Our Ability needed to replace manual processes to better serve their clients.
For people with disabilities, finding jobs with understanding, accommodating employers can be a challenge. To help facilitate these opportunities, Our Ability provides a website that connects employers with people with disabilities. The process is simple: candidates can search for positions and employers can search for candidates, but the system itself does not attempt to make these connections on its own. Instead, the process was manually done to find matches between candidates and positions.
The existing data source from employers was largely unstructured with no metadata regarding what type of position they were offering or what the position’s requirements were. The existing data about candidates consisted of a resume-style job description for any previous work experience. In addition to structuring this data, there was also a desire to keep the interface between human and machine as accessible as possible. Accessibility accommodations on the site needed to support physical disabilities such as impaired sight or limited limb movement and cognitive disabilities such as high anxiety, autism spectrum disorder, or ADHD.
Filters down positions within a certain radius
Expand company’s services with AI automation
Enables people with physical & cognitive disabilities
3Cloud partnered with our ability to develop an ai-powered solution.
3Cloud engaged with Our Ability and the Microsoft AI for Accessibility program to develop an AI-driven solution with an emphasis on accessibility. To assist job seekers without any prior experience or planned career path, a questionnaire encompassing basic skills was developed by the company’s team. Responses to these questions were then mapped to frequently occurring broad skills. To facilitate even deeper skill matches, 3Cloud built a program using Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics API that analyzed text from applicants’ previous job descriptions and employers’ current job descriptions to pick out skills from these bodies of text.
By understanding an individual’s skills and comparing this set of skills against all open positions, Our Ability could now make targeted recommendations as to which jobs might be the right fit. From the summation of skills identified in each job and a candidate’s identified skills, a ranked list of positions could then be computed and returned from the AI system. Then, this result could be filtered down to positions that are available within a certain radius using Azure Maps. A future enhancement to this system will allow for filtering based on commute time or restrictions on what positions are available by public transportation.
The solution 3Cloud developed allows Our Ability to expand and automate their services by using AI to make targeted recommendations. It also allows them to filter down positions within a certain radius on geocoded data from Azure Maps. The single-focused chatbot interface enables users with physical and cognitive disabilities.
In addition, to further support users with cognitive disabilities, the entire interface to the profile-building process was constructed in the chatbot, and embedded into the website as an assistant built using the Microsoft Bot framework. This provides an interface to the job seeker that is single focus in nature, can be stopped or resumed at any time, and never encumbers the job seeker with more than a handful of questions in a row. The Microsoft provided webchat interface also includes excellent text-to-speech and speech-to-text services for users who might benefit from them but may not have screen reader software available at the time.
Operationalize the cloud and enjoy the ultimate Azure experience with the experts at 3Cloud.