Starting up: This startup is leveraging tech to make compliance faster and smoother

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Jocelyn King is the founder and CEO of VirgilHR, a compliance software startup that leverages automation and a “smart chatbot” to help HR pros navigate the complex world of compliance across federal, state, and local labor and employment law.

“You can submit a query like, ‘I have an employee in Massachusetts requesting paternity leave,’ and it will ask diagnostic questions to analyze what federal, state, and local employment and labor laws apply,” King said. “We use logic programming for this, and we actually have labor and employment attorneys program it directly rather than using AI, which really can’t handle the complexity of the field of law today and also isn’t very reliable.”

The idea for VirgilHR dawned on King while working in HR at a multi-state tech outfit that was designing an app using conditional logic programming. King—who was struggling to manually add changes to laws to an Excel spreadsheet—thought it would “be so interesting if somebody built a tool that leveraged conditional logic programming to really analyze what laws are applicable and given scenarios, which is exactly what we did.”

“I felt like we were really, as an HR community, underserved technologically on the compliance side,” she said.

Since its founding in February 2021, VirgilHR has raised $1.85 million, according to King, including $1.5 million in pre-seed funding from Squadra Ventures, Techstars, SHRMLabs, and TEDCO. The company was also a Pitchfest finalist at last October’s HR Tech conference in Las Vegas.

VirgilHR launched its product in March 2023, and notable clients include SmartRecruiters and Piedmont Airlines, a subsidiary of American Airlines.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What specific issue in HR does your company intend to solve?

Compliance, employment and labor law, and labor relations.

What product or service does your company offer?

We offer an HR compliance product that provides instant employment and labor law guidance to HR professionals to help with day-to-day tasks. Our automated technology analyzes applicable laws and provides prescriptive instructions to help HR stay compliant, real-time, without the need to conduct research or speak with attorneys. We also offer a resource center, which includes an employee handbook builder, multi-state comparison tool, legal updates, templates, and more.

How has the Covid-19 pandemic and rapid growth of remote work impacted the need for a product like VirgilHR?

I identified this issue long before Covid-19, because I experienced it myself, and it was just the nature of working with high-growth tech companies. We had a lot of remote employees.

But [Covid-19] really escalated this problem pretty significantly, because there’d be a small business that might have had 15 employees in one state, and now—all of a sudden—they have 15 employees in nine states. Even for a very small business, it now has become a huge problem for them. So, it came out at a good time.

Humans, rather than AI, are behind the back-end of the interface informing how the chatbot will respond to queries based on the current compliance landscape. How does that work?

We have a team that works on this and as laws get close to passing, if we feel pretty confident it’s gonna pass, we’ll start changing things in the background already. But once an effective date comes up, all of that change occurs: the logic in the chatbot, the notifications will be sent out to our customers, our compliance calendar, [and] any content—like new policy templates, for example, based on those legislative changes. 

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