Daniel Walsh isn’t worried about AI taking jobs.
Quite the opposite, actually.
Walsh is CEO of Birmingham, Alabama-based VeroSkills, an AI-native staffing and recruiting platform for blue-collar workers. From his vantage point, Walsh sees that the AI boom won’t replace jobs, but rather create more high paying ones for the blue collar community.
Data centers being built across the country, particularly in the Southeast, and other massive infrastructure projects need construction workers, HVAC professionals, and plumbers. Lots of them. The real challenge? Filling what is estimated to be a $1 trillion gap in economic loss by 2030 from the skilled worker shortage.
And that’s where VeroSkill is looking to change the hiring game.
Inside VeroSkills
Unlike traditional staffing and recruiting platforms, VeroSkills is an AI-led experience. Recruiters are shown pre-screened, authorized candidates, often from immigrant, refugee, and underserved communities. Instead of scrolling through endless profiles, the platform can make important decisions interviews, conducts interviews (in different languages, if needed), and then onboards the candidates that are the best fit for a company.
“Our job at VeroSkills is really to do two things: bring people in faster and more efficiently, and then to educate them,” Walsh said. That education happens through the platform’s 900 upskilling courses that are free to candidates. Those courses are designed to help someone move up the ranks to become a master electrician or plumber.
The VeroSkills platform flips the script on traditional recruiting.
“Staffing and recruiting has been doing the same thing for the last 50 years. Career fairs, hiring events, and cold calling candidates,” Walsh said. “[VeroSkills] uses a lot of social media to attract a new generation of candidates. And because we are using AI, we’re able to spend so much more time with each candidate than a typical recruiter would. A typical recruiter is maybe spending 10 minutes with a candidate. We’re able to spend an hour with each candidate really learning what they’re doing.”
The Blue-Collar Road
Walsh grew up with parents that ran a plumbing business, immersing him from an early age into the world of business and entrepreneurship.
He found his way into tech at an early age, even building his first iPhone app at the age of 17. After building his career, he found himself in 2017 ultimately helping others find their way into the tech field as the co-founder of the remote coding bootcamp TrueCoders.
“We trained thousands of software engineers and put them in jobs all over the world,” he told Hypepotamus.
But COVID was a turning point. 20,000 people applied to join the bootcamp, which was a record for the business. But only a small percentage of those applicants could ultimately qualify and get the financing together to join.
The major unlock that helped form VeroSkills? “For most people to build a better future, it has to start with a job they can get today.”
And as AI creeps in and starts replacing more white-collar jobs, “we’re going to have a crisis on our hands where more and more people don’t have a job in tech,” Walsh said. “The jobs that are available today are increasingly what I call ‘New Collar’, a fusion of tech and blue collar.” According to Walsh, these are the jobs we need to build the infrastructure for the AI revolution.
“Building Tech For Everyday America”
Walsh said building VeroSkills in the Birmingham community is a “game changer” for his startup. He credits locally-grown success stories like unicorn Fleetio and Shipt for creating a robust tech talent market in town. In fact, Walsh said many of his early employees came from those companies.
But there is another important reason why Walsh believes it is important to have his startup headquartered in Birmingham.
“We’re building tech for everyday America. If I was in Silicon Valley, I do not think I would be able to build the technology and have the understanding of [our] customer,” he told Hypepotamus.