This Week in Startups
01:06:37 · Brendan Foody, Alex Wilhelm
[01:06:37] S5: This is certainly the case. And most importantly, that I think it'll be centralized, right? Instead of all these decentralized, fragmented job searches and companies that are looking to hire, I think it'll be one place that everyone goes, that every company hires from, that can facilitate all of these job matches that people love and companies are finding a lot of value in. [01:07:02] S1: Okay. And I think you want that one place, that central hub to be, Merkur, your company. And if you succeed, this means that recruiters, as we know them today, are gonna have a hard time. Probably generic, unai enabled job boards like Indeed and similar are all gonna get hit. So that's the scale of what you guys are shooting for, essentially, a revolution of how people find and secure jobs around the world. Fantastic.
01:07:02 · Alex Wilhelm, Brendan Foody
[01:07:02] S1: Okay. And I think you want that one place, that central hub to be, Merkur, your company. And if you succeed, this means that recruiters, as we know them today, are gonna have a hard time. Probably generic, unai enabled job boards like Indeed and similar are all gonna get hit. So that's the scale of what you guys are shooting for, essentially, a revolution of how people find and secure jobs around the world. Fantastic. [01:07:28] S5: Well, one way of thinking about it is there's sort of these two ends of the spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, there's companies like LinkedIn or Indeed, their job boards. And they have this very broad distribution, but they only aggregate this very thin layer of the person's resume. And so they capture about one thousandth of the value chain associated with facilitating a hire. On the other hand of the spectrum, there's the services companies, the recruiting agencies, the staffing agencies that do all the manual work and heavy lifting to get their 30% of first year or whatever their fee structure is. But no one has been able to combine the distribution of LinkedIn and Indeed with the value capture and value add of a recruiting and staffing firm. Because previously, it wasn't possible to automate services. But now that's all changing. Now it's becoming possible to automate everything that recruiters and staffing agencies would otherwise do in this unified way that has the same kind of distribution scale of consumer platform with hundreds of millions of people.
01:08:36 · Alex Wilhelm
[01:08:36] S1: Alright. I wanted to start here because I want people to know where you're going to. But I now wanna go the other direction and talk about what you're doing now. Because you guys have this really interesting, quote, public secret plan, if you will, of using, helping AI companies find the right talent that they need as essentially your wedge into the market. And to help explain this to folks, you guys want to learn how to place candidates very effectively in this one area where there's a short feedback loop, if you will, so you can learn pretty quickly and then apply that more broadly over time. But I think you've been pigeonholed by some in the press is like helping people hire for AI when that does seem to be kind of a small fraction of the company's vision. So, what I want to know is how does it work today? I know you guys are working on one subset of the market, but walk me through from the candidate and the company side, how Merkur actually does do what you're describing.
01:09:28 · Brendan Foody, Alex Wilhelm
[01:09:28] S5: So candidate will come to us looking for opportunities for work. They'll see a lot of the jobs available, or they can apply to one of those or talent pool more broadly. They'll upload their resume and they'll take an interview with the AI on our platform to then get evaluated to see what they're a good fit for, what they're interested in, what kinds of matches we might be able to create for them, and facilitating huge volumes, tens of thousands of these matches with no human process and involvement. On the other side of the marketplace, there's companies that will give us these requests of saying they need 100 people in a particular domain, maybe a subset of software engineering or investment bankers or whatever the professional domain is. And we will go out to the supply side of our marketplace, find all the people that are a good fit for them, and facilitate all of those contract opportunities. [01:10:24] S1: Tell me more about the AI interview. And I'll just say that I'm an AI bull. I think this stuff is really cool and it's going work well. On the other hand, I do have some friends that are in less prestigious jobs who have had to deal with some AI onboarding, some AI screenings, and they've been pretty negative about it. So I'm curious what you guys have built and how well it works and kind of what candidates think of that part of the process.
01:10:24 · Alex Wilhelm, Brendan Foody, Hon Weng Chong
[01:10:24] S1: Tell me more about the AI interview. And I'll just say that I'm an AI bull. I think this stuff is really cool and it's going work well. On the other hand, I do have some friends that are in less prestigious jobs who have had to deal with some AI onboarding, some AI screenings, and they've been pretty negative about it. So I'm curious what you guys have built and how well it works and kind of what candidates think of that part of the process. [01:10:49] S5: Yeah. So we built the first AI interviewer in March 2023 when I was in my college dorm room. Initially, I remember it would hallucinate like nothing else because it wasn't even GP4 at that point. Right? [01:11:01] S3: It was just
01:11:01 · Hon Weng Chong, Brendan Foody, Alex Wilhelm
[01:11:01] S3: It was just [01:11:01] S5: GPP-two 80, like ten second latency. And it's been extraordinary to just see this tailwind of model improvement lift all boats and make these applications possible. And so a good heuristic for it is emulating all of the processes that a human would otherwise do. Where similar to how a human would review resumes and conduct interviews, we automate all of the preparation for the interview and conducting the interview and evaluation of an interview with that similar format and heuristic. And while I think some candidates obviously prefer to talk to a human because they think about it more as a selling process from the company rather than strictly a buying process, the overwhelming sentiment is that there's millions of people that apply to jobs and just get completely ghosted and don't even get the opportunity to interview. It'll be like less than 1% of people even get to talk with someone or show more than their resume for the most competitive jobs. And so globalizing that ability, and not just internationally, but also all across The U. S, for people talk with the candidates and actually consider everyone for the opportunity has been really impactful. [01:12:18] S1: Does the AI interviewer you guys have built in its current iteration, does it work with multiple languages? Because I presume that if you're only doing English, you're still constraining to a small portion of the overall possible job takers.