By Paul Post
A Queensbury firm and its Singapore-based partner are helping companies worldwide with a new high-tech hiring service that purports to find key employees quickly and efficiently while saving valuable time and money.
“Our first customer in New York City went from an average of two to three months per hire to just three days using our tool,” said Tim Montgomery, owner and president of TIMIT Solutions LLC. “Our primary target is businesses that hire a lot of people. We’ve initially engaged with some very large IT (information technology) companies in India.”
ConvInt.ai (Conversational Intelligence), founded and owned by Virender Aggarwal, of Singapore, uses artificial intelligence to locate top candidates not only for IT companies, but those in other industries such as insurance, healthcare and the rapidly expanding field of cannabis production.
“Many human resources people aren’t technically savvy and don’t know much about who you need to hire for the cannabis industry, the types of people and skills they need,” Montgomery said. “This tool makes them an expert in all of those areas because we’re asking expert questions on their behalf.”
Earlier in their careers, Montgomery and Aggarwal became acquainted as members of India-based Satyam Computer Services’ global leadership team.
Montgomery was working for General Electric Co. near Boston when he founded TIMIT Solutions in 2012 and moved the firm to his native Queensbury in 2014.
Aggarwal has more than 35 years of tech industry experience. His firm’s website says ConvInt.ai is “an intelligent AI-based, cloud native conversational platform, built on the most contemporary technology stack, designed to accelerate corporate officials and recruiters in fulfilling their recruitment needs and redefining the experience for the candidates and jobseekers.”
Both recruiters and candidates can interact using their preferred channel or chat platform to register, initiate or take an assessment.
The service completely eliminates the cumbersome process of sorting through and reading lengthy resumes, which may or may not be truthful.
“Once you put a job description out there on Dice.com or Montster.com, people have technology that can create a resume based upon that job description,” Montgomery said. “There’s not a lot of honesty in the candidate search process any more because a lot of resumes we have found are duplicates of others or they aren’t resumes that represent the individual.”
“That tells us two things,” he said. “First, resumes aren’t worth the paper they’re written on any more and two, you’re spending an enormous amount of time reading multi-page resumes, which might be seven to 10 pages long for tech people. We’re saying don’t bother with that. Other companies do similar types of things, but we believe we are the only one that is not just accelerating, but eliminating steps in the hiring process.”
Companies interested in using ConvInt.ai are given a free two- to three-week pilot run, which includes training in how to set up specific questions, and “how to assess what you get back and what to do with it,” Montgomery said.
For example, a company might need a sales force developer with expert or even medium administration skills. “We give you a link to access our product,” Montgomery said. “You go in and decide what skills you’re looking for and pick those from our database. Now you’ve created a role. That’s step one.”
Next, the employer decides how long it wants to offer the job, perhaps four weeks. Candidates may be invited to consider the position, using only their name and email address, or it can be posted on a job board or the company website.
“The candidate clicks on a button or link that says you’ve been selected as a candidate for this job opening with these skills,” Montgomery said. “You could have thousands of people completing assessments. All you do is sit back and wait for the results.”
Candidates are asked to answer a number of job-related questions. ConvIntl.ai decides the next question to asked based upon the previous answer, and continually redefines what a difficult, medium-difficult or easy question is based upon how all respondents answered that question.
Companies are then given a candidate assessment report that shows which questions a person got right or wrong, and how they answered each question. The report also tells if the candidate agreed to being video taped while answering questions. This helps ensure integrity by showing how long it took to answer questions, and proving that they answered questions on their own without seeking outside help.
So bottom line, the service tells employers the best people to choose from based upon their responses.
“Now if they want to call a few candidates, they can do that,” Montgomery said. “It’s a good idea, we recommend it. For example, they might want to ask: You answered Question 3 right, why did you answer that way? The HR director can also ask questions that aren’t part of the assessment, like are you willing to relocate? What is your salary expectation?
“In the end, the HR director is very confident the person is suitable for that job. They can focus on all the important aspects of recruiting and not waste time reading resumes and questioning candidates on skills they may or may not be experts in.”
TIMIT Solutions can be found at timitsolutions.com.