How AI Is Making Job Interviews Accessible to all
A cogent argument could be made that, at its core, Ribbon is all about accessibility.
On its website, the Toronto-based company bills itself as “the #1 AI recruiter” and says it’s “built for recruiters to effortlessly interview at scale.” The AI part comes in by way of Ribbon’s software providing insights about job candidates to human recruiters, while candidates reap the benefits of being able to sit through an interview on their terms.
Ribbon has a video demonstrating its software on YouTube.
Ribbon’s applicability to accessibility is right there on its website. Take a scroll down the homepage a bit and you’ll find a few callouts of statistics and testimonials, where Ribbon boasts about its software saving more than 10 hours per week per recruiter whilst seeing an 60% increase in times to hire. Indeed, a user named Elena McGuire testifies to Ribbon’s efficacy by saying in part it has “has helped [their team at Thrive] make our hiring process faster and better.” The moral here is simple: Ribbon leverages artificial intelligence to make recruiters’ jobs not merely more efficient—it makes it their work accessible too by taking on much of the grunt work associated with the position. If you’re someone with a disability who works in recruiting, that AI could help you, say, identify skillsets and the like means less scanning and typing—which could be burdensome in terms of visual and/or motor acuities depending upon the condition(s).
Ribbon’s co-founder and CEO is Arsham Ghahramani. His background is in AI research, back in the days when AI was described as “machine learning” and, as he told me during a recent interview via videoconference, an area in which “not a lot of people were super interested in this space.” The impetus for Ribbon’s mission lies in the workings of another startup, Ezra, where previously Ghahramani led AI and would meet his Ribbon co-founder in Dave Vu. It became apparent, Ghahramani explained to me, there were problems to be solved for all involved in the hiring space. The ways in which most companies hire, he said, are (a) oftentimes inflexible about catering to people’s needs and tolerances; and (b) personal interviews are increasingly important given applicants oftentimes employ chatbots to assist them as they’re seeking employment.
“The example I always give is if everyone uses the same version of ChatGPT to create the perfect résumé for one role, it becomes really hard to discern who is the right candidate for this [job],” Ghahramani said of Ribbon’s goal. “In that world, interviewing someone becomes more important than ever, but also harder on both sides. We started Ribbon with the idea that let’s make it easier for candidates [by allowing] them to interview anytime, on their own terms, and under on much pressure as well. Then also, let’s make it easier for companies to understand who’s the right match for jobs.”
“Ribbon is an AI interviewer that can interview people for almost any role,” he added.
Besides his history working in AI before it was crazy cool, Ghahramani has another facet to his background that helps inform his work on Ribbon. Like yours truly, he’s a lifelong stutterer. He called accessibility something that’s “always been close to my heart,” adding his stutter has been at the forefront of his mind “in every interview I’ve ever taken.” Job interviews, he told me, are “high pressure environments” for the candidate, which is exacerbated for people coping with a speech delay. However unfair, the coldhearted reality is interviewers judge candidates in large part on their presentation, speech-wise. Ribbon, according to Ghahramani, gives more control back to candidates such that it becomes “a much friendlier environment” for them. By leveraging artificial intelligence, users can rest assured “you’ll get the same experience every time.”
Ghahramani noted Ribbon does its best to stay faithful to other aspects of accessibility, such as ensuring adherence to the WCAG standards for best practices on the web.
Ghahramani’s lived experience as a stutterer gives context to Ribbon’s raison d’être because, as he told me, recruiters obviously want applicants to be at their best during interviews. The problem, of course, is a high-stakes situation like a job interview often induces stress and, commensurately, often worsens someone’s fluency and intelligibility. It then becomes a lose-lose proposition: companies can’t pick up laborers because the people aren’t looking their best. In this sense, then, Ribbon is providing an assistive technology insofar as, as Ghahramani said, it’s a “huge advantage” to be able to complete an interview on your own terms. He pointed to users of the platform who report Ribbon is “not the same as a regular interview” because technology can accommodate for a wider swath of people. To wit, Ghahramani said it isn’t merely stutterers who benefit; indeed, people who are neurodivergent also see gains in terms of “saying the wrong thing [and] wishing you could redo.” All told, he believes Ribbon is offering “a massive accessibility bump” for everyone—to recruiters and applicants alike—compared to the tried-and-true rigamarole of conventional job interviews.
Ghahramani believes having a speech disability puts you at a steep disadvantage.
“I’ve always felt, in the situations where you have to perform on the spot, that’s where [stuttering has] the biggest disadvantage,” he said of stuttering. “In my job now, I have to present to a lot of investors and pitch them. I’ve always felt [his stutter] is a disadvantage there. In job interviews, I’ve always felt the same, I’m making a giant assumption here, but I think the average person who has never had a stutter, and never had an issue with that, probably watches me stutter and thinks I’m dumber than them. I’m making, like, a massive leap there. I’ve always had that feeling, and I felt you have to overcome that [perception] in other ways and demonstrate there’s not something wrong with me, or I’m not dumber than you. It’s hard to fight that perception.”
When asked about how technology can enable greater accessibility, Ghahramani conceded my question, while good, lies in an area at the “edge of my knowledge.” Speculatively, however, he answered by telling me technology has the capacity to expose things to “a much wider range of people.” Ghahramani has never seen a speech-language pathologist for therapy, saying he probably would have had he parents in the United Kingdom possessed the resources to do so. This all is Ghahramani’s roundabout way of illustrating that his company’s technology has profound potential to help people. He believes people should have accessible ways of practicing for interviews, on both sides of the desk, and that Ribbon can be a conduit for said practice. Moreover, Ghahramani told me technology can help in “our understanding of speech and like cognition and the way the brain works.”
In terms of feedback, Ghahramani reiterated Ribbon’s conceit that it exists to make interview processes smoother and more streamlined for recruiters and applicants alike. It’s a virtuous circle: if companies are able to hire people with increased efficiency and rapidity, the job market as a whole is able to become fuller and less exasperating to navigate. Ghahramani said it’s a “paradox” that AI can be so humanizing, able to offer more intimate, personalized questions that a human may not think of because they’re overburdened with work and back-to-back meetings. Users, he added, have reported feeling like Ribbon “actually cared” about them and their candidacy; simply asking about one’s last big project can be lazy whereas Ribbon can surface more thoughtful questions that can lessen stressors which contribute to disfluency for stutterers.
As to the future for Ribbon, Ghahramani of course expressed the boilerplate enthusiasm regarding the continued growth of his startup. More poignantly, though, he expressed excitement for a future he and his team are building towards in which “you can get hired in under 24 hours for almost any role.” He envisions Ribbon users completed one, in-depth interview and using that as a template for a hundred others. The company, he said, believes recruiters and job-seekers will be happier and more productive in positions that are more finely tailored to their skills and interests. The job process can be improved by shortening it—thereby making it more accessible to boot— by taking the tedium (and the stress) out of it for both recruiters and applicants alike.
