LearningBranch Becomes HiringBranch: A Pivotal Moment in Our History

Learning from LearningBranch

LearningBranch was founded in 2014 as a solution to train employees on the language and communication skills needed to succeed in the global workforce. We were a learning solution.

Our mission was to augment people's skills, not replace them.

And augment, we did.

We started by helping students and trainees learn and use language and communication skills.

We created audio and video practice courses for improving workplace communication skills. When we needed to deliver instructor-led courses for practicing speaking, existing tools on the market came up short. So we created the LearningBranch platform for proprietary cloud-based audio recording, evaluation, and training.

We expanded this solution to training environments in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) in India and the Philippines, as well as in college and university language programs in Canada and the UK.

Augmenting employees and students was working. Our customers were very happy.

Soon our BPO clients needed to upscale the skills they were training on and more urgently - evaluate trainees' higher level communication skills automatically - without human intervention.

The light bulb went off: we need to automate soft skill assessments alongside language assessments.

Measuring and Automating Soft Skill Assessments

In 2018, we set out to build an alternative and better hiring solution to what was offered on the market. Using data from recordings of spontaneous speech, our AI team had 2 goals:

1. evaluate what candidates say,
2. assess how candidates say it,

and automatically score candidates at scale.  

After multiple successful pilots, we launched our language and soft skills tool in one single 45-minute assessment with customers. At the time this article is being written, we have had over 1 million assessments completed through our platform.

To our delight, we learned that not only does assessing soft skills deliver better results than assessing on language alone (see the proof here) and it's 100% unbiased (see that proof here), but the candidates our AI selects perform better once hired (see all case studies here).

Every single customer has seen dramatically improved results:

• Lower bad hire rates
• Increased time to hire
• Better CSAT
• Lower turnover

We know we're onto something big. Customer are expanding our product into more of their sites and departments.

There was just one problem: our name (LearningBranch) didn't reflect our new core offering, hiring.

And so we have renamed the company to 🥁 ... 🥁 HiringBranch!

We are continuing to offer our training solutions and in fact, they are the perfect follow on offering to our hiring solution.

Forever Changing Hiring (for the better!)

One final learning has come to us via our customers - they no longer need to do interviews at all. We are helping companies select the best candidates effortlessly and we are saving them significant time (and candidates too!) by enabling the 'no interview' model.

We will continue to learn and expand our technology to innovate and solve more problems for hiring managers around the world.

Although our name has changed, our vision has not - we help companies hire and enable people that do great work.