Press Coverage

In an environment where hard skills can increasingly be supplemented, or even entirely substituted, by machines, the rarest and most valuable assets are the very things that make us human.

Organizations are struggling to find skilled workers to fill roles, and more business leaders are saying, “Ditch the four-year degree” and still earn a six-figure salary. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that jobs for associate degree holders are expected to grow by 6.3% from 2023 to 2033. With a median annual wage of $62,180—well above the U.S. median of $48,060—these job seekers have the skills employers are looking for. The 2025 High-Pay Associate Degree Jobs Report highlights this year’s top 10 highest-paying associate degree jobs.

The old-school job interview process can be a headache for recruiting teams and feel even more arduous for roles with naturally high turnover, such as call center agents or retail workers. What if a tool could make that headache go away? Enter HiringBranch, a Canada-based software company providing an AI-based talent screening assessment platform for call centers. The company has worked with large employers, including IT company Infosys and Bell Canada.

Every interaction in contact centers shapes brand perception. To streamline hiring, businesses are increasingly turning to AI, often defaulting to large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT or Google’s Flan T5-Large. While these models excel at processing language, they fall short where it matters most in customer service: soft skills assessment.

The call center is one of the most important touchpoints in the customer journey. When things go wrong, it’s often the first place people turn. How those interactions are handled can make or break the relationship.

HiringBranch is a company that uses responsible native AI to measure skills by role through tailored, open-ended voice and chat conversations with 98% accuracy. Pulse 2.0 interviewed HiringBranch co-founder and CEO Stephane Rivard to learn more about the company.

Picture this. Joan hires at least one hundred new retail associates per month to staff across two hundred and ninety department stores in her jurisdiction. The problem is that she gets about a thousand applicants for that position every few weeks.

Using AI in the hiring process should come with advantages, not just costs. In the United States, companies spend an average of $4.7K to hire just one new employee, and adding untested AI into the process has the potential to either increase or decrease that number.

At Customer Contact Week, HiringBranch CEO Stephane Rivard and Fundraising Direct Operations Director Sarah Wise argued that the answer lies in changing how contact centers hire. Their session showed how skills-based hiring, powered by AI simulations, helps identify fundraisers and agents who can truly communicate, handle objections, and stay resilient, instead of just looking good on a CV.

Awards and Recognition

HiringBranch has been officially recognized as the winner of the Lighthouse Advisory HR Tech awards in the Talent Acquisition Technology: Best Advance in Practical AI. Ben Eubanks, the Chief Research Officer at Lighthouse Research & Advisory, explains first-hand why HiringBranch was selected: “What if your company could predict which candidates would be high quality before they ever got through the front door? This is the hope of most employers, but many haven't figured out how to make it happen. HiringBranch doesn't just claim this--they offer a guaranteed improvement on employee KPIs, which proves that their AI is about results, not hype. Companies with high volume needs should definitely take a look."

HiringBranch has been named as one of six finalists in the skills assessment category for the 2024 In-house Recruiter Awards! Following careful consideration and review by an expert panel of 12 judges, they were selected as a supplier whose "dedication and innovative approaches stood out from the rest."

HiringBranch is extremely proud to be a finalist in the Best Workplace or Talent Assessment Project category at the 2024 e-assessment awards, for our entry, titled Skill Assessment Implementation Leads to 400% Reduction in Bad Hire Rate. For the award submission, HiringBranch zoomed in on bad hire rates within one global organisation that employs more than 100,000 people. Our research team looked at a sample of nearly 1000 employees who were hired by this company and who also took the HiringBranch assessment during the evaluation phase of their candidacy.

Press Releases

CIBC Innovation Banking Provides $2.5M of Growth Capital to HiringBranch

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HiringBranch Joins AWS Partner Network Bringing Skills-Based Hiring AI to AWS Telecommunications, FinTech, and Contact Center Customers

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HiringBranch Language Model Shows 32-50% More Accurate Soft Skill Measurement Than LLMs

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HiringBranch Secures $5M to Scale the World's First Soft Skills AI

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HiringBranch Wins Best Innovative or Emerging Tech Solution Among Top 1% of HR Technology

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Unbiased Hiring Decisions with the HiringBranch Soft Skills AI™ Assessment

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