Another year, another HR Tech conference is in the books. Every year 500 vendors and roughly 10,000 attendees gather at the Venetian in Las Vegas to swap war stories and talk tech.

Once again, AI and automation dominated the vendor booths. Though this year I noticed that those buzzwords are finally making some inroads inside the recruiting process.

The automation of recruiting is well under way led by the chatbot companies such as AllyO, Mya, Paradox and others. They are helping recruiters save valuable time particularly in the pre-screening and scheduling areas.

This year I even found a company that is taking the phone screen to a new level. They are called CuriousThing based out of Australia and they were my favorite discovery in the expo hall.

CuriousThing was one of the 6 finalists for the Pitchfest competition and even though they didn’t win I felt their platform could have the biggest long term impact in the recruiting process. Their tool is essentially a virtual phone screener that is sure to have other applications for HR. Listen to them pitch:

Virtual phone screening technology like this is poised to transform the way we recruit and become a huge time saver. It also has many other use cases including doing automated exit interviews.

I also met Montreal based AppyHere which is trying to tackle the blue collar job market with its app based job search technology. They believe the resume is dead (for blue collar workers) and that you need to simply streamline the apply process. They piloted the platform in Montreal and are heading to San Fran next.

I was impressed with the platform as they have a dedicated app for recruiters and one for seekers. Both iOS and Android are supported.

Building a business will be a tall task as there are already a lot of players like Wonolo who have head starts in the blue collar space but the mobile app experience they created is pretty slick. I hope they can make a dent.

To see my picture of this years HR Tech Conference just head over to the RecTech Media Facebook page to view them.

This years show had more of a global feel to it as I met people from all over the world…Canada, Japan, Australia and more. Since a lot of the new venture capital in our space is originating overseas this is not much of a surprise but it’s pretty cool to see the globalization of HR technology.

Shoutout to Euan Hayward of Emissary.ai for dinner at the steakhouse. Also great to reconnect with industry friends including Chad & Cheese, Josh Akers, Brendan Cruickshank, Andre Boulais, Daniel O’Neil, Sam Fitzroy, Shannon Pritchett and Jim McCoy.

Subscribe to the RecTech Podcast to hear my interviews from HRtech to be published in the coming weeks.