Jordan Franklin founded Gumption to help companies identify job candidates. (Michael Woods)
There may be concerns that the increased use of artificial intelligence in the workplace will reduce the need for human employees, but one Northwest Arkansas company is trying to reverse that idea.
Jordan Franklin founded Gumption in 2022 to use an AI platform to help customers find the right candidates for their companies. Franklin, co-founder of Stratis, a Fayetteville staffing firm, brainstormed the idea to leverage AI when one of Stratis’ clients asked for help finding 67 employees during the hiring process.
What inspired Franklin to create Gumption was not just the fact that there were 67 job openings, but the fact that those 67 job openings had eight supervisory managers, each with a single job description, with their own priorities and personalities.
Gumption uses the information entered by Franklin and his team to vet applicants based not only on the position, but also on the client’s criteria for culture and other values.
“At that point, I really started outlining: What’s the problem, what can I get, where can I save money and time?” Franklin said. “The recruiting team was managing everything on SharePoint and Zoom and several other platforms, and we were all communicating and communicating with each other. It was really chaotic.
“I said, ‘There has to be a way to put this all in one place and use some kind of AI to streamline each step of the process.’ That’s really where Gumption started.”
The problem was that Franklin was running Stratice at the same time as her husband and co-founder Scott. Scott had insisted that Stratice be successful before Jordan could develop his AI idea. Stratice’s success was immediately apparent. The company is a 2022 Arkansas Business of the Year finalist and Jordan Franklin is a two-time Executive of the Year finalist. So Franklin started Gumption.
“When it comes to AI and recruiting, I think a lot of the systems in use today are matching job descriptions to resumes, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the right thing to do,” Franklin said. “What you really need to do is fit the person to the team and fit the position. Of course, including their skill set and all that, making sure they have the skills, but it’s really about fitting the person to the team, and that’s where Gumption is.”
pass the test
The use of AI in the recruitment process is not new. Many companies use it to sort resumes to find applicants with the right qualifications.
However, this can be difficult because candidates can use the same AI to format their resumes. AI screening programs like Gumption work best with detailed human input into the process.
“This is AI with human input, because this is a very human-centered thing that employs people,” Franklin said. “We’re hiring humans, we’re not hiring bots. I really think digging into the home side of things has made us successful.
“The layers currently in use may filter out the right people, or they may be fooled by AI resumes.”
The selling point of AI recruitment platforms is that they save companies time and money. Executives don’t want to manually go through hundreds of resumes to find a few good interview candidates.
Kian Hassani, Extremis’ chief of staff, said Gumption has reduced the company’s overhead costs in the hiring process. Xtremis has offices in Washington, DC and Fayetteville, and has added three employees to its AI radio frequency spectrum monitoring company using Gumption.
“She and her team have been extremely helpful as we’ve been growing our workforce, because they’re looking to match the right people to our team, not just the right resume,” Hassani said. “For us, that’s great because we’re a lean team. We don’t have a ton of resources to spend doing a lot of interviews and reading a lot of resumes.
“What Jordan and her team were able to do is put the right people in front of us. They went the extra mile to make sure that the candidate was not only the best fit from a qualification standpoint, but also the best fit for our culture and organization.”
