This story is part of our June 2025 issue. To subscribe, click here.

Last year, Ted Driver’s blade sharpening business lost two employees.

One got married and moved to Nevada on good terms. The other got caught stealing money from the company and using the “business phone to do unspeakable things,” according to Ted’s resourceful wife, Rhonda.

Accurate Edges Sharpening provides onsite services to restaurants and other businesses, sharpening knives, mandolines, cleavers, pizza cutters and more. With customers across the Capital Region, this isn’t a one-person job. But finding a credible, reliable replacement was grueling.

“Unfortunately, the pool out there of people that apply for jobs ends up being very tedious to go through,” Rhonda Driver says. “You spend tons of time on the phone talking to them, they tell you one thing and do the exact opposite, say they’ll get references and never do, pander to what you want to hear, and it doesn’t pan out.”

Who has the time and energy for that? Not her. The 55-year-old mother of three, who teaches K-2 grades, would rather be spending time with her kids or working, not searching for new hires. Plus, she’s gone back to school at Sacramento State, pursuing a psychology degree to become a counselor. But it was in her College and Career AI class at Sac State that she came up with a high-tech solution to their hiring problem.

“One of the assignments was to make a custom bot,” she says. “And I thought, ‘My time is precious. If I could just create a bot that asks candidates questions, I could breeze through those quickly. The ones who seem like they’re half credible, I could have a conversation with them instead of taking time I don’t have.’”

Driver admits she’s “not a programmer or coder or anything of that sort,” but her screening chatbot creation puts her at the leading edge of a growing trend in recruiting: leveraging AI to fill positions with qualified candidates. This strategic shift in talent acquisition is all but destined to become the new normal. From small businesses to major corporations, AI platforms allow employers, recruiters and hiring managers to streamline the selection process, saving time and money (and headaches) across the board.

So is the online job ad officially obsolete?

‘Deep match’

Online job boards, found on Indeed or LinkedIn, remain popular for job seekers. But the fact is, most people don’t actually secure positions by launching applications into the digital void. Reports estimate less than 20 percent of applicants get hired through online job boards alone.

Sources highlight a “hidden job market,” where about 70 to 80 percent of jobs are never posted. Through this informal route, professionals get hired through networking, word-of-mouth and referrals. The classic “it’s who you know” method.

Is that really a surprise? The job search is tedious on both ends. Depending on the size of the company, employers might sift through thousands of resumes to narrow down the field and find a single hire. On the other side, job seekers might apply to dozens of positions, tweaking resumes, taking interviews, answering the same questions over and over, only to be left in the dark about where they stand.

It was a matter of time before technology came to the rescue. Driver’s chatbot represents its potential for small businesses, but big companies in the region have also developed their own new-and-improved, AI-driven recruitment platforms.

On March 1, Talr officially launched as a spin-off from Clapself, a recruiting company in El Dorado Hills. With a fully automated end-to-end hiring process, Talr aims to eliminate inefficiencies by streamlining key steps in the hiring process, from sourcing and screening candidates to ranking and shortlisting them based on skills, experience and company fit, according to Ramna Sharma, founder and CPO of Clapself.

The platform enables professionals to sign up and go through AI-powered interviews that check their backgrounds and qualifications. Along with professionals’ preferences, the recorded interview is used to match applicants with ideal positions.

“Even before AI, we were thinking of using technology to automate this process,” Sharma says. “AI took it to the next level. It eliminates all of these manual steps, automates the process and brings more intelligence into the hiring process. And gives us a unique opportunity to empower talent to thrive in the AI economy.”

To build Talr, the team interviewed hiring managers, recruiters and job seekers to understand the biggest pain points in recruitment. What they discovered was hiring managers (especially in startups) have a hard time translating their needs into clear job descriptions. The result? Vague postings that attract unsuited applicants. AI helps refine those job descriptions to connect with the right candidates. The technology doesn’t just identify superficial matches based on skills; it performs what the team calls a “deep match” that factors in company culture, work preferences and other nuanced elements for long-term success.

In addition, Sharma says, this technology plays a critical role in reducing bias by focusing solely on qualifications and disregarding age, gender or ethnicity.

“Bias in the hiring process is very prevalent,” Sharma says. “We see the power of AI really making the recruitment process bias-free.”

Human input

When it comes to AI adoption, many organizations proceed with caution, mainly due to privacy concerns. But it’s a misconception that AI poses a greater security risk than any other cloud services, says Alexander “Sasha” Sidorkin, chief AI officer and director of the National Institute on AI in Society at Sacramento State. He acknowledges the technology’s practical application, like with screening bots, can be really powerful when combined with significant, specific human input.

“It is possible to ask AI to compare two interview transcripts against the position description and get a second opinion on which job candidate is stronger than the other,” he says. “It helps to control biases that humans have.”

Still, despite AI’s presumed objectivity, he warns against the temptation to “take yourself out of the loop as a human being.” The more people delegate decision-making to AI, the more it will develop biases based on the data it receives, he says.

“I think people need to develop a good sense of where to trust it and where not to trust it, and that takes time,” he says. “Do I have a perfect sense? No, I don’t. Sometimes I expect it to be good at something, and it just screws up. But sometimes I go, ‘Wow, I didn’t know you can do that.’ So that kind of internal ability to disaggregate.”

Sidorkin hopes recruiting agencies will use this technology as a collaborative tool, not a replacement. In the future, he envisions platforms that match applicants to positions not solely based on qualifications but also personal characteristics. For example, when hiring for a cybersecurity position, AI could identify candidates who are careful, conservative, maybe even a little “paranoid” — traits that may not be as ideal for, say, an innovation officer.

Passive candidates

In today’s competitive job market, the most skilled professionals already have jobs. According to Chris Johnson, CEO and founder of The Johnson Group, a national talent acquisition firm, most are passive candidates: skilled professionals open to new opportunities but too busy doing their jobs to actively apply for a new one.

“Unfortunately, the pool out there of people that apply for jobs ends up being very tedious to go through.”

Rhonda Driver, co-owner, Accurate Edges Sharpening

In August, Johnson officially launched Passive Candidate Pro AI, which uses the power of AI to bypass job postings. Unlike conventional methods, the tool identifies candidates based on what the company is looking for, then auto-populates contact details.

To put it in perspective, Johnson says, the system can reach out to 25,000 candidates per minute.

“Some of these clients have not even had a chance to interview in several months,” he says. “But now they’re interviewing top-tier candidates within 48 hours of being on our platform. Some make offers within the first week. The fastest hire was in four days.”

Passive Candidate Pro AI only specializes in mid-level, senior and executive positions, he says, which tend to be the hardest to fill. This is not “poaching,” Johnson says, as the system “does not move happy people” or try to persuade someone to leave an organization.

“It’s more of a referral platform,” Johnson says. “Like organizations say, ‘If you know someone, let them know we’re looking for hires.’ That’s what this technology does at scale. You never think of referrals as poaching.”

Since its official launch, the platform has generated $1.3 million in annual recurring revenue, securing a $10 million valuation, Johnson says. He aims to scale to $100 million in the next 12 to 18 months.

That said, certain challenges need to be addressed. For example, on the customer side, interview styles should be tailored to the type of candidate. You can interrogate active job seekers because they’re used to that. But passive candidates require something more strategic, an approach that highlights company culture, growth opportunities and long-term career goals.

For 20 years, architecture, engineering and construction had been The Johnson Group’s main verticals. But with Passive Candidate Pro AI, the range has expanded to a wide array of industries, including law firms and medical companies, to the point where even its competitors are using the platform, he says.

Could this have existed without AI? It did. For nearly two decades, The Johnson Group had been spending hundreds of thousands on posting jobs manually for customers and “getting nothing,” he says.

“With technology, I was able to use AI to super-boost it,” he says. “In the last four years, we have filled over 500 key high-level, hard-to-fill positions without one single job ad.”

You’re hired

For Rhonda Driver, the chatbot serves as an intelligent screening tool. Instead of her spending 30 to 40 minutes on an initial interview, applicants receive a link, and the bot handles the first round of questions, such as:

• Can you walk me through your resume and highlight the experiences most relevant to this role?
• Can you describe a recent project or accomplishment that you’re particularly proud of?
• How have you handled working under pressure or tight deadlines in the past?

Each answer allows her to filter out unqualified applicants quickly and eliminate those who fail to follow through on basic requests. Within weeks, her screening bot produced tangible results: In March, she hired someone for the position at Accurate Edges Sharpening.

With the mission accomplished, her screening bot’s future is unclear. But Driver believes it could help other small businesses, from local restaurants to tradespeople who can’t afford professional recruiters.

“What started as a class assignment has become something that’s already making a difference,” she says. “I’m not trying to get rich off of this. We are a small business, and there are other small businesses we’re friends with that might be able to use this bot as well. I could market this bot to them for a small amount for my time. It’s a form of a headhunter for small businesses.”

–

Stay up to date on business in the Capital Region: Subscribe to the Comstock’s newsletter today.