New AI-backed job platform helps retain hotelier staff

The hospitality industry is notorious for poor turnover numbers, making employee retention all the more imperative. Virgil Careers is a platform built to combat this through harnessing artificial intelligence to help hospitality employees define their career goals.

Ron Mitchell, founder of Virgil Careers, gained exposure to human resources through a Wall Street internship program that he created for student-athletes. He placed more than 250 student-athletes at the most prestigious financial firms, including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, etc.

“These were kids who were great athletes, great students with a 3.7 average GPA and great leaders. Yet, despite their qualifications, they were woefully underprepared and knowledgeable about career pathways available to them as well as the process for attaining them,” said Mitchell. “I found my first entrepreneurial opportunity in doing that work for them, but what I was doing back then was not scalable. I needed to create a system that could provide a high level of granularity on hundreds of different career paths. That led me to create Virgil.”

Mitchell strongly believes there’s an absolute need for hospitality businesses to develop people internally and enable them to build a career path within the organization. That’s why it’s the core of the Virgil Careers platform.

“We became acutely interested in hospitality for two reasons: First, it is a people-centric business. Despite the fact that automation is making its way into every business, at the core of hospitality is people. Second, hospitality is one of the few industries that can credibly attest to the fact that entry-level employees have the opportunity to work their way up to executive-level positions, including CEO,” he said. “We enable the transparency and communication of skills and experiences that make that journey more efficient.”

Virgil Careers taps into the latest technology, such as artificial intelligence, to power its recruiting and career navigation platform.

“There are three core elements of our technology. First, we have developed efficient ways to capture information from both individuals and companies that have traditionally been cumbersome to acquire. This includes data on skills and experiences developed by individuals, skills that are required for certain roles. We have created our own natural language processing scripts that enable us to pull that information from various sources, combine it with our own data and then organize it efficiently,” he said.

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