Meet the AI Hiring Assistant Small Businesses Actually Asked For

Built with our Customer Council, this new AI hiring assistant helps owners cut busywork and get to better hires—faster.

Hundreds of applications. Booking, then rebooking, interviews. Missing out on great candidates while dealing with this week’s fires. Hiring has never been easy. For years, thousands of our customers told us the same thing: it’s repetitive, it’s draining, and it’s sometimes too much.

We knew it was time to build something that changed what it meant to hire hourly teams. Not just “easier” or “better”, but a product that completely transformed the tasks, time, and energy business owners have to reserve for hiring–and then hiring again.

And no one could help make a better solution than our Customer Council: a group of Homebase users willing to go knee-deep on building out a hiring solution with our product and design team. Every two weeks, they met to go over research and prototypes, providing real-life examples, testing out applications for actual positions, and putting the business owner–and the candidate!—first.

The goal: using AI to reduce hours (or days) of hiring time to minutes, while keeping the business owner 100% in control.

And together, we built the Hiring Assistant.

Here’s how.

"Going through irrelevant resumes was becoming a waste of time"

Jamie Wilson has been working for the Wild Onion Brewery for 12 years. She started as an Event Coordinator for the combination restaurant, brewery, and event venue, and serves as the General Manager today. She’s taken her team from sticky paper timesheets and Excel-based payroll to an automated, Homebase-supported workplace.

And she knows a thing or three about hiring.

“We’re running three different types of businesses under one roof,” says Jamie. “My line cook isn’t going to be a banquet server; there are just different skill sets you’re looking for.” 

She had been using the former Homebase Hiring feature for about a year before she joined the Customer Council to help build the Hiring Assistant—and she came prepared.

“One of the issues I was having was that I put out a job posting for a Dishwasher, and kept getting applications from forklift operators,” says Jamie. “So I figured if there was a way to weed those people out more effectively, I could see the immediate use for the Hiring Assistant. Otherwise, going through so many irrelevant resumes was becoming a waste of time. But if I don’t get through those applications soon enough, people aren’t going to wait around—they already had an interview and took another job by that point.”

The sheer volume of applicants to sort through is the single biggest pain point our team found in all their Customer Council sessions. For that single dishwasher position at Wild Onion Brewery, Jamie worked through 87 applicants in between her (many) other duties. 

Every member of the Customer Council had a similar story to share. Too many applicants. Too little time. And every hour spent screening resumes was an hour taken away from running the business.

And they made sure that we made sure: fixing that was foundational for the Hiring Assistant.

What is the Hiring Assistant?

The Hiring Assistant is an AI-powered tool that removes the hours of extra time small business owners spend hiring new workers. It creates job descriptions, intelligently screens applicants, and summarizes responses into easy-to-scan profiles. Top candidates are scored and sorted for review, with interviews automatically booked based on availability.

Starting early June, it has been released to a select group of Homebase customers, and will be available to all customers as of July 1.

Want in? Sign up for the waitlist!

"No one does this, because it's hard to do"

Product Manager Dana Lobo and Staff Product Designer Fadi Rizk built both the Customer Council and the Hiring Assistant. They didn’t start by writing code: they started with conversations.

Customer Council meetings were held every two weeks, an hour a piece, and Dana and Fadi prepped research for days before each one. Then, after each call, they revised and remixed the Hiring prototype. The goal was customer satisfaction, not just executive buy-in.

"If you were to open a book on software development, this is what would be in there," says Fadi. "But no one does this, because it's hard to do."

"It takes a lot of discipline," adds Dana. "But it created an environment of mutual respect. More than one of our customers were grateful that we involved them and built something that actually solves their problems."

For years, we knew business owners needed a better way to hire. Chief Strategy Officer Ray Sandza has been thinking about it since he started in 2017. 

"Hiring is the pain point that all of our customers talk about," Ray says. "And now the business is ready for it."

Plus, the game’s changed: things that weren’t possible before AI are now immensely possible. By the end of 2024, Ray saw the team as having a “cool year-and-a-half” of AI experience under their belts.

“We were able to see where it was going, and avoid making the mistakes other companies made when launching their first AI products,” Ray says. 

And we test drove it ourselves, too.

When Lauren Benoit, Homebase's Senior Talent Acquisition Advisor, heard about the project, she had one question: "How can I get that for myself?"

Her hiring hurdles at Homebase were very similar to Jamie’s. “I’ve used the Hiring Assistant twice for two different engineering roles,” Lauren says. “ Collectively, those brought in over 2,000 applications. That is a lot for one person to sort through.”

Lauren makes a point to respond to every applicant—she has no interest in ghosting anybody. But any given position at Homebase generates between 500 and 800 applicants. By using the Hiring Assistant on just two job positions, she got days back.

And frankly, if we’re ready to bring the Hiring Assistant to our customers, it should be something we’re excited to use ourselves.

"Give business owners more control–don’t take it away"

For many small businesses, built on community connections, the new concept of AI can feel cold or disconnected. When reflecting on her experience in the Customer Council, Jamie Wilson admitted that she was initially skeptical of the Hiring Assistant. But after weeks of workshopping the tool, skepticism was replaced by excitement: the Hiring Assistant was built to give business owners more control, not take it away.

As Ray puts it: "We're going to do the busywork for you, and make it really easy for you to make decisions. We are not making hiring decisions. We're just gathering information that you wouldn't have the time to gather yourself, and putting it in such a way that you can make a much better decision with much less work."

The Customer Council proved the benefits of keeping things human-centric at every step–even when recruiting the help of a new AI assistant.

The result? An AI assistant that gives business owners more support, not more work.

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