The crisis has increased unemployment among young talent, who often lack work experience and a relevant CV. As a result, the number of applications companies must process has risen. Karim Akhlal, CEO of Recrout.com, aims to narrow the gap between employers and job seekers through a combination of intelligent matching and smarter assessments.

What does Recrout do? 

“At Recrout, we combine social science and SaaS technology. With our SaaS Talent Platform, we help companies predict the best matches and select the right people based on psychometrics. Our innovative, user-friendly technology and best-in-class assessment modules enable our clients to predict the perfect fit. Recrout is the ideal recruitment automation partner for start-ups, scale-ups, and SMEs. We enhance organizational success through matches based on predictive analytics, personality traits, and cultural fit.” 

Where do you see the main application?

“We offer start-ups, scale-ups, and SMEs a white-label SaaS Talent Platform to help them create an excellent and objective recruitment process. We develop data-driven and easy-to-use matching and selection technology to help recruiters work smarter, attract the best candidates, make better matches, gain deeper insights into candidates, and significantly reduce the time and cost per hire. We provide our clients with a fully automated SaaS platform for intelligent matching at the cost of a single job posting. It is a fully white-label platform and includes an integrated assessment module to automatically pre-select candidates based on their talent and personality.”

What problem are you solving?

“Over the years, we have identified three very clear problems that we solve:”

• Inefficiency of the recruitment process. The recruitment process has proven to be time- and cost-inefficient and overly conservative. Relying solely on traditional recruitment methods and tools often leads to costly mismatches and wasted time.
• Subjective matching / Discrimination. Discrimination in the labor market remains a significant problem. This calls for a more objective way of matching and selecting your future employees.
• Low quality of the assessment process. Personality assessments used for pre-selecting candidates are costly and therefore not always included as a standard part of the procedure. This means that most companies settle for the current status quo, which clearly no longer works—or perhaps the old method never really worked in the first place.

And how do you plan to solve these problems?

“We provide our clients with the most efficient and user-friendly recruitment platform in the industry. Our technology automates the entire (pre-)selection process and helps companies manage their candidate pipeline. With a disruptive pricing model, we enable businesses of all sizes to use the software. Our AI-driven recruitment platform, featuring an integrated assessment module, offers an intelligent and user-friendly way to match and select candidates. The result: less wasted time and money, and unique, essential insights that help our clients make better selection decisions based on objective and validated data.”

What is the impact of Recrout?

“We currently have millions of unemployed people in the EU, and every day thousands of people lose their jobs. Millions more are searching for a new job each month. On top of that, there is a significant skills gap between job seekers and the companies hiring them. We are dealing with inequality and discrimination in the labor market. I mean, come on—this is 2021. Is this really the best we can do?” 

The old way of recruiting and job searching no longer works, and the labor market is completely broken. The crisis has increased unemployment among young talent, who often lack work experience and a relevant CV. As a result, the number of applications companies must process has risen.

Work is a large and important part of a person’s identity in Europe. Being unemployed or choosing the wrong job can lead to many social, economic, and personal problems. At the same time, most companies struggle to decide whom to hire. Our mission is to solve this problem.

We are also working on reinventing the way assessments are used within the recruitment process.

Where do you currently stand?

“We are one of the pioneers in Europe when it comes to combining psychology and technology for recruitment and selection purposes. Since our launch five years ago, we have inspired many companies, both small and large, to follow our example. We are noticing a change in the world, and that gives us the satisfaction of believing that we are on the right path.” 

Recrout operates at the intersection of social science and technology. We are only at the beginning of what we believe is a new revolution in creating predictive analytics using intelligent technologies—such as AI and self-learning, data-driven algorithms—to improve recruitment and prevent discrimination.

The possibilities and potential of social science combined with technology are endless if we can make their positive outcomes accessible and easy to apply in the world—regardless of where you live, what you look like, or where you were born. 

Ultimately, it is our responsibility to help companies achieve their long-term goals. And it is the people who make that possible. Therefore, we must ensure that we develop the best technology to predict future success in the labor market.”

When is Recrout going to launch on the market?

“Although Recrout has been operational since 2015, we are going live this year with our latest product. Over the past six years, we have learned so much, and those lessons have led to the creation of our white-label solution.”

We believe we can make a much greater impact by sharing our technology with any company that is serious about creating an objective and intelligent recruitment process. To us, that feels like a far better approach than trying to create a new job portal—of which there are already countless—while holding on to the illusion that we somehow “own” the candidates. It’s simply a dying business model. 

Our relaunch of Recrout’s white-label SaaS proposition is scheduled for May 2021. The world is about to experience how simple recruitment can be.  

Who has invested in you, and what kind of investors are you looking for?

“We have remained independent since our founding in 2015 and have always kept investors at a safe distance. But the truth is, if you really want to scale, you need external capital and networks.” 

Last month, we closed our first investment round with a strategic investor, who happened to also be one of our clients! I don’t think you can get a bigger compliment than that.

The funds will be used to roll out the new go-to-market strategy for our SaaS proposition, with a particular focus on branding, sales, and marketing. At this time, we are therefore not actively seeking investors.  

What would the ideal investor for Recrout look like?

“As I said, we are not currently seeking investors due to our recent funding. However, if we meet someone who understands our business, shares our beliefs, and can help us scale globally, positive things could happen. At this stage, though, there would really need to be a strong connection between us.” 

For us, it’s not just about the money. We’re not interested in financial consultants looking for their annual 7–8% ROI who enjoy spreading spreadsheets around. We are entrepreneurs, not policymakers. So when the time comes, we will look for investors who aim for the moon—or better yet, Mars—and truly want to create a global-scale impact. 

Ultimately, you do business with people. So you want to be sure you’re dealing with people you trust—people who have your back when things heat up in the kitchen. Because if you’re trying to disrupt an entire industry, you can count on things getting hot in the kitchen! 

In collaboration with Fundsup, we highlight promising start-ups and early-stage investors every Thursday. You can find more information about Recrout for investors here.

About the author: Arjen Strijker is Founder and Chief Operations Officer at Fundsup.