recorded, and it will be shared with you via email. So you'll be able to share with your other team members, and we will have a few other resources for you as well on these AI companions. So as I mentioned, my name is Christine. I'm director of product marketing here at Employ, and I am joined by the lovely Katie Jenkins, our VP of product management. So to set the scene for today, here is our poll. Would love to hear everyone's thoughts. What is the primary outcome that your team is looking for from using AI in hiring? And we have a few options here today for you, filling roles faster all the way down to increasing quality of hire. We will keep this poll open throughout the webinar so that you could share your thoughts. So kicking off with our product vision. So, some of you may already be customers of employees. Some of you may be fairly new for us, but wanted to share that right now, we are really laser focused on delivering the right AI innovations that will help you redefine how you hire. At the end of the day, we believe in a people first approach to that AI technology. So we're focused on keeping you in the driver's seat as you redefine how you find and hire talent. And most importantly, these trusted AI solutions are built to be flexible so that they seamlessly adapt to your unique needs. So with these new AI innovations, we are very excited to unveil these AI companions to all of you. So looking at the challenges recruiters face today, we're introducing this new view of our product portfolio. Our series of AI companions work alongside recruiters, almost like a digital assistant, doing all that busy work and that admin work that really bogs you down and helps the recruiters have more time on the human side of hiring, building relationships, connecting with candidates, collaborating with their stakeholders. So these companions are all supported by our new Watson x governance partnership. So that is utilizing constant, always on governance to detect and immediately alert if it finds any bias in those AI processes or decreases in accuracy of those AI recommendations. So this helps us to be one of the most trusted AI vendors in that HR tech space, and we're really proud of that. And each of these companions layer on top of those ATS solutions. So for our customers today, we'd love to hear which ATS solution you have right now. Is it JazzHR, Lever, or Jobvite? And this new tech stack helps to make your recruiters more effective, and, again, giving them more time to connect with talent. So these AI companions were built to really look at those, specific hiring hurdles in the process and where recruiters are seeing friction. So let's take a moment to acknowledge the reality that most of you are living today in talent acquisition because we get it. Hiring is really hard no matter which industry you're in or which size company that you're in right now. It's not just hard. It's messy. It's manual. It's frustrating for everyone involved. I mean, where you're sitting today, you may be all three of these people just this week alone in your hiring. So if any of this sounds familiar, you're really not alone. I mean, we have a massive webinar today, so it just goes to show, how many recruiters and TA teams are really struggling here. And these are the friction points that our AI companions were built to solve for. So let's start to meet some of these AI companions. They are that built in support system. They're purpose built to tackle all of your hiring hurdles from sourcing to screening to interview, helping to remove that friction, surface insights, create a more human hiring experience, and, again, really backed by that IBM Watson x governance for safe, responsible, and always on AI. So we're going to start first with our screening companion. So let's take a closer look at that screening companion. Screening is one of the biggest choke point in hiring. So this companion starts by flagging risk and surfacing insights. It helps you grow that passive pipeline. It detects those drop off signals, and it even delivers automatic feedback on candidate fit. So what does that mean for you? That impact is that you get a ranked shortlist of qualified screen candidates and fast. You can reclaim over forty hours a month. I feel like everybody could probably use that time. And candidates stay more engaged. So it really all adds up to a better experience for all. Because it's not just recruiters that are challenging that are challenged today. Right? It's also your hiring managers. It's your candidates. So now let's jump into interviews. So some of you have seen pieces of our AI interview companion before, so let's look at the whole scope of what this companion can do. So we know that interviews is not only one of the most critical parts of hiring, it's also one of the most inconsistent. I mean, we get it. Right? You're sending your hiring teams in to conduct an interview, and then you have to kinda guess how that happens when they come out, and then you have to chase them down for notes. So instead, with the AI interview companion, it allows you to have an AI assistant that is guiding your interviewers in real time to auto generate transcripts and summaries of those interviews. It helps you enable skills based hiring so that you're not just making hiring decisions by gut feeling, and then also helps you coach and upskill your interviewers. That's my favorite part of this. So the results speak for themselves. So for the teams that are using this today, they're seeing 42% more offers to quality diverse candidates. They're saving twelve to fourteen hours per role. And because structured interviews lead to better hires, it is driving a 32% drop in that first year attrition. And last, a look at that AI sourcing companion. And that's really where the hiring journey begins. Right? And but this is also the spot where recruiters are losing the most time and the most budget. And, actually, I was just recently at, an HR event, and sourcing was such a big topic of how do we get more resources there. It feels like a luxury to to be able to spend more time and resources here. So what can that AI sourcing companion do for you? It helps you rediscover high fit talent that's already in your ATS. It automates job recommendations so that you can suggest where and how to post, and you don't have to have any guesswork there. It posts with performance in mind, and it helps you boost job visibility. So that impact means higher quality candidates, a faster time to post, increased efficiencies, so less time managing all of those ads. This helps you just build a stronger employer brand and, also better ROI on every job. So you're able to really maximize every dollar that you're spending within sourcing. So I know all of you are really here to see what these companions look like. So now I'm gonna stop talking, and I'm gonna hand it over to Katie to give you a look. Awesome. Thanks, Christine. Can you confirm that you can see my screen? Just Christine, if you could. Yeah. Looks great. Thank you. Alright. So many of you are current customers, and you will have seen our first two AI features that we've rolled out. So first being TalentFit, and also the interview companion, which was formerly known as Pillar. So as we look to the future of our, various AI features, TalentSight sort of forms the nucleus of information that we have on any given candidate. We simply look at the candidate's resume against the job description to determine if they're fit for the role. No model training, no other information clouding that super pure piece of judgment. And then we layer on all the other information that is collected throughout the hiring process. Things like interview notes, messages between recruiters, and candidates, and then assessment results. All of that forms this web of information that we have about the candidate that we use to inform the actions that the AI companion will either prompt the recruiter to take or automate itself behind the scenes. So as you use more and more of our AI companions, the more information we have to inform the actions that are taken behind the scenes. So the companions really create a situation where one plus one equals three. We are collecting so much information that the two working together are able to be more than the sum of their parts. What I'm getting ready to walk through is a functioning prototype of the AI companion experience as it exists today. So it's in development right now in terms of the actual kind of, like, interaction with the agent. So it will look a little bit different than this, when we roll it out in the fall release. But I wanted to go through and sort of help everyone understand how you might interact with the AI companions. So today, I am demoing from Lever. And for the sake of, demo, we're going to assume that I have both the screening companion and the sourcing companion, in my Lever instance. And so what will happen throughout this is you'll see, two features. One, candidate loss risk, which is a part of the screening companion, and then talent rediscovery, which is a part of the sourcing companion. So the first thing that you're gonna see here is sort of this introduction of the companion. One of the things we're really cognizant about when we build AI is that the buyer and the recruiter are are not the same person. And so the recruiter may have a different personal posture towards AI, than another recruiter or than, you know, the TA leader that is, like, the buyer of the software. So one of the things we are trying to do is to make sure that it's very clear, what things the AI companion might do, what, like, capabilities and skills it have. And the other thing that we try to do too is we're making a a stop along the way between, like, AI and AI plus automation. So you might get prompted, hey. Here's an action we think you should take and here's why. We might even prompt you with an email template, right, to do that. But we want to give the recruiter a little bit of time to get comfortable with what AI might do before we just throw it all at the recruiter, and it's automating things behind the scenes. Nobody nobody likes to just have that sprung on them. We think that getting recruiters and hiring managers comfortable with what AI would do if automated before we go through that, like, full automation step. So if we click here, so, hey. I'm your AI companion from reminders to recaps. I'm here to take care of the busy workout of sourcing and screening so you can focus on great hires. Do you wanna see what I can do? So if we click yes, then it gives you a little bit more information. It says, here's how I work. And so we provide three or four examples, of things that the agent would go do, or recommend to the candidate just to get the recruiter comfortable, with what those things are. So for example, I identify candidates who are a fit, and I track their engagement throughout the hiring process. I find and nurture high quality candidates from meaningful sources, but you're always in control. Review, accept, or dismiss anything that I surfaced. So there will be some UI changes. So this will be sort of left side to where the notifications are today, that you see up at the the top right, so that it's a little bit clearer that it's not just notifications, but so then you say, got it. Right? And we go on with our day. So after that introduction, imagine that you're a recruiter working in Lever on a new job. You're working through job details, prior to posting and you're working through that job, and then you get a candidate risk alert. So looking at this, there are two candidates that have been identified as a potential loss risk. So what the candidate loss risk does is in the background, it's always evaluating the risk of all of the candidates that are that have proven to be high fit and or meaningful to you. We measure that a couple of ways in terms of how many either they were a talent fit and they passed the recruiter screen or they passed the recruiter screen plus another interview. So we sort of kind of narrow down to candidates we know that you're engaged with, and then we give you the reasons. So if we look at Sofia Brown, we see that she's had no contact for seven days. And in the recruiter screen, she expressed that she was also exploring other opportunities. This candidate was a really high talent fit, and then we also got positive interview feedback, in the hiring manager and experience interviews. So then the system says, hey. If you were to send a follow-up to reengage this candidate, that would help keep this candidate engaged because it seems that you're serious about this candidate, but we recognize that they're working through other processes too. So you can see it says there's an AI drafted message ready for your approval. So we go and we view the message that has been prepared. So it's to Sofia Brown and just pay says, hey. Like, do you have time for a quick chat? And you're always gonna see this sort of reasoning up here so that you know sort of what's being, factored into this message. So hi, Cynthia. I hope you're doing well. It's been a little while since we last connected, so I wanted to check-in. I'd love to hear more about your current interest and availability and share a quick update on the senior engineer role. So from here, you can either go in, edit this message, you can discard it, you can say, hey. Wait and send this tomorrow if for whatever reason you needed to do something else, and then you click send. So now you can see here that we've sent the message, and so it will reassess risk, in twenty four hours sort of depending on what that communication looks like with that with Sofia, and she could remain a risk. Right? It could be that, like, that communication communication comes back and she's not overly positive or she says no. So, like, that risk, will continue to be readdressed. But for right now, you've taken a mitigating action, so you're able to kind of check off Sofia. And then as we look down here at Alex Carter, we see the candidate reached out last week with a question, but no response was sent, and the hiring manager interview hasn't been scheduled yet. So here, there's a suggestion ask action that is to go kick off the the hiring manager interview. You do have the opportunity to, look at an ad drafted message if that's what you wanna do. But for now, since this requires some other steps, I might go ahead and dismiss this notification and say, hey. I need to get back to what I was doing, and so I'm gonna move on or decide, Alex, isn't that high risk depending on what I know. So we'll leave that for another time. As we finish up this job, you can see that now we finished the job and we are in a ready to hire state. So what's new here is in addition to having finished that job, you also have this group of candidates down here. So we're this is our talent rediscovery feature. And so anytime you finish a job, we're going to sort of prompt you to say, hey. These are, the various candidates that we've found that are either previous applicants or very engaged from, like, a nurture standpoint and lever, and we believe that they're a high fit for these roles. So if we look here at Addison Tate, right, we can click here and this will pop up her little AI summary. This is going to be the same for any current Lever users. This is going to be the same summary you would see on TalentFit just being processed, in more of a context of should we invite them to apply or not, rather than the the context of they've applied right now. So you can see here, like, Addison has proven skills and cross functional collaboration and improvement, experience in a similar role. We also know, we also know that she made it to a final interview in in a previous role for that senior software engineer. So we know a lot of really great things here. There's just one note here that says there's a gap in their resume that you just might want to clarify. You know, not necessary. We know those things happen, for a variety of reasons. And then we provide some areas to clarify down here. Right? So there's a potential that Adelson has to kind of adapt to a new industry, right, which could mean a variety of, you know, new entities that they have to work on for engineering. And then there's a couple other down here that are just, can you sort of clarify that they have these soft skills? So this is something that the recruiter can go use in their interview, to really kind of assess these things to make sure that those are, like, all good and ready to go. So then you could click this invite to apply button, and it would send to Addison an invite to apply email. And then you can, you know, scroll through the other options that we've got here that have their own sort of talent set summaries. You will see where we call out sources that are, like, unique or important. Right? So Jackson is someone who is an internal candidate, and this might be kind of the next step in his career. So, we do know the the source when we think that it's, you know, a really relevant part of of the decision making process. So that is sort of a look at what the, screening and sourcing companions look like in the context of Lever. So we will be rolling out Lever features first. Those so you'll see, all of these things will be out by our winter release. And then for Jobvite, we'll start working on adding screening, and sourcing companions to Jobvite. We are, working through interview companion for Jobvite already, so that is already in process and can be purchased with Jobvite. And then as we go through 2026, we will have a third party ATS strategy. So Employ is looking not only to sell these companions into, like, the base we have now, but we believe there's a ton of goodness here, and we want to make the we want to be able to provide these experiences, to recruiters that don't have one of our ATS solutions. So, as we go through 2026, we will start to establish some third party ATS that, we can add these onto. So looking forward to that. I think that's kind of what I had, Christine. So we can pop over back to you and take questions or whatever's next. That's great. Thank you so much, Katie. So we're going to kick off our q and a. I there are a lot of questions coming in through chat and the q and a module here, so I'm just going to look at some, that are popping up here. Katie, you did just answer the, number one question, which is availability across all of those Employ ATSs. And I feel like you also answered this question, but just to to repeat in case anybody didn't hear it, can AI companions be purchased standalone, or do they have to be purchased with an ATS as an add on? Yeah. So as we go into 2026, we're looking to really determine what that third party ATS strategy is gonna look like. There's a reality that these are always going to work best with our tooling because we have complete control over how the agent shows up, over how the companion interacts in the context of the ATS. So we're working to figure out what that would look like for a third party ATS, in order to, like, not only have the behind the scenes features, which would be, you know, quite easy to do in terms of having that integrated to a third party ATS. We're really trying to figure out how we drive that same companion like experience, so that the recruiter feels like they have a digital twin, right, no matter what ATS they're using. And so, we are we will be kind of releasing more information about that as we go into 2026. Great. Thank you. And I know that we looked at a few of the companions today. Should we expect even more AI companions from Employ to cover additional use cases? Yes. For sure. So there's a couple things that we're looking at right now, that are in various stages of planning. So, one of those being a high volume hiring companion. We know that that high volume workflow looks really different than if you are making corporate hires, and we have a lot of customers that are trying to do both. Right? If you look at, a large restaurant chain or, or large retail chain. We've got, you know, you're you're hiring merchandise. There's an accountants and things, but you're also hiring people to work in those stores. Those are really different workflows, and we wanna be able to support those through a companion. So we're looking at high volume hiring as something we might tackle next with a companion, and then we're also looking to do a planning companion. Right? There's a reality, that we end up looking for a purple squirrel a lot, right, when we are hiring. Because let's say Christine leaves us, and I'm trying to find someone that looks exactly like Christine. Well, the reality is Christine has a set of skills, and those skills are what's leading the organization. And so I might not need someone that looks exactly like Christine, but fill the skill gaps that we have in our organization as a result of her exit. And so really looking at how we take sort of what your employee base is now, looking at internal mobility, and figuring out what are the skills that are missing in your organization and how do we help you craft a job description that targets those skills instead of saying, I need exactly a director of product marketing because I'm trying to replace Christine. It might be that Christine brings way more to the table than that, and we're using her skills a little bit differently, and it might be a different role that we need to replace. And so that planning companion really helps to work through all of that and ultimately really gives TA a seat at the table. I think we see all too often that TA is sort of like an afterthought when we think about strategy, but the reality is, like, your organization has to be staffed with the right set of skills in order to build your product or run your stores. And so we're literally looking at, like, how do we develop this planning companion that can give TA that seat at the table, that they really need, as as people have discussions about the strategy in the future of their business. That's great. Thank you. There were also I'm looking at, some of the questions that came up into the chat, and I also saw in the q and a, any guidelines around, working with legal teams specifically in regards to that interview companion? Yes. So we, we have kind of a variety of information compiled from a security standpoint on how that data is processed, where it's processed, what it's used for. And so, certainly, we can provide documentation, around those things. I will say one of the the most critical things I always mention about reporting is we don't really use any of the visual cues. Right? So what we're looking at is pretty much purely the audio. We kinda don't believe in using the video beyond the experience the recruiter is having. And then also in the companion, you have the opportunity to, like, play Katie's answer and Christine's answer side by side to sort of assess some things. But for, like, transcription specifically, we actually just, like, throw the reporting out once we've transcribed it, if you're only using that, like, transcription and AI summary piece. So, I think that there's, like, a lot there to make someone feel a lot more comfortable with with what's going on. But we can certainly provide, you know, all the the legal ins and outs of how the data is stored and what we do with it. And, Katie, I know we talked about availability, so we just wanna confirm. So screening companion will be fully available this fall, which is October. And then source of companion is winter, which I believe is February. Yes. Yep. And I think one of the things too that, is really important to note is, like, AI moves fast. Right? And so, like, we're adapting to that too. And so, what you see will not just be what comes out in the fall release for screening companion. As we look at the companion and the skills and capabilities that it has to work kind of in the background, we will continue to add AI capabilities to every companion on a regular basis as we develop additional capabilities for the companion. So every companion will have a release of sort of the entire first version and this first set of features of the companion, but you should definitely think of these as, like, a living, breathing thing. Your companion will grow. It will get new skills. It will find, new information that can be used to make decisions. So, yes, these will be available in fall and winter releases respectively, but, it will be really continuously improved as we go even in between those launches. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you, Katie, for giving us a look at these companions as they start to come to life. Thank you everybody for being so engaged. I know that we are at the end of our webinar for today. There are additional resources that are uploaded here for the screening, companion as well as interview. And, this webinar deck as well as those resources will be emailed to you at the end so that you can share with the rest of your team. If you are an employee customer, please don't hesitate to reach out to your employee team in terms of more specific release dates for, all of this goodness that Katie just shared with you today, especially related to your ATS. So thank you again. Thank you, Katie. Have a wonderful rest of your day.