AWS has entered the HR tech market, albeit with an AI interviewing tool and not a full-on HCM platform.
Amazon Connect Talent, released in preview, is a combination agentic AI and analytics tool that conducts interviews on behalf of recruiters, analyzes the answers, and dashboards the results so recruiters can take action and make offers. It also provides transcripts and deeper dive analyses of interviews to users when needed.
Amazon Connect -- now renamed Amazon Connect Customer -- launched nine years ago as a bundle of contact center technologies that has grown into a full-fledged contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) suite. The Amazon Connect brand is now positioned as a horizontal offering for all industries, not just contact centers, said Pasquale DeMaio, Amazon Connect vice president at AWS.
To that end, earlier this week at its What's Next With AWS marketing event in San Francisco, AWS expanded the offerings under Amazon Connect to include the HR hiring tool and Amazon Connect Decisions, a bundle of supply chain tools. Last year, Amazon Connect Health and Amazon Bio Discovery launched for those distinct healthcare verticals.
AI interviewing is a well-established tool for recruiters to handle high volumes of interviews for roles such as warehouse workers, retail and restaurant jobs, and contact center agents. In the last decade, what started as chatbot interviews has evolved into AI agents that can put candidates through the paces of a job during the interview and score skills, experience and temperament for a particular position.
Independent HR technology analyst Josh Bersin was surprised that AWS jumped into the AI interviewing market now, because it's mature and already crowded with both large HCM vendors offering similar features -- and many smaller companies, too, that offer integrations to the big platforms.
"Google tried this. Facebook tried it before they were Meta. A lot of companies tried to get into the HR recruiting domain because they thought it was so easy," Bersin said. "But it's not easy, because you're selling it to HR people who want to customize it for their companies. I'm not saying it isn't good technology -- it probably is [good technology] -- but I wonder if it's worth Amazon's time."
Evolution of AI interview tech
In general, the pluses of this technology include 24/7 availability at the interviewee's convenience; analytics that help compliance and iron out human bias toward one demographic or another -- and also has fewer issues with accents; offers interviewees the ability to re-record answers they want to restate; and can interview many candidates at once, therefore shortening the screening process of 100 candidates from weeks into days -- or hours.
Prospective employees report that they appreciate how such interview automation speeds up the hiring process -- i.e., they don't wait a week [to hear back from] McDonald's or Starbucks before moving on to the next opportunity, Bersin said. McDonald's McHire uses bots from Paradox; Starbucks uses a bot developed by Sapia.ai.
"It's very powerful [technology], because if you're recruiting for a high-turnover role -- like a truck driver, warehouse worker, any sort of tactical work -- you're going to get a lot of applicants and need time to schedule interviews," Bersin said.
"Hiring managers don't have a lot of time to do it, either. So, it serves as a very good screening tool… it's a way to take all of the intellectual property that companies use for interviewing and embed it in a much more scalable experience."
Not everyone fully endorses the technology. Laws in jurisdictions including Maryland, California, New York City and Illinois govern certain aspects of AI interviewing, such as consent, facial recognition and potential bias.
Vendors have pushed back on the notion that AI introduces biases.
AWS based Amazon Connect Talent on Amazon's own AI hiring systems, much like the original AWS CCaaS was based on Amazon's homegrown, in-house customer service technologies, AWS's DeMaio said.
The company built the AI interviewing tool with customers in mind who hire many people annually, for jobs that sometimes turn over twice a year. He characterized the AI as "less judgmental" than humans.
"[The volume of work] is a really hard problem for these recruiters to face," DeMaio said. "Every day they come into work, and they're trying to do this hiring. A lot of it's been very manual, not very much fun. Over time, we had built a bunch of science around how to accelerate these recruiters' ability to do their jobs and just have a better experience bringing people on. Using that science, we've created this product, Talent."
Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with over 30 years of experience, specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip? Email him.
