Whether in boom or bust, talent teams need all the help with efficiencies that they can get, and there’s a new AI tool to help.
Claira, an intelligent talent assistant, is a machine learning functional tool for workforce intelligence.
“A new era of talent management is upon us. It’s required in an age of digital transformation and in the age of AI especially,” says Katie Hall, Founder and CEO of Claira. “Companies have to work faster, cut costs, embrace all types of talent, and understand machine capabilities as well.”
Throughout her years of working in the public sector with both state and federal governments, as well as in the nonprofit sector in economic development and workforce management, Katie saw how broken the hiring system is. She says that after “getting angry enough” with the system, she was inspired to create a solution.
Katie Hall, founder and CEO of Claira
Claira launched in 2020 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Katie has also taken the Michigan Founders Fund pledge and has leveraged the groups connections and resources to help Claira expand. Named as such to make companies feel like she’s an employee hired to modernize how they acquire and manage all talent, Claira has been expanding her knowledge and capabilities. Over the last few years, Claira has been growing her intelligence, learning new information and developing insights from patterns.
But what makes Claira different from any other AI tool? For one, it’s specifically trained on HR workflows. As an efficiency tool, Claira can cut time on tasks by almost 70%. Imagine, for example, reducing the average time to write a job description from 11 hours to 2 hours. She can conduct interviews with employees to discover invisible skills, gather insights from your current workforce, or analyze a resume. Secondly, Claira centers around a unique approach: competencies. She is the first assistant in the world specifically trained on HR, built on competencies and deployed in a private system.
Thirdly, Claira is a stateful assistant that can process follow. System message tooling changes over time and introduces entirely new behaviors — but this is what allows her to conduct interviews, have complex conversations and create new data for users.
The Power of What People Can Do
During her experience with the nonprofit, Katie noticed a critical insight: the companies that were implementing her team’s competency-based solutions saw the best results in efficiency, diversity hiring, internal mobility, and revenue growth.
By discovering and harnessing the competencies of their employees, companies were able to remove barriers and focus on real results.
Currently, recruiters usually rely on approximations of what someone can do — things like education, logo recognition, or networking to find candidates. Competencies are what someone can actually do, and everyone in the world — including machines — has competence.
So what happens if you don’t have a resume?
For about half of the world’s population, this is a reality. And without a resume, people can get left behind. In America, about 44% of the population doesn’t have a college degree, which means they might never write a resume. Katie says they could be “digitally invisible.”
“Claira is not just about cracking the door open to let a few people in. The whole system needs an overhaul,” Katie says. “The currency of jobs needs to change from who you know, logo recognition, and education to what people can actually do.”
When companies focus on the actual skills people have, it opens up a whole new pool of candidates based on who can do what. It removes implicit bias, takes the guesswork out of recruiting, and instead offers a forensic look at workforce development.
Though Claira’s capabilities reach beyond just hiring, creating a more equitable system is one of the main reasons why Katie started the company.
“We’re at a moment where we either realize the business and societal value in including everyone in the future AI labor market, or we stick with our current ways and leave them behind for good.”
Industry 5.0
As AI becomes more and more embedded in our work experiences and daily lives, the future of work is called into question. We’ve already seen this with Industry 4.0 as more intelligent digital technologies get integrated into manufacturing and industrial processes. At the heart of it, a more existential question lies: how do humans and machines work together?
Katie sees this revolution unfolding every day through her customers. They are strategizing how to utilize AI for higher efficiency and a competitive advantage. And that strategy, Katie says, must include people.
“HR is an old term. It’s really all just ‘R’, or resources. People are resources, machines are resources, and the challenge now is to figure out how to make humans and machines work harmoniously together,” says Katie. “In this way, we’re more at Industry 4.5 or 5.0.”
As machines and humans become more and more integrated, Katie says that there’s a real unbundling happening. Roles become less important than they used to be, the lines between industries become less distinct, and education lines are blurring too, as people are constantly learning new things. In this new era of workforce transformation, this Industry 5.0, competencies will have to be the basis for how companies operate.
“The future of work is a big database of all human and machine competencies,” Katie says — because, yes, machines have competencies, too. “It’s better to have everyone online because it makes us the fastest we can be, able to adapt better, and it’s a win for humans and individuals.”
Katie says she can see a world where people contribute their competencies to certain projects here and certain projects there, and then get paid in real time.
“This is the future of the workforce. We want companies to think of work as a living organism and less like something people just show up for,” says Katie.
Interested in joining the talent revolution? Claira just launched “Quick Start,” an entry level plan for $199 a month. Companies can try the tool for free for 30 days. Katie says the tool was designed to be easy to use and experiment with.
Try out Claira now and experience the next evolution in HR workflows.
