The next evolution of your AI assistant is here: Contextual Conversations uses generative AI to make the candidate experience even more personalized.
Aaron Einhorn is senior HR business partner at Hamra Enterprises, a franchisor of 198 restaurants across the country. He recently sat down and talked with Paradox’s Hunter Colleran about the impact of Contextual Conversations on the restaurant franchisors’ hiring process.
You can read a snippet of the conversation below.
________
The following has been lightly edited for clarity.
Problems to solve.
Hunter Colleran: Can you share a little bit about the problems you were trying to solve with Contextual Conversations?
Aaron Einhorn: Our hiring managers have a lot going on — they’re busy every day, running a restaurant. Answering candidate questions isn’t something they’re focused on.
And many of our candidates have never worked before. This will be their first job. They have a lot of questions that they want answered quickly. We want to answer them quickly.
We saw Contextual Conversations as a way to be faster. And a way to improve how our candidates were speaking with Sam, our AI assistant.
How generative AI makes an impact.
HC: Where have you specifically seen Contextual Conversations immediately make an impact in that regard?
AE: Sam used to struggle with complex questions and topics.
Because of the limitations with standard natural language processing, my team previously had to manually program answers into the backend. Obviously, it’s impossible to upload the answer to every question that way. And if Sam was asked a question that didn’t have an answer, he would default to “I don’t know.”
It’s all different with Contextual Conversations. All of our company and brand information lives in Sam’s brain. He's got all the answers to those very specific questions that he didn’t before. Effectively, he has the same level of information about our organization as a real recruiter does.
For example, a candidate might ask a question like, “Do you offer an employee discount?”
When we were implementing Contextual Conversations, we decided which of our pre-existing content to include or exclude. It took one click to give something like our entire electronic handbook to Sam. Moments later, our handbook had been totally incorporated into Sam’s brain.
It was so easy for us, and it was fascinating how well the answers were contextualized inside of Sam’s responses.
HC: I’d love to hear about follow-up questions. If your candidate asks a clarification question, how can the AI expand on a given concept to give more information?
AE: This is a funny story. One night, I was lying in bed and testing the AI. I had asked about a benefit and Sam responded, so I prompted Sam to tell me more. And he went into more detail of our policy — specifically the part I was looking for.
It was like he knew exactly what I was asking. It was magical. My mind was completely blown.
It was a big confidence builder. And since we’ve gone live, that same scenario has played out many times with real candidates. It’s still incredible to see how Sam can literally sense what you’re asking.
Improving the recruiter experience.
HC: Beyond the candidate experience, can you share how it’s also improved the recruiter experience?
AE: As I mentioned earlier, our hiring managers are extremely busy running restaurants. And our recruiting team is very small — there’s only two of us. So every second we can save is valuable.
Contextual Conversations is like having another recruiter on staff 24/7/365. It is an extra set of hands that is always available to help us. It has saved us so much time — we trust that Sam is taking care of our candidates and giving them the information they need.
Learning to trust AI.
HC: Speaking of trust, how did your team learn to trust in this new technology’s capabilities?
AE: We were early adopters of Contextual Conversations, and I was nervous as to how Sam would perform. I didn’t want Sam to start guessing. But he doesn't do that.
Sam is answering a lot more questions, with greater accuracy. But what really gives us confidence is the fact that Sam will still sometimes say, “I don't know.” We’ve learned that “I don't know” can still be a good answer. It’s certainly better than making something up.
And if something is ever even a little clunky, our team can immediately look at any response to see where Sam’s pulling the information from. And we can easily go into Sam’s brain and make adjustments.
Overall, though, that trust is built in the results. We trust Sam more because we’ve actually seen the improvement in his abilities. Which has not only improved the candidate experience, but our own experience as daily users.
__
Beyond just Contextual Conversations, Hamra Enterprises has been at the forefront of modernizing their TA tech stack with innovative software.
You can hear more about their story below.
