Introduction
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Paradox stands out from the crowd because of their stellar implementation team and their flagship product Olivia, an AI assistant that interacts with job candidates via text.
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PROS
- Their implementation and customer service is very efficient and accessible. You will not only get a Customer Success Manager to help you with every step during your implementation phase but your issues will also likely be resolved within the same day. Unlike many vendors, you can contact their support team via phone and explain your issue in real-time.
- It’s very time-saving and cuts down on back-and-forth communication between job candidates and recruiters. As Derek B, Head of Recruitment at a large-sized enterprise puts it, “Olivia helped us shave our response time from 7 days to under 24 hours. This time saving ensured that the applicants we chose to interview were the best of the bunch.”
- Olivia, their AI chatbot is programmed to respond to candidates in a way that feels personal, as if a real person is responding. What’s even better is that despite complete automation, you can see all chats and manually override them if need be.
CONS
- Although you can get some data and feedback about your company and its processes, analytics is not very robust in Paradox. If you’re looking for advanced features that let you slice and dice your data in various ways, you’ll have to look for other applications.
- Their AI assistant is intelligent and has a human touch but at the end of the day, Olivia is still AI. At times when you want nuanced answers in conversations, you’ll have to manually operate the chat.
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Paradox is also synonymous with Olivia, their AI assistant and flagship product named after the founder’s wife. They have a straightforward aim: to cut down HR professionals’ time on mundane tasks and help them focus on people-centric work instead. Olivia has many use cases for recruiting and it’s as good as having a personal assistant at your disposal.
How Paradox works is that their HR chatbot Olivia converses with candidates on your company’s behalf via text messages. Although it’s powered by artificial intelligence, it’s like chatting with a real person. In fact, the chatbot’s profile picture is set to the real Olivia’s photograph. You can ask Olivia to schedule interviews, screen candidates, onboard new hires, and more.
From the point of view of hiring managers and recruiters, Olivia looks like a personal assistant who asks you to configure your settings with a few taps on the mobile app. Olivia then takes it forward from there and directly converses with the candidates. You can even embed it in your ‘careers’ site so that when candidates are searching for a relevant job, Olivia can fetch the most relevant openings based on the candidate’s experience, interests, and real-time responses.
You can also use Olivia when you’re hosting virtual hiring events. Olivia handles registration, candidate questions, reminders, and interview scheduling. It also has native integration for video conferencing.
As of August 2021, Paradox acquired Traitify, a pre-employment assessment software that relies on visuals to collect personality data points. Traitify is accessible by mobile and takes users under two minutes to complete a test.
At the heart of Paradox lies automation, which is usually needed by teams looking to outsource daily HR tasks so they could focus on more nuanced work like building the company culture. If your team is small or doesn’t mind spending a little time on using HR tools, there are tons of free options for interview scheduling, recruiting, and virtual events.
Unilever, McDonald’s, Amazon, 3M, CVS Health, Nestlé, Lowe’s
- Conversational AI: Paradox’s unique selling point is their conversational AI tool Olivia, to whom you can delegate all your mundane HR tasks. Olivia would chat on your behalf with your job candidates and pass all the necessary information.
- Recruiting: You can use Olivia for hiring in multiple ways. Candidates can use a job board to apply for an opening in your company and Olivia will start chatting with them the minute they click on the ‘apply’ button. You can also embed Olivia in your company’s career site to bring candidates a tailored job opening based on their interests, experience, and responses to the conversation with Olivia.
- Interview scheduling: You don’t have to manually schedule interviews with candidates. Olivia syncs with your calendar and automatically takes care of this part for you. You can use it to schedule multi-location, multi-person, and other complex interviews. It also sends automatic reminders to job candidates and handles rescheduling with the candidate on its own.
- Screening: When a candidate applies to a job opening and starts a conversation with Olivia, the candidate will be automatically screened against job requirements. If the candidate moves past the initial automatic screening, Olivia would also automatically schedule them for an interview.
- Events: Olivia can be used as an event assistant for coordinating between event hosts and attendees. Instead of letting your guests sign up through an events page, Olivia can chat with them through text messages for registration, answering questions, or sharing any information ahead of the event. This can be used for a variety of events including job fairs, seasonal hiring, orientation, and recurring virtual events. Because Paradox supports native integrations for video conferencing, Olivia can also prompt qualified candidates to talk to recruiters on the spot.
- Pre-employment assessment: You can use Traitify, Paradox’s pre-employment assessment tool to acquire desired talent. What’s interesting about this tool is that it gives its takers a visual, image-based test that takes less than two minutes to complete. Despite the brevity of the test, you can collect hundreds of personality data points about your potential employees.
Paradox integrates with many ATS systems, job boards, CRM, assessment software, Calendar tools, and other types of applications. The most popular ones include Workday, SAP, UKG, ADP, Cornerstone, Taleo, WhatsApp, Zoom, Gallup, and Indeed.
Pricing is not disclosed upfront. You will have to schedule a demo to get custom pricing based on your company size. After filling out a demo form on their website, their team will reach out to you within one business day to learn about your team’s challenges and schedule a custom-tailored demo.
Paradox is ideal for large enterprises that deal with a high volume of job candidates on a frequent basis.
Paradox has a dedicated implementation team and a process that’s divided into phases. Because it depends on your team size and business needs, we can’t tell you the exact length of time or the number of phases it will take to fully implement Paradox but the whole process can last for several months. You will be provided a Customer Success Manager to help you guide through the entire implementation and administration process.
Paradox has many resources to help their customers perform their best. There are blogs, how-to guides, research articles, and client case studies. There’s also a help center that is available to members who have bought their software. You can also contact them by email or phone.
We’ve only heard good things about their customer service but to sum it up in the words of Steven, a Human Resources Consultant at a mid-sized company, “Paradox's customer service stands apart and above almost any other vendor we work with. Most customer service relationships in our experience involve leaving a voicemail and having to follow up to get issues resolved. I never have had this problem with Paradox and am often able to speak to our representative on my first call.”
Aaron Matos, the founder and CEO of Paradox loves the intersection of people and technology and understood the power of computers from an early age. He went on to study human resources in college and spent over eight years working as an HR professional before he founded multiple companies in the HR tech industry.
Paradox was found because Aaron saw an opportunity to transform the recruiting experience for organizations by freeing up people’s time on mundane tasks using artificial intelligence. Paradox is best known for their AI assistant Olivia, which was named after Aaron’s wife (then-girlfriend). The team at Paradox believes that the recruiting process is a human experience and they wanted to create an assistant that had a personality. The name ‘Paradox’ is also a play on the paradoxical concept of an AI having a personality.
From its inception, Paradox has experienced consistent growth. Within four years of entering the market, they completed a $40 million B round of funding with Brighton Park Capital. Other notable investors include Workday Ventures, Indeed, Sapphire Ventures, and Twilio. They’ve also won many awards such as Forbes Top 500 Startup Employers of 2020 and 2019 Gold Stevie Winner for Human Capital Management Solution. Their dream is to be the most candidate-centric company on earth.
Company HQ
Scottsdale, Arizona
Number of Employees
470+
Year Founded
2016
Amount Raised
$253.4 million over four rounds of funding, the latest of which took place on December 27, 2021.
FAQ
Are Paradox and Olivia the same company?
Yes, Olivia is Paradox’s AI assistant. You can use it to automate interview scheduling, recruiting, virtual career fairs, screening, and pre-employment assessment.
