Our Co-founder and CEO, Stephane Rivard, has been on the road and on the air all summer recording podcasts with some of our favorite voices in the HR industry. From Vegas to Europe and of course, Canada, this team has had a busy few months discussing AI, the top soft skills for salespeople, and even the value of a bag of chips! Here’s a roundup of the top takeaways from every stop on our summer tour, so you don’t miss a beat.
The Chad & Cheese Podcast
The first stop of our podcast tour was at Unleash America with Joel Cheesman and Chad Sowash! These two are as straightforward as they come and their podcast provides a refreshing voice in the HR industry. They got together on June 5th in Vegas to record an interview with our CEO Stephane Rivard who was wearing our famous F*ck Interviews t-shirt!
The two C’s practiced their French and talked VR and AI for a few minutes before looking at how the HiringBranch product works. Our favorite moment of the interview?
“Joel: Your take on ChatGPT and what it's gonna do to the industry?”
“Stephane Rivard: Oh, fuck, that's a great question...”
Listen to the full episode or read the transcript here:
https://www.chadcheese.com/post/f-ck-interviews
The Use Case Podcast with William Tincup
On June 28th, our CEO Stephane Rivard sat down to talk to William Tincup on The Use Case Podcast about how we are changing the high-volume hiring game by replacing interviews with HiringBranch's AI skills assessment.
In this 20-minute episode, they discussed the importance of hiring for soft skills and how the HiringBranch platform clones top performers while reducing bias. Our favourite moment of the conversation? See below:
“William Tincup: Yeah. I’ve I worked in retail coming up and I still remember being yelled at by a customer for the price of broccoli being wrong. Like that was a real thing that actually happened. And she pointed in my chest, like she - not hit me - but she put her finger in my chest and she says it’s mislabeled…it’s supposed to be 11 cents a pound and this, that, and the other. I’m like, I don’t put a price. I have no idea. That’s life!”
“Stephane Rivard: That’s life. Yeah, I know. I was at the supermarket yesterday and when I’m alone, I always try to sneak in a bag of chips, but the bag of chip was six bucks!”
“William Tincup: They’d better be really good chips.”
“Stephane Rivard: Yeah. This was standard chips.”
For the full episode and transcript go here: https://recruitingdaily.com/podcast-episode/storytelling-about-hiringbranch-with-stephane-rivard/
The Recruitment Council Podcast
Can recruitment be done better by machines than human beings? Two brains are better than one to answer this question! This podcast episode aired July 13th and featured not one, but two CEOs talking about AI and assessments.
Listen to our CEO, Stephane Rivard and Lumenai CEO, Antonia Manoochehri in this especially fun episode! Our favourite moment?
“Sverre Haugen: What do you think we can take away from your tool?...”
“Stephane: Oh my god, so Kevin Wheeler probably said it best. What we have learned from people who qualify for jobs based on their education or experience alone is that they’re not necessarily good performers.”
Listen to this podcast or read the transcript here: https://meyerhaugen.no/podcaster/can-recruitment-be-done-better-by-machines-than-human-beings/
Hired Podcast
We were guests on Hired's podcast Talk Talent To Me with super host, Rob. The discussion with Rob and our CEO talked a lot about measuring soft skills with AI.
Stephane explained that there are 3 categories of soft skills our AI measures for customer-facing employees:
- people skills
- a candidate's understanding of a customer call
- the candidate's ability to retain information in a customer call
At the end of the day, soft skills are trainable, and so the conversation continued around how we can identify skill gaps for training. One of the top excerpts from this episode (it was hard to choose!) that aired on July 27th was when Stephane revealed that the top two soft skills for successful salespeople are having a high level of fluency and building rapport.
Listen to the full podcast episode or read the transcript here: https://hired.com/talktalenttome/episodes/hiringbranch-ceo-co-founder-stephane-rivard
Recruitment Flex Podcast
Stephane spoke on The Recruitment Flex podcast on July 4 with Canadian hosts Shelley Billinghurst and Serge Boudreau.
Over a few laughs, the group discussed a number of topics including:
- The transformation of HiringBranch from a language training company to a skills-based hiring platform
- The importance of data-driven decisions in hiring, and
- The future of HR tech and AI in the recruitment industry.
One of the top takeaways from this discussion was about exactly what HiringBranch is and does. There was a discussion about how HiringBranch's platform offers skills-based assessments to revolutionize high-volume hiring. The hosts also wanted to look at the notion of shifting from traditional interviews to skills-based hiring.
Our favourite moment from the show comes from Shelly when she asked Stephane frankly:
“Shelly: So I’m picturing an entire army of people having to listen to this. You say this is a technology…It sounds a little like Voodoo magic. You gotta give me more here Stephane because for as long as I’ve been in recruitment - now I did spend a good six years with a company where call center was a major part of the business and that was always our challenge. Now that wasn’t the language because that’s easy. That’s probably the easiest part but it was what you just touched on which was ‘Do you have the awareness or the skill to do the job where you heard what they said, you understood there was an objection, and how do you respond? This is blowing my mind. How do you figure that out? We never could. It was after 8 weeks of training. It costs anywhere between $10,000 - $15,000 per person to train them. And then we figured out that they can’t retain what somebody just said. ”
As fellow Canadians, it was nice that Serge and Shelly also wanted to talk about building our economy with HR tech companies. Despite the perception that Canadian firms may be more risk-averse, companies like HiringBranch are breaking through with AI, automation, and data analytics to revolutionize everything from talent acquisition to employee engagement.
For the full episode click here: https://www.therecruitmentflex.com/podcast/episode/1d8a6f51/fck-interviews-withstephane-rivard
The Jim Stroud Podcast
On August 11th, our CEO sat down with well-known podcast host Jim Stroud. In this 24-minute interview, Jim asked Stephane questions about:
- biases and stereotypes in the hiring process
- discrimination, diversity and the role technology plays in fair practices
- measuring fair hiring practices
- and more!
Our favourite moment:
Stephane: "It takes a split second to make an impression on a stranger's face...you make a judgement call conscious or unconscious automatically...there's all kinds of bias, our instincts are really deceiving to us... we have to look at the human and the skills they possess, and hire them based on those skills and the skills you need to do the work."
Check out the full episode here:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/eliminating-bias-from-interviews-with-interviewless/id1286314003?i=1000624113444
RecTech Podcast
Our final stop on our podcast tour was with one of the industry's best, Chris Russell at RecTech. Chris wanted to know:
- What makes a good assessment tool
- What impact HiringBranch has on the recruitment process and candidate selection
- With our real-life job-specific questions, how do we strike a balance between standardization and customization
Our favourite moment:
Stephane: "A good assessment platform matches assessments to hiring performance."
Hallelujah! Correlating performance to assessment is ALWAYS our customers' aha moment.
Check out the full episode here:
https://www.rectechmedia.com/blog/2023/8/28/hiringbranch-ceo-talks-assessment-software
That concludes our full podcast tour for this summer, but stay tuned because from where we sit the conversation is just getting started.
Image Credits
Feature Image: Unsplash/israel palacio
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