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How recruiting is automated, or why HRs retire



Robots will be making decisions about whether you work or not. And this is already happening.

Hundreds of thousands of owners of restaurants and cafes in the United States are now preparing to reopen as soon as the restrictions are lifted. The biggest problem is to recruit several million employees who have not worked for two months. One of them found another job during this time. Someone left the city, someone went to study. How to solve the problem of such a global hiring? And in a situation where this happens with millions of different businesses across the country?

In order to expedite the task and not be at risk of physical contact during a pandemic, the hiring process, even for jobs such as cooks, waiters, salespeople, maids and drivers, is now almost entirely online. Thousands of companies with this process are assisted by a San Francisco-based startup Workstream . It has fully automated recruitment for nearly five thousand managers - including those from Uber, Marriott, H&M, Amazon, and McDonald's. They say that this allows you to process 4 times more applications, quickly check employees and reduce the time to hiring by 70%.

Workstream works behind a screen, secretly helping the recruiting mechanism quickly scroll from start to finish. The service integrates with online job search sites. Scans resumes and allows you to post a vacancy on 24 sites at the same time. Responding applicants will receive a chain of automated questions tailored for a specific position in text messages. They may not even suspect that they are communicating not with HR, but with the bot.


Workstream interface

As a result, if the answers of the applicant satisfy the system, they agree on a specific time for the final interview. And this is the first time that a real person is connecting to the process from the side of the employer. He receives an already “ready-made” specialist who satisfies the company for all inquiries. Since the era is now Covid-19, the last interview is usually held by phone or via video chat. And so you can usually invite a person to your training center or to your future place of work to at least look at him.

All work with documents for the applicant also takes place on a mobile device, you do not need to sign anything manually. The whole process, from filing an application to getting a finished job, can take just a couple of hours. Workstream founder Desmond Lim explains:
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Recruiting has gradually moved online for two decades. Startups that facilitate HR work raised $ 6.7 billion of investments in 2019 - twice as much as in 2017 (CB Insights data). Basically, it's just a platform for posting resumes and vacancies. But similar to Workstream systems with AI are also missing. Lever and Greenhouse are engaged in office recruiting software. Instawork and Wonolo - focused on a one-time job, performing small tasks on a contract. And Workstream deals with employees without special qualifications with hourly pay, who just can go to cafes and restaurants, or to newly opened hotels. Or in Uber with Lyft, when they begin to expand again.



Desmond Lim says the pandemic has paved the way for the automation of recruiting processes. More than 35 million people in the United States have become unemployed since early March. This is an unprecedented amount. When shops, hotels and restaurants begin to reopen, they will need to quickly process a huge number of applications in order to select the best employees. Only good AI can do this effectively. The new trend now is testing, interviewing, hiring, and training a new employee remotely, without a single human contact (so as not to become infected).

Amazon still held large meetings in Marchfor recruiting and training personnel for their warehouses. This was told by journalists, and the company was forced to move completely to virtual platforms. Checking how well the worker understands the tasks of packing and moving goods has become more difficult. But the processing speed of questionnaires has increased several times. And to dismiss a person if he can’t do it, after the test period you can always. Founder of Workstream tells:
Companies have no other choice. Recruiting automation is a process that has been talked about for about 50 years. But the pandemic finally changed the minds of people in this regard, forced to stop relying on old decisions. Even deep-rooted habits such as conducting face-to-face interviews are now in question.
Many companies now have to rely on automatic recruitment services. For example, King Courier, a logistics company offering goods delivery services for Amazon in San Francisco. Now Amazon is mainly engaged in masks and sanitizers, third-party services are not needed for this, everything is done with USPS. Before the pandemic, King Courier's business flourished. Each driver made 250 deliveries per day and worked on average 5 months, and then switched to something higher paid.

Now - less work, but the number of applicants has increased by 75%. The company is thinking of waiting for, as soon as the pandemic passes, to immediately hire several thousand employees to meet the pending demand. They plan to increase the number of their drivers by 8 times in 1-2 weeks - so as not to give orders to their competitors. Previously, for such a task, dozens of HRs would have to be hired. Now, one Workstream bot can handle it.


Workstream founder Desmond Lim

Desmond Lim, founder of the company, is now 34 years old. At 20, he immigrated to the United States from Singapore. He was a manager in a restaurant, worked on Wall Street. In 2017, he launched Workstreem with a minimum of funds, making sure how much time managers usually spend coordinating and conducting interviews.

The situation was especially unpleasant in those cases when a person did not have e-mail - and this was quite common among people of working specialties. Even if they had an e-mail, they did not check it, running about their business all day. Therefore, his tool for assisting with hiring Lim "stuck" on text messages. Everyone has a smartphone, and people are used to checking notifications on it regularly.


This is how communication with applicants goes.

In the first quarter of this year, due to coronavirus, the number of transactions in the field of HR technologies decreased by 30%. Recruiting suddenly became less relevant. Workstream, meanwhile, has begun releasing new features to help managers who find themselves in a difficult situation. For those companies that are not sure how many employees they will hire in the future, the system allows them to recruit potential employees to the “reserve fund”. They will go through all the bot's questions, and when there is a sharp need to fill in the positions, the HR manager will simply click on the button. Throughout their entire database of “past” messages will be sent to check who else is interested. Documents for them are already ready, it will only be necessary to conduct a final interview. Recruiting hundreds or thousands of employees will be much faster.

Among other new functions is the ability to undergo safety training remotely (relevant for those who do not yet know what measures are being taken at the enterprise to combat Covid-19, and whether, roughly speaking, one needs to bring their gloves). And hiring in batches, even without final interviews, if the work is even primitive, and you just need a lot of human strength.



Among the companies that have relied entirely on Workstream are Envoy America, in fact, Uber for seniors. Covid-19 seriously affected their business: older users are less likely to go to doctors, visit families and, especially, go to church. But a startup only at the beginning of its development, and before the coronavirus, the growth rate was very solid, the number of drivers increased by 30-50% every month. Workstream helped to select the best job seekers (it is very important that they do not drink, do not smoke, know how to deal with those who already have difficulty walking and much more). The screening and hiring process, which used to take 40 days, was reduced to 18 days.

The company's chief HR officer, Cherie Tewson, explains:
We need to make sure that grandma falls into good hands. And it turns out that you can check for moral qualities, even empathy and compassion, in the language that people use in their messages.
Envoy’s business was hit hard by the pandemic, but there were a lot of new applications from applicants. All those who were laid off from Uber and Lyft, as well as other drivers who cannot find work. Anticipating a business upswing in June, the company through Workstream is gathering a “base” of the best drivers who fit their tasks. “In order to improve as soon as the situation, we immediately returned to previous volumes.” And those who fit the requirements perfectly receive an invitation now.

In early May, Workstream raised an additional $ 10 million in investments, including from the founders of Slack, Airbnb, Instacart, Pinterest and DoorDash. But for Desmond Lim, a family-born driver and cleaning lady from Singapore, the most important thing is that his platform helps ordinary people quickly find work in the most difficult times.

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