HiringBranch Launches a Conversational Skills Screener to Replace Resume Scanning

HiringBranch reimagines the hiring funnel, enabling recruiters to send 10-minute job simulation assessments to every applicant and stop relying on resumes.

MONTREAL--(BUSINESS WIRE)--HiringBranch, a soft skills and communication assessment platform, announced today at the Gartner® HR Symposium/Xpo™ conference, the launch of its Job Skills Screener. The new product empowers enterprise hiring teams to screen everyone, miss no one, and improve candidate quality at the top of the hiring funnel.

In the age of AI, resumes have become increasingly unreliable and unmanageable. This new top-of-funnel skills product from HiringBranch opens up an opportunity for recruiters to validate skills applicants claim on resumes, such as critical thinking or empathy. “As we saw a resurgence in assessments to solve for indistinguishable AI-generated resumes, it was a natural extension for us to design a reliable short-form assessment and make it accessible to recruiters at the forefront of applicant screening. This way, recruiters get performance signals at the start of the process, not after a round of bad interviews,” said Stephane Rivard, the company’s Chief Executive Officer. By assessing at the start of the hiring process, every applicant is given the opportunity to showcase their skills and be considered for the job.

“Creating a short screening assessment that maintains scientific rigor required extensive validation, iteration, and investment,” says HiringBranch Chief Research & Development Officer, Assaf Bar-Moshe, “Shorter assessments are difficult to design because every question removed is a potential loss in predictive power. We changed that with our finely tuned soft-skills language model and native acoustic NLP engine, allowing us to uphold assessment validity at substantially shorter durations.” This is a major advancement in the company’s conversational assessment technology, enabling enterprise hiring teams to evaluate applicants faster and earlier in the funnel, reliably.

Dedicated to customer-facing roles, key features include:

• Job simulation. Candidates perform tasks for specific roles, thereby trying the job before getting the job.
• Skills-first. 50+ communication and soft skills, such as spoken fluency, teamwork, and negotiation, are evaluated in real-time by HiringBranch’s proprietary language model with unmatched accuracy.
• Voice-based. Candidates are measured on what they say and how they say it for in-person and phone support and sales roles.

“While companies race to automate recruiting functions, they don’t need to sacrifice quality; instead, they can elevate it,” Rivard says. For years, HiringBranch assessments have delivered measurable gains in hiring quality for global enterprises, from lowering attrition and absenteeism to improving job performance. The company aims to deliver that same impact to the very first step of hiring with this short screener.

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About HiringBranch

HiringBranch helps enterprises hire the right people, bias-free, with realistic job simulation assessments. Built for customer-facing roles, its conversational and proprietary AI qualifies applicants by measuring human skills that resumes and multiple-choice tests can’t. Enterprises cut interview time by 80%+ and achieve mis-hire rates as low as <1%. Headquartered in Canada, the company serves Fortune 500s and local organizations, including Bell Canada and Infosys.