With COVID-19 making the hiring process more complex than ever, a Riverview, N.B. company has developed a solution to help automate the process of finding and attracting job seekers.

Brad DiPaolo is the founder of CandidateHub.io, which lets employers peer into the “hidden talent market” -- people who are eyeing a potential employer, but haven’t formally reached out. The software is being developed with the help of the Université de Moncton.

“I thought, you know, why can't we use some of these traditional processes that we use in sales?" said DiPaolo "Because salespeople have qualified leads in their inbox every day. Why can't recruiters have qualified leads in their inbox every day? So, we developed a software that actually does just that.”

CandidateHub uses cookies and web-tracking to identify and monitor potential job applicants, helping recruiters know who to contact. The software can also “score” leads based on how interested a given job seeker is.

DiPaolo has spent six years as a corporate recruiter, and he said CandidateHub's design is based on his experience of how difficult it can be to attract people into a company’s hiring funnel.

“I kept thinking, there has to be a better way," he said. "There has to be a better way to attract candidates, there has to be a better way for organizations to identify better quality candidates and turn them around faster."

DiPaolo is moving  swiftly. He founded CandidateHub in September, and said the software has now passed the minimum viable product stage and is ready for commercialization. Companies can buy access to the technology as a SAAS subscription, with about a 20 percent discount for customers that purchase an annual package.

So far, he has onboarded just under half a dozen clients, and has two employees. A third person, who worked with DiPaolo at a previous job, is waiting to join as soon as DiPaolo can afford to hire them. Next fall, he is planning a funding round of between $250,000 and $500,000.

Next steps for the team will be to continue building out the AI system, such as by adding a feature that will let companies tailor their web content to individual users. If a job candidate is interested in sales jobs, for example, a company’s job portal will show them only sales roles -- not software development or accounting roles.

DiPaolo also wants to add natural language processing to interpret social media comments, so that companies do not accidentally try to recruit people who are visiting and posting on their social media pages because they are angry about something.

“We want to get involved with the entire brand’s online presence, with multiple ways that we capture information to get (job seekers) into the talent community,” he said.