HiringBranch was born from LearningBranch, a company founded years before to train employees on the language and skills needed to succeed in the global workforce, especially soft skills. The company’s mission, at the time, centered around recognizing and augmenting people’s skills, not replacing people with technology.
HiringBranch History: Skills Were Always the Key
The company began by helping students and trainees develop their hard and soft skills, like language and communication. The company logo bore the cross between hard and soft lines, representing the intersection of employee success.
Soon the training took off in academic and institutional settings and expanded to training environments in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) centers in India and the Philippines. These new BPO clients needed help not just training people to communicate well using soft skills, but also to hire people who already had these skills. With large hiring mandates, they wanted to automate the ability to assess both soft skills and language skills - that’s really the day HiringBranch started.
Measuring Performance, Not Just Soft Skills
In 2020, HiringBranch (LearningBranch at the time) was awarded funding from the National Research Council’s Industrial Research Assistance Program to develop and commercialize an AI soft skill evaluation tool. The company already had years of proprietary training data tied to people performance.
With a legacy of collaboration alongside leading academic institutions and contact centers, HiringBranch created the first proprietary language model dedicated to soft skills. Today this language model has evolved, forming the foundation for a new set of algorithms trained to detect soft skills with 98% accuracy. This collection of algorithms is known as Soft Skills AI™.
Today candidates around the world have been evaluated using the HiringBranch Soft Skills AI. The algorithms are tailored to each customer by role and industry, and in some cases, by benchmarking top performers.
Over the years, the HiringBranch Soft Skills AI has demonstrated that assessing soft skills delivers better results than language alone, or using any type of multiple-choice questionnaire or behavioral test. People can’t be measured in boxes.
More importantly, measuring a person’s skills provides an unbiased evaluation method, compared to subjectively judging a person based on their CV, an interview, degree, or experience. Once hired, candidates who took the HiringBranch assessment and were selected for having the right soft skills for the job, perform better than those hired through traditional processes.
Every HiringBranch customer has experienced these improvements, and performance has become the core fabric of the HiringBranch Soft Skills AI technology today. Contact centers use the HiringBranch Soft Skills AI to measure agent performance, and as a result, they’re operating faster, with lower costs, less bias, less attrition, more revenue, and greater long-term resilience.
Enabling the Workforce of Tomorrow
Years of linguistics and machine learning engineering; rigorous validity and bias testing; a new name and now a new look - HiringBranch has become the golden standard for skills assessments in contact centers.
The company continues to develop new solutions with its Soft Skills AI and ongoing tests for accuracy. Although HiringBranch is different from the company it was born from, the vision hasn’t changed - it will always be centered around recognizing the value of people’s skills. HiringBranch is forever changing the talent game by unlocking the power of accurate soft skill measurement at scale.
Image Credits
Feature Image: Unsplash/Sacre Bleu
Image 1-2: Property of HiringBranch. Not to be reproduced without permission.
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