Some of the latest statistics show that employers are inundated with job applications. In the UK alone, employers running postgraduate training schemes will receive an average of 140 applications for each role in 2024, a 59% increase on 2023, according to the Student Employers Association. And despite some trepidation among a minority of recruiters, many companies are turning to AI to help, especially given that Gen Z now outnumbers Millennials in the population. We're looking at platforms.
No doubt this contributed to the news. Maki, which has a conversational skills assessment-based AI agent for job interviews and candidate filtering, has raised $28.6 million in Series A funding led by UK-based Blossom Capital. DST Global and existing investors Frst, GFC and Picus Capital also participated. The company had raised €11 million in a previous funding round. The funding will be used to accelerate our product roadmap, expand in the US, and grow our team.
Founded in 2022 by Maxime Legardez, Paul-Louis Caylar, and Benjamin Chino, Maki's platform interviews candidates via audio, video, and text. The company has signed employment agreements with companies such as H&M, BNP Paribas, PwC, Deloitte, FIFA, Abercrombie and Capgemini in more than 50 markets and claims to have grown by more than 300% in 2024. The company also claims its platform can streamline hiring, create a better experience for candidates, and reduce attrition rates.
Maki's AI-based agents speak to candidates in natural language, automating processes by 80% and reducing time to hire by a third, the company says.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Maki CEO Maxime Legardez said: “We use AI to build agents that our clients can customize to fit their needs, essentially replicating the tasks humans do in recruiting. Our agents source, screen, and source candidates. We can schedule and conduct interviews.”
He said the agent set up for clothing giant H&M is called Maria. You can call candidates on the phone or become their visual avatar on a video call. “Synthesia has an embedded avatar, so it's a very visual experience. She speaks to candidates 24/7 in multiple languages, and she can talk to candidates for 5, 10, or 15 minutes. You can have a conversation and assess hundreds of skills,” Legardez said.
He added that AI can assess candidates on things like customer empathy, collaboration, and resilience, among other things.
But while this may sound impersonal, especially considering the number of candidates you have to interact with, it really isn't. “If a candidate is rejected, they will receive personalized feedback with some tips to learn new things that will help them improve,” Legardes said. They can also become good ambassadors for your brand as they will be given a chance next time. He said: “Currently, 98% of BNP Paribas candidates say this is the best recruitment process of their lives and are motivated to join BNP Paribas.”
Additionally, even though this is the so-called death era of DEI, Legardes said the maquis are far less biased than humans. “We have been audited by the state of New York and have proven that our AI produces less bias than humans.” It takes into account human ethnicity, gender, and age, and with more data The more you have, the better you can adjust and pre-train. ” Perhaps AI adoption will create a more diverse workforce in the future?
Maki's competitors include companies such as SHL, EON, Pymetrics, Saville, Recruit CRM, BrainTrust, Recruitee, and Manatal.
But Legardez said Maki isn't selling traditional HR software, but rather “automating human work through agents.”
Legardez previously founded digital freight forwarding company Everroad, which was acquired by Sender.
“Maki's agents have the ability to help large organizations reach the next level of efficiency and decision-making, and how HR can drive business success,” said Ophelia Brown, managing partner at Blossom Capital, in a statement. I believe there is a possibility of redefining this.”
Maki's fundraising efforts are certainly on trend. Today, LinkedIn launched Jobs Match, a new AI product that instantly advises whether a particular job is worth your time to apply for.
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