How to make your recruitment campaigns successful in terms of equity, diversity and inclusion? With this Quebec startup!

Hélis is a young Quebec-based artificial intelligence (AI) start-up that came into being during the pandemic. Its founder, Sam Bellamy, has created a technological tool to support organizations’ equity, diversity and inclusion efforts, and more specifically their recruitment campaigns.

The application facilitates recruitment along the following dimensions: gender identity, sexual orientation, language spoken, being an ethnic minority, being a visible minority, socio-economic level, level of education, being disabled, being neurodivergent and age. In practical terms, the dashboard allows you to track the progress of recruitment campaigns for each group of people. Tracking can also be done by department and by hierarchical level within the organization.

What role does AI play in all this?
Algorithms can define all the following data mentioned above, apart from sexual orientation, which remains a dimension that algorithms cannot yet determine, the founder explains.

Here’s how an AI-assisted recruitment campaign from Helis works.
Step 1. The organization decides to recruit. It publishes a job advert.
Step 2. Resumes are received. Helis algorithms analyze them and identify candidates according to dimensions.
Step 3. The app reports on the applications.
Step 4. The organization decides whether to send an interview invitation or a test to the people it has selected.
Step 5. The organization makes its choice based on the established dimensions, but also taking into account other criteria such as experience, qualifications, etc.
Step 6. The organization records the reasons why the person was or was not selected in the app.
Step 7. Helis challenges the organization on its choice of candidates to ensure that it has not been biased in its selection, by monitoring the selection trends of recruiters. For example: a recruiter tends to hire men 9 times out of 10, even when 80% of applicants are women. It’s up to the recruiter and the company to take this information into account when making future selections.

Have you ever thought of being assisted by AI algorithms for your recruitment?