TriplePundit • This New AI Tool Helps Recruiters See Skilled Immigrant Talent and Fill Jobs Faster

U.S. employers posted around 7 million job openings a month in 2025. At the same time, “there are 2 million skilled immigrants and refugees with the legal right to work who are unemployed or underemployed,” said Mary Lee, national director of employer engagement at the nonprofit Upwardly Global.

That disconnect has real consequences: doctors driving Ubers, engineers washing dishes — not because they lack expertise, but because hiring systems don’t recognize the relevance of their experience, resulting in what is aptly referred to as “brain waste.”

Upwardly Global has spent 25 years helping immigrants, refugees, and asylees who are trained professionals to restart their careers in the United States. The organization frames the challenge facing skilled immigrant workers as a “visibility gap” that results in lost opportunities for individuals and underuse of talent for employers.

The nonprofit’s recent pilot with the HR software company Workday used artificial intelligence to make talent recruitment faster and more equitable as a means to reduce that visibility gap.

“We were really excited to explore a partnership that would utilize responsible AI to mitigate these challenges,” Lee said. “We primarily needed two things: a system that looked one-to-one at job requirements against candidate profiles, thereby mitigating some of the traditional recruitment biases. But also, what’s exciting about AI is the potential for scale, right? We were eager to find a system that would create visibility for our candidate pool at scale.”

Human biases that impact hiring include things like confirmation bias: People naturally seek out and remember information that matches what they already believe to be true while ignoring facts that challenge it, like a hiring manager overlooking a qualified immigrant candidate because they assume foreign credentials aren’t valuable. Anchoring bias describes our human tendency to be overly influenced by the first piece of information we see or hear about something, such as rejecting a resume because the first job listed doesn’t match expectations, even if later experience is perfect.

Instead of building something new or asking companies to adopt a different hiring platform that uses AI, Upwardly Global connected to Workday’s software that is already widely used in corporate America. Upwardly Global Fetch, a custom API for Workday’s HiredScore AI tool, pulls candidate profiles from the nonprofit directly into recruiters’ existing workflows. This means talent that once sat hidden outside the conventional system becomes visible alongside all other applicants, without asking hiring teams to learn a new tool or change how they already work.

This native integration is key in a time when recruiters are overwhelmed. “One of the companies we work with told us that they’ve had 7 million applications for 150,000 positions. There is an overwhelming number of applicants right now, particularly with AI creating applications so easily,” said Lee, underscoring the urgency of smarter screening and more inclusive filters.

But the application of this custom tool wasn’t a sure thing. “We didn’t know how the tool would work. We didn’t know if our candidates would be matched at all for open roles, so that was the first thing we wanted to study,” Lee explained.

In the nonprofit’s first analysis, the Fetch tool effectively surfaced 575 candidate recommendations for open roles from a pool of 1,500 immigrant job-seekers, a number that has grown steadily since, she said. “To us, it demonstrates both a strong demand for the skills and competencies represented by our talent pool, and that there was a high rate of discoverability — meaning the AI was able to recognize the talent and match them for open roles.”

The Fetch pilot’s early outcomes have been positive. “For a role for one of our companies, we were manually able to present 45 candidates for that opening. In comparison, our AI tool could present 200 for that same opening in the same time period,” Lee said. “So, what it’s solving for is time and efficacy of matches in a way that we never had access to.”

This approach does not aim to replace human recruiters, but rather offer support and speed. “We know that AI can help open doors, but human decision-makers ultimately shape the outcomes,” Lee added. In practice, recruiters still review recommendations and make hiring decisions, but the AI expands what they can see and consider.

What makes this more than a proof of concept is how the technology interprets data: Rather than relying on keyword matches or hardcoded filters, the AI analyzes the international context of each profile — like credentials earned abroad or career paths that diverge from a typical U.S. trajectory — and aligns them with job requirements that legacy systems often overlook.

Recent analyses find that immigration will drive nearly 100 percent of U.S. labor force growth through the 2030s as the native-born workforce diminishes — a reality that makes efforts like this one an economic necessity as well as a social initiative.

By embedding skills-first AI into hiring workflows, Upwardly Global’s Fetch integration offers a practical way for employers to build more diverse, capable teams without adding cost or workflow disruptions. Where traditional tools fail to translate resumes with foreign credentials and education backgrounds, the tool shows early promise for matching applicants’ relevant skills to job requirements at U.S. companies.

“What we’re seeing is that we’ve addressed the problem of visibility, and it’s also looking like we’ve addressed the problem of translation by using responsible AI to do that one-to-one matching of our candidate backgrounds to open roles,” Lee said.

Featured image: Getty Images/Unsplash