COVID 19 tech tools Paradox

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Even during a raging pandemic, there are employers in talent acquisition mode. Some of them are turning to Paradox, a Scottsdale, Ariz., conversational AI platform vendor that recently launched Virtual Hiring Events to meet pandemic-specific recruiting needs.

Built around Paradox’s artificial intelligence assistant Olivia, the new product enables employers to quickly and easily create a virtual event and engage with people directly in a simple, chat-based environment, according to Josh Zywien, chief marketing officer.

Josh Zywien

“Development on Virtual Hiring Events accelerated after an increase in client requests brought on by travel restrictions and social-distancing requirements,” Zywien says, noting that brands such as CVS Health, McDonald’s, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Intel, Wendy’s and Aramark are Paradox customers.

Zywien explains that Paradox clients are experiencing challenges they’ve never seen, which forced the company to think about new ways to add value. He explains that, while many companies have frozen hiring, many others are still actively hiring–and even the ones that aren’t still want to keep candidates engaged.

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“We’re proudest of the flexibility of our product to help clients adapt to challenges they’ve never seen before,” Zywien says.

For example, one of the nation’s largest healthcare companies–a company facing a massive hiring spree–worked with Paradox to build automated candidate capture and screening mechanisms to help displaced hospitality workers find a new job quickly.

Another customer, a large professional-services firm, used the firm’s AI assistant to help current employees affected by shutdown industries like hospitality find jobs within other areas of the business that were hiring, such as healthcare.

“The thing employees crave most during situations like this is clear, consistent communication,” he says. If employees are furloughed or have to defer compensation, they want quick answers about what this means for them. Also, if they were in-cycle for a promotion or a new job in the business, they want to know the impacts–and the next steps.

“People want to know how the company is responding, what resources are available to them while they’re remote and how policies might change once the country opens up and we start to go back to work in offices,” Zywien says, adding that, while HR, talent teams and hiring managers can certainly answer a lot of those questions on their own, it’s not particularly efficient for repetitive FAQs.

“Giving employees a tool–like an AI assistant–where they can get quick answers to common questions is a simple step that can go a long way toward ensuring everyone feels informed and engaged,” Zywien says. “And what could be more important during this current crisis?”

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Tom Starner
Tom Starner is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia who has been covering the human resource space and all of its component processes for over two decades. He can be reached at [email protected].