Headquartered in San Francisco, Herman has designed an AI/MLpowered online assessment and virtual interview platform that predicts professional performance through a robust competency model, personality analysis, and a patented biometrics analysis. The key benefits of Herman include internal talent audits, candidate selections, succession planning, and employee development. The platform automatically understands candidates’ natural language, emotions, and behavior and helps employers make better decisions and the right choice. It enables a fair and unbiased interview process with accurate assessments and comprehensive evaluation reports to select top performers. “Our AI-assisted recruitment methodologies can increase the effectiveness of the interview process while providing real-time feedback to interviewees,” states German Garcia, Director, Herman.

In an interaction with Manage HR magazine, Garcia discusses how Herman’s online assessments can help companies select the right-fit persons and accurately predict their professional performance.

Please walk us through the challenges the industry is currently facing.

First, there’s a lot more talent liquidity in the market today. The traditional talent screening processes are also oftentimes error-prone, time-consuming, and challenging. As a result, it has become a daunting task for companies to find potential employees quickly and accurately. On the other hand, candidates are also looking for more agile and advanced hiring as well as onboarding experience. Therefore, they prefer to apply in those organizations that have a modern approach toward talent acquisition.

Due to the pandemic, many organizations have cut down on positions, resulting in the HR departments being overwhelmed by the number of applications they receive for available positions. The curtailment of vacancies has made it difficult for them to choose the best candidate. In addition to that, the shortage of skilled interviewers has made it challenging to tackle and interview a large number of applicants efficiently.

What Herman brings to the table is a scalable virtual one-on-one contact experience. It normalizes interviews and categorizations to solve these challenges and complete the assessments of hundreds of candidates in a few days, as opposed to the manual processes that take weeks.

How does Herman assist its clients in hiring the right talent?

Businesses usually rely on selected parameters while hiring a candidate, such as technical knowledge, skills, and previous experience. But Herman primarily assesses a candidate’s personality and success profile, which comprises self-skills and competencies. Our company considers sub-skills to be the most significant predictor of good performance. Herman also provides multiple choice-based questions that examine an applicant’s behavior and competency. Furthermore, hiring managers can personalize and calibrate the competency model as per their requirements. The platform offers a wide range of adjustable presets, such as strategic thinking, leadership, and much more.
Undoubtedly, competencies are the best way of predicting the future performance of a candidate. Typically, HR professionals and psychologists are the ones who conduct profound interviews that span around 35 to 45 minutes per candidate. But with Herman, the entire procedure becomes virtual and fast. We offer assessments that evaluate a candidate’s problem-solving ability by presenting real-life situations to them. Then, our cognitive analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence technology analyze the candidate’s behaviors and reactions to these questions. The gathered insights then enable organizations to choose the most suitable candidate.

Non-professional recruiters can also use Herman without any hassle. They can choose the required competency and the level and depth of its proficiency from the available templates.

We go around the chosen competencies by adding open questions where candidates are needed to answer situationbased questions in their own words. Our algorithm detects their language in terms of fluency and level, tone, selection of words, silences, speed of response, and many other criteria to assess their performance. We analyze both structured data coming out of their responses to multiple-choice questions and unstructured data from their answers.

More importantly, our platform provides comprehensive competency and psychometric report that enables employers to focus on the competency gaps of an employee and subsequently draw the development plans.

Apart from the competency and calibration, we also focus on the human element of virtual interviews, as it plays a significant role in attracting the interests of candidates and aligning them to the business objectives of an organization. In this context, Herman allows hiring managers to record welcome videos that remove the artificial ambiance from the interview process and helps in clearly conveying their organization’s mission.

In essence, Herman streamlines the entire hiring process by equipping clients with accurate behavioral data of candidates and revealing their psychometric aspect. Interestingly, we hired our leadership team using this technology, and our position in the market today is the best example of how competitive and successful the solutions actually are.

Would you please highlight a success story or two where Herman played an active role in driving its client/s to success?

We had an exciting collaboration with a globally renowned auto manufacturer recently. This company had been assessing women candidates for their mentoring program where the selected person gets access to an internal mentor. We helped them to accurately assess the participants by analyzing their self-skills and critical thinking abilities. The candidates were given a link through which they downloaded the Herman Pro app, registered themselves, and completed the assessment process. Later, all participants were given a feedback report to help them understand the areas they needed to improve as well as the instances where they performed well.

We’re also partnering with a multinational call center for over four months, where we’ve assessed over 5000 people to date. The company’s hiring manager even attested that by leveraging Herman, they’ve successfully minimized human biases, time, and labor in conducting interviews. We have helped them to be a lot more productive and scalable.

What kind of ambition does Herman have for the future?

We have a three-fold expansion strategy, which includes geography, partnership, and product. From a geographical standpoint, Herman is expanding further into Latin America, the U.S., and the European market. We are also seeking to strengthen our partnership models by collaborating with key global companies. And from the product side, we’re communicating with our customers to understand their business requirements in order to drive our future product developments.