Jun 2024
AI & Hiring: Positive Shifts Perceptions
Written by Positive Team
Our passion for HR Tech was recognised by our peers when they awarded us the prestigious Product Media Relations Sabre for our work generating positive media coverage and building brand awareness for AI hiring platform HireVue!
If you’re unfamiliar with this award ceremony from PRovoke Media, it’s like The Oscars of PR.
The hiring landscape was upended by the pandemic. Companies struggled to attract talent, while job seekers faced a black hole of application portals. Both sides desperately needed hiring reinvented.
HireVue, the leader in human potential intelligence, aimed to drive this transformation through its digital interviewing and evaluation technology. However, they faced a major hurdle – negative perceptions around using AI for hiring. Some saw AI in HR as cold and calculating, dealing in algorithms rather than people.
Positive had to get creative to showcase how their innovative products could actually reduce bias and realise human potential.
Here’s how we did it:
Fostering Human Connections
From the start, we knew highlighting diverse personal stories would be key to fostering connections. We held insight sessions with experts across product, DEI, customer success and more at HireVue. This helped craft a powerful narrative around launching careers, nurturing talent and building inclusive cultures.
Our subsequent media coverage cultivated conversations on unconscious bias, equitable advancement and meaningful work. Over 10 briefings with top UK journalists like those at the Financial Times, The Sunday Times and The Telegraph helped advance collective understanding. We even welcomed scepticism as an opportunity for critical discourse.
The ripple effects were transformative, empowering professionals to envision better futures as team leaders or individuals charting their own path. In total, we secured 60 earned articles spanning every major HR publication.
Becoming a Guiding Light
While we helped the company grab a lion’s share of coverage, we knew HireVue needed to expand their category to create real, lasting change. So rather than rehashing hiring process details, we positioned them at the intersection of human potential and the future of work.
We implemented “mini-campaigns” turning flashpoints like Elon Musk’s AI doomsaying into an ongoing narrative where HireVue was the North Star guiding organisations to realise human potential amid complex change. Tying commentary to trends like “quiet hiring” kept them at the forefront.
Pioneering a New Future
Our creative storytelling cemented the company as a trailblazer pioneering new frontiers. This enabled HireVue to capture over 50% share of voice in the HR tech market and acquire a major competitor.
Most importantly, HireVue pioneered a new category empowering career mobility based on skills and potential over pedigrees alone. By convincing top media voices that AI can be a compassionate friend for job seekers, we transformed perceptions from cold and calculating to empowering.
Positive’s partnership enhanced inclusion, understanding and advancement as companies and individuals navigate the age of AI and automation. By getting creative to realise human potential, we helped usher in a new era of hiring hope.