How Artificial Intelligence Will Make Recruiting Human Again

How Artificial Intelligence Will Make Recruiting Human Again

Twelve months ago, in my one-bedroom apartment in NYC, my founding team at Wade & Wendy got together on a mission to make the recruiting process human again.

The four of us had experienced the many pains of the recruiting process from all angles. Myself, as an executive recruiter early on in my career, and then as a startup founder with the responsibility of building highly technical teams. Our CTO, Josh Brandoff, a highly-sought after engineer bombarded by pushy recruiters every time he joins a new social network. Our Head of Growth, Ian Jaffrey, a former chief of staff at American Express with a deep appreciation of the intimate mentorship it takes for career advancement. Our Head of Product Design, Adrian Von Der Osten, who was trained and educated in the field of architecture but found himself in the wonderful world of startups doing user experience design, a radical career jump many can only dream of.

Now, one year later, what began as an idea with four founders is now a team of twelve people with an array of unique backgrounds ranging from Natural Language Processing, Distributed Systems Engineering, Linguistics, and Organizational Psychology. We work on a company called Wade & Wendy, named after our two artificially intelligent assistants.

“Make recruiting human”: what does that even mean? Ironically, it started with training robots, or machine intelligent assistants, to have natural language conversations about work and handle basic repetitive recruiting tasks. We found that building teams has become a robotic effort by humans, when at its core, successful recruiting comes down to communication and developing relationships. This is where people should be spending their time.

We know bots are all the rage right now, but we don’t see Wade and Wendy as bots. Bots are transactional, they are often natural language UI buttons to accomplish a simple task. That’s helpful in many areas, but we think hiring and career discovery are perfect for truly intelligent assistants. For us, it’s not a gimmick but the right way forward. Artificial intelligence is a natural fit to improve empathy and user experience in the recruiting process.

Before I go any further, I should properly introduce our AIs, Wade and Wendy.

Wade is your personal super recruiter and career advocate. He communicates with you via chat privately about your career, learning about your skills and experiences, discusses your interests and goals, and processes those conversations to provide you personalized feedback that will enable you to discover new career opportunities. He is powered by conversational artificial intelligence, informed by network insights and trained with human empathy. I like to think of him as your professional competitive edge.

The first hypothesis that we set out to confirm with Wade was this: would people even chat with an AI about their career? Our discovery after thousands of Wade conversations and interactions is not only will people chat with Wade, but it’s a refreshing & unique experience.

“I think this is a great introduction that allows me to discuss my experiences and ask questions under a less stressful condition.”

“I loved this conversation. I have had many of these types of conversations in the past 30–45 days and seldom have I experienced such a personal connection with the recruiter.”

And my personal favorite bit of user feedback….

“Ironically this is far less robotic than the usual experience I have with hiring people.”

This is a great start for Wade, but we know we have a long way to go to deliver the empathetic experience we strive for. He needs to be informed, friendly, understanding & funny! His “glitches get stitches” line was only funny the first time :)

We have been in a limited and private beta for the past six months, working mostly with Product Managers, Data Scientists and Engineers. We will continue to expand our limited rollout over the following months.

I can’t wait for you all to get to know Wade! Join the list to meet him!

Growing companies, I have your newest hire, her name is Wendy! She will help you develop your amazing teams to build the incredible products you are trying to deliver to the world. She doesn’t need health benefits, but that doesn’t mean she won’t catch a bug now and then, Bdumchhh :) Wendy is the dream recruiting assistant for teams! I’m telling you this first hand, because she is our recruiting assistant :)

She lives inside of Slack, becoming a member of the team, supporting your talent acquisition efforts. Her role in the organization is to improve recruiting communication, operationalize those insights, to ultimately find the right people for your open jobs. Whether it’s facilitating conversation to capture the nature of an evolving job opening, making an introduction to the right candidate, or moderating a group session for post interview feedback, Wendy will be there to make sure the process runs smoothly and that insights are made actionable. Wendy has even performed many of our first interviews with new applicants.

Any head of talent or internal recruiter will tell you an efficient process is critical to a successful talent acquisition team. Wendy will fit seamlessly into your process. Already integrating with Greenhouse ATS, with other platforms on the way, Wendy will be a complement to your system, never a disruption.

Sign up to add Wendy to your team!

Here is our core belief. Job descriptions are broken. Resumes are broken. They work fine in order to do buzz word matching, but buzz words are not what makes up work and culture and they do not define our experiences and careers. Conversation allows us to understand the nature of a role, and the capabilities of an individual. This makes Wade and Wendy and their ability to remove robotic processes and support human communication the future of recruiting!

Building Wade and Wendy is a tremendous undertaking. We are looking for all sorts of talented people to join our team including product managers, recruiters, software engineers, data scientists, game designers, marketers, linguists, account managers and improv writers.

Our team is based out of the NYU Data Lab in Soho, armed with $4.0m in seed venture capital funding from some of the most influential and strategically aligned early stage VC Firms and corporate venture funds globally including ffVC, Randstad Innovation Fund, Slack Fund, Indicator Ventures, Converge Venture Partners, Rothenberg Ventures, Camp One Ventures, Three Fish Capital, Rugged VC, Great Rok & Evolution VC. That list only scratches the surface of all the support we have received since this vision was formulated.

If you are interested in building the future of human and AI professional communication, while helping people and teams grow, email me directlyDrew@WadeandWendy.ai or find some of our jobs here.

If you don’t hear back from me quick, don’t worry, Wendy will be on my back. :)

Great article Drew! Wishing you much success, and looking forward to tracking your progress.

Like
Reply
Jon Ebner

Market Leader, HUNGRY | Entrepreneur | Passionate Speaker & Mentor | Author

8y

Awesome article! Very excited to see where this company goes!

Like
Reply
Krishna R

Improving the buying experience of automation for warehouses

8y

Great article Drew Austin! Wish you success!

Like
Reply

To view or add a comment, sign in

Insights from the community

Others also viewed

Explore topics