Neil, we’re excited to have you with us today. To start, can you share a bit about your professional journey and what led you to find HireClix?
I started out at PwC right out of college but eventually transitioned to advertising at Monster, which got me closer to the recruitment space. Once I was there, it became apparent to me that there was a need for a service that would help corporate talent managers build their brands in the recruiting space. That is when I started HireClix. Nearly 15 years later, I now lead an outstanding team of professionals, working to make recruitment marketing easier for our clients.

What inspired the creation of HireClix Help, and how do you see it elevating the candidate experience in today’s hiring landscape?
HireClix Help is an innovative customer experience (CX) platform that gives clients access to a large library of resources to optimize their recruitment strategies. This platform is meant to work in conjunction with our account management teams to further improve our current customer service and give clients access to previously unavailable resources. Because we constantly have our ears to the ground, working to understand and overcome common talent acquisition pain points, we recognized a need for a more self-service option. AI has transformed the customer experience across industries, so we simply fostered it to help expand service options for our customers. Our hope is that this will inspire our clients to uplevel their own candidate experiences as well – perhaps using AI.

In a competitive market, what do you believe makes HireClix Help a true differentiator compared to similar offerings?
Our true differentiator remains the fact that our agency truly cares about our clients. We pride ourselves in knowing exactly what unique challenges our clients are facing regardless of industry, and we work toward offerings that will streamline processes and make their lives easier. At the same time that HireClix is making these large investments in how we serve our clients, our competitors are lowering the support they provide to customers, which only deepens the divide.

Can you provide an example of how HireClix Help can be particularly useful to talent acquisition and HR teams in their day-to-day operations?
HireClix Help can assist talent acquisition (TA) teams in their day-to-day operations as it is an on-demand resource that provides content related to both baseline knowledge and advanced concepts for recruitment advertising, employer branding, and application tracking systems. For a typical TA team, digging into recruitment marketing is just a step away from their day-to-day work, so having the ability to easily search for resources related to understanding core functionality of vendors like Indeed, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Seekout, and ZipRecruitier, is really valuable. On top of that, our customer support team has a depth of knowledge of these tools and can provide additional insight and advice on how to best leverage these solutions to round out their hiring needs. For example, HireClix Help can provide talent acquisition teams with a baseline understanding of how to leverage Google, Meta, YouTube, Spotify, and other consumer channels, and then our team can help finesse those campaigns.

How does HireClix help balance AI-driven automation with the human elements of the customer experience to create a better overall user experience?
HireClix Help is an extension of HireClix’s dedicated account management teams, so the goal was always to augment the outstanding customer service we are already providing with AI-driven automation that allows clients the autonomy to explore their needs on their own before diving in with our team. This gives clients access to hundreds of useful resources that they might not have been able to explore otherwise and further cements HireClix as a true partner.

What’s next for HireClix? How do you envision innovation continuing to shape the future of talent acquisition technology?
Since this announcement, we have released a few additional HR tech solutions, including the HireClix Advanced Analytics Dashboard and map technology for career sites. All three of these announcements aim at the same goal: to help make our clients’ lives easier. With that in mind, we have established quite the pipeline through the end of this year and into the new year. You can expect some truly groundbreaking stuff in the talent acquisition space coming out of HireClix.

Hiring is going to pick up in the new year, and if you are still working to streamline your recruitment strategies come December, you will be left

As a leader in HR technology, what personal strategies do you employ to stay ahead in this fast-evolving industry?
As a business owner of a scaling company, I learned quickly that in order to retain my most valuable employees, it was best to just ask them what they need and want from HireClix as an employer. This same strategy rings true for our clients. In order to show them how much we care, we get down and dirty in their industries and processes to uncover their most paralyzing challenges. Once those have been identified, it becomes our challenge to ease their burden.

What do you see as the biggest challenges facing HR professionals today, and how does HireClix Help aim to address these challenges?
All industries are different, but across the board, we are seeing our clients struggle with the candidate experience. Application processes tend to be a bit too long and not mobile-friendly, which is discouraging to job seekers. HireClix Help has a plethora of resources that can help our clients better understand what the job seeker is looking for in an application process and easy fixes that can help get more people transitioning beyond top of funnel.

Based on your experiences, what advice would you give to other entrepreneurs or leaders looking to innovate in the HR technology space?
Keep your ears to the ground. Listen to what your target audience is really asking for and make that your priority.

As we wrap up, are there any final thoughts or key messages you’d like to share with our readers about the future of talent acquisition and the role of technology in it?
Recently technology has gotten a bad rap for overcrowding and overwhelming HR teams that have accumulated too large of a tech stack. However, that’s not the reality. Technology will make our lives easier, but HR teams will have to put a large time investment into understanding each solution to its extent. This will help simplify the tech stack and likely give you money back in your budget should you realize you have some overlapping solutions.