Soft skills have become vital in hiring candidates for high-volume frontline positions. The World Economic Forum reported that by 2025 soft skills will be critical in the workplace. What exactly are soft skills? These are all the skills to do with how people interact and communicate with each other in a work environment.
The problem is that soft skills are difficult to evaluate. It's easier to assess hard skills like writing and coding. Companies can automate the evaluation of how well a person writes and codes. But automating the assessment of how well a person talks with people is challenging.
HiringBranch, founded in 2017, has the solution. The automated conversational-assessment platform is used by Fortune 500 Companies including Infosys, Accenture, Afni, Fundraising Direct, and others. The platform resulted from their clients' challenges evaluating candidates’ soft skills during the pre-hire process.
Co-founder of HiringBranch Stéphane Rivard said that their customers’ hiring process was taking too long. Many of the processes were inconsistent and biased and candidates were dropping out. So Rivard and his Co-Founder Patricia Macleod created a data-driven, automated assessment platform. The platform accomplishes two things. One, it speeds up the process. And two, it evaluates candidates for skills that drive customer success. In the end, they created a platform that is fast, accurate, and cost-effective.
Automated Interview Assessment
HiringBranch offers fully automated pre-hire conversation assessments. The assessments are designed for customer-facing positions, including positions including outbound sales, customer support, or collections. The platform tests candidates for a variety of fundamental soft skills such as positive language usage, problem-solving, and active listening.
HiringBranch can help employers and RPO providers assess candidates’ speaking and writing proficiency, language skills, multitasking, typing speed, processing speed, customer focus, and quality focus.
Their assessment is adaptable to various industries and is multilingual. You can tailor the platform to fit specific languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, and Mandarin.
HiringBranch offers hiring and training solutions for the BPO (business process outsourcing), retail, and telecom industries.
The HiringBranch Difference
What sets HiringBranch apart from other conversational assessment platforms? Well, their platform has four unique features that set them apart from other assessments. Those four features include:
- A scientific communicative-skills framework to assess candidates
- AI to analyze results
- Data that can be used to benchmark skills and standards
- Real-life chat, email, and call scenarios that match your work environment
A key feature is the use of real-life scenarios. The real-life situations require candidates to listen to a client's request and then respond with clear and concise answers. The answers are both written and spoken -- and spontaneous. The AI technology automatically evaluates their responses. Both the candidate and the company benefit from this process. The platform provides the candidate with a genuine preview and feel for the work they'll be doing. And the company will hire a candidate who is job-ready.
RPO and HiringBranch
HiringBranch helps Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) providers hire candidates for high-volume frontline positions. "We love helping RPO providers hire skilled frontline candidates who can perform and get better ROI for their clients," Rivard said. "We like that our clients are hiring great talent automatically and getting great results for high-volume positions."
Rivard said that their platform gives RPOs flexibility to scale hiring on-demand for multiple jobs. HiringBranch is a valuable partner to RPO. They're valuable because they help RPOs screen candidates for the fundamental skills that provide results.
Customers using the HiringBranch solution for volume front-line hiring are experiencing 20 percent increase in first call resolution, increase in speed-to-hire, and 15 percent increase in customer satisfaction rate.
Working with HiringBranch
The HiringBranch team is very agile, results-oriented, and uber customer-centric. Rivard likes working at HiringBranch because "We help companies solve fundamental problems in screening for high volume positions. We help them deliver great customer service by helping them quickly select candidates that perform and deliver results."
HiringBranch helps companies see which candidates have effective language and communication skills. It's soft skills like these that make businesses successful. Their process is entirely automated, unbiased, and delivers results fast--like Usain Bolt fast.
When partnering with HiringBranch, companies:
- automate interviews
- streamline hiring
- reduce costs
- Improve Performance
These good-performing candidates are ready to work on day one. Therefore, companies improve their customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, reduce turnover, and enhance speed to proficiency and reduce time to hire.
