Intro

Good morning 👋

A welcome to all new subscribers that joined last week: we’re glad to have you on board! Anyone involved in recruitment should take a look at today’s startup; it promises to take the (not insubstantial!) agony out of hiring new staff.

Today’s update is 450 words, 2.3 minutes.

Snippets

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Startup of the Day

Impress, Singapore

Source: Impress.ai

What’s the deal: The process of hiring new employees can be painful — among the issues may be an overwhelming number of applications (if you are lucky!), inefficient workflows, or battling bias.

Launched in 2017, Singapore-based Impress AI aims to reduce the agony by offering an AI chatbot software for the recruitment process. It evaluates job candidates through various assessments, and assigns an overall metric value to each applicant.

Funding: $4.4M in pre-series A funding.

Why it matters: The global recruitment process is becoming increasingly virtual. The Impress solution improves that digital pivot through AI chatbots, which process large numbers of applications efficiently, reduce unintentional bias, and streamline the whole recruitment process.

Following the introduction of Jim, the Impress chatbot, DBS bank successfully

• Shortened screen time from 32 to 8 minutes per candidate
• Improved the job application complete rate by 97%.

96% of inquiries were responded to by the chatbot.

Our take: For sure, AI integration in the recruiting process is a huge time-saver for employers, but it comes with potential pitfalls too. AI can make it much more challenging for individual candidates to get noticed by employers.

Moreover, for new startups like Impress, competition in this market is fierce. In Asia, Beisen — with $388M funding — is a huge rival, and there are many other competitors hailing from the USA.