AI-powered tool helps with recruitment

For workers who identify as having a disability, many employment web sites offer a frustrating experience that hampers their ability to get a job.

But on Oct. 27, a new site was launched that aims to help those prospective employees find meaningful work.

“A lot of the online recruitment, the portals that are in place within businesses, aren’t very accessible. They look accessible on the front ends and people are meeting their requirements but it’s things like not being able to save your work and go back and edit it,” says Jeannette Campbell, CEO of the Ontario Disability Employment Network (ODEN) in Whitby, Ont. “Sometimes you get timed out of portals, or you can’t leave and come back and continue to build your application.”

ODEN partnered with a U.S.-based organization, Our Ability, to offer an artificial intelligence (AI) bot that will scan an employer’s career portal and bring that information back to the Jobs Ability Canada site and offer job-matching services to visitors. The U.S. version was created in 2017.

“There are three arms of artificial intelligence built into the system and so what happens is for job seekers, the artificial intelligence is there and it’s something called Abi, based off of the name ‘ability,’ and Abi will help support job seekers and businesses through the process of creating their profiles, registering and getting themselves set up,” says Sue Dafoe, business development manager for Jobs Ability Canada, in Whitby, Ont.

Job seekers can go to the site and build a profile, which will then offer “real-time matching built in so as a job seeker builds their profile, they will see jobs that match come up on the right-hand side of their screen; and then for businesses when they log in, and they pull up one of their job descriptions, they can see the best match that their top 10 matches come on the bottom of the screen,” says Dafoe.

Despite employers planning to make their workplace more diverse through different programs, many have failed to follow through with their plans, according to a report from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) in partnership with the Harvard Business Review.

AI does the work

For employers, the AI tool Abi does most of the work for them, as it crawls their career sites, according to Dafoe.

“It harvests jobs from the business, so all we really need is a link to their career site. They don’t need to spend hours uploading job descriptions”

Jobs Ability was designed for employers that are serious about increasing diversity, says Campbell.

“It is specifically for job seekers who identify as having a disability but it’s also specifically for businesses who are intentional in their diversity, equity, inclusion work, making sure that they have a lens on disability and they are being proactive and active in going after employees who identify as having a disability.”

Jeannette Campbell and Sue Dafoe

Once an organization registers with Jobs Ability, and pays a yearly fee based on company size, industry and whether or not it is for-profit or non-profit, it is vetted on its D&I efforts, says Dafoe.

“We want those people that are being proactive. You’ll see a lot of businesses have a D&I, diversity and inclusion, statement on their websites, and they don’t do anything with them. We want to make sure that the companies that are involved with Jobs Ability actually are being proactive and they are actually not just posting and not really doing anything.”

In addition, employers have access to information sheets around inclusive job postings, accessible recruiting or E-recruiting, and inclusive interviewing. There’s also a disability-awareness survey that HR managers can use to take the temperature of their organization and see whether they’re in good standing and progressive.

Good business practice

Overall, reaching out to persons with a disability is a good business practice, as 50 per cent of those people have a post-secondary education, says Campbell.

“This is a highly skilled, highly educated, highly motivated talent pool that really gets overlooked. It’s 59 per cent of people who have a disability are employed, which is compared to 80 per cent in Canada of people who don’t have a disability.”

And HR departments need to take a look at their diversity, inclusion equity plans, and make sure that disability is part of it, says Campbell.

“They need to then have that hard conversation with themselves around what have they been doing to include job seekers who have a disability to give them access to opportunity, and then reach out for help and support.”

Meanwhile, some employers are embedding wellness objectives into their D&I plans.