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Alex Desjardins is the Co-Founder and Director at BubbleHR.
Since parting ways with the traditional education system, his focus has been on making the corporate hiring process easy, transparent, and human. Alex and his team have set out to lead the industry’s imminent transition from Applicant Tracking System to Intelligent Recruitment System.
Alex is an up-and-coming shark so we decided to feature him on FutureSharks.
City where you’re from: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Hobbies: Reading, Public Speaking, and Hockey
Favorite quote: “Employers should engage prospective talent by portraying content that is real, raw, and in the moment.” – Carlos Gil, Award winning Snapchat storyteller
Social accounts: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram
What are you working on? How did you come up with this idea?
For the past three years, I have been independently studying the core roots of corporate recruitment and the nature of what makes people analytics effective. I initially discovered that the information used to assess people’s skills and attributes in the workplace was insufficient. This was due to the fact that material such as resumes and social media were being used to label peoples true value.
From this research, and my understanding of advanced machine learning technology, I established a concept that would allow people to showcase their skills and traits through richer forms of digital media, such as mobile recorded audio and video. After pursuing this endeavour, I discovered that resumes were not to blame; it was traditional recruitment software that was causing a majority of these problems. Thus, our pivot to BubbleHR (an Intelligent Recruitment System) took place.
How is BubbleHR different?
Simply put, BubbleHR allows people to experience a job digitally before officially starting. We advance the way growing technology companies portray their company culture to prospective talent. By doing so, companies can meet the industries growing expectations surrounding corporate transparency and candidate experience.
When it comes to machine learning, our advantage lies within the way we benchmark our candidate assessment data. Which is done through deep learning applications of natural language processing to encode the psychological profile of the current employees based on I/O Psychology. This helps us understand which skills and attributes a team does and does not already have. Our definition of cultural fit involves heavily diversifying hard skills and soft skills based on what makes a team of people proven to be effective.
What’s your dream with your company?
Ten years from now, we have mastered the way in which human and artificial intelligence co-exists in a corporate recruitment landscape. We have been successful in creating a fully immersive digital environment that cultivates all of the most important moments in the hiring process for analytical and observational purposes.
By this time, many jobs we see today do not exist, but BubbleHR has evolved to the point in which we have tied together human psychology, data, and science to reconstruct what successful recruitment looks like in this new era.
Ten years from now, every job seeker has the innate ability to step inside any company to virtually review where they could be working and whom they would be working with. This will be an industry standard that every modern organization must adopt to in order to stay competitive in the never-ending war on talent.
How is recruitment software evolving in 2018?
The number one expectation for talent acquisition in 2018 is a rapid transition to a “candidate centric” hiring process. To sustain a world-class employer brand, recruiters and hiring managers must leverage mobile digital media in order to intimately connect with talented people on an emotional level. It has become widely known that “Passive Candidates” (or people that already have jobs) are the most valuable talent to hiring organizations. The problem is, that these types of people are already happy where they are – or are they?
A recent study shows that 47% of the managers and HR professionals said their departing employees were motivated more by the attraction of an outside opportunity than by their dissatisfaction or desire to leave. This means that no matter how happy your employees are, there will always lie the possibility of voluntary turnover due to more exciting opportunities elsewhere.
They key to all of this, is making sure your company is portrayed as the most exciting and fascinating place to work. Only then you will experience a high demand of quality applicants, and a low rate of turnover. This concept is very similar to the way Millennials and Generation Z tend to choose their intimate partners – If there is more perceived value elsewhere, there is intrinsic reason to believe that we must change our lifestyle or the people we’re associated with.
What should an entrepreneur focus on?
Seek everyday to break the gap from who you are, and who you wish to be. Resistance is the powerful force of nature that keeps us from becoming who we aspire to be, and in most cases, who we need to be. When we aspire to achieve, there is often a feeling of fear triggered by potential failure. This is what keeps us from executing the small daily tasks needed to reach our much bigger goals. According to Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, five minutes is actually all the time you need to conquer your fears and get started on that important project or big dream you’ve been persistently putting off. Just sit down and do it!
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