This Week in Startups
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.
01:12:18 · Alex Wilhelm, Brendan Foody, Hon Weng Chong
[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. [01:12:30] S5: Yeah. We started out predominantly with English. Now now we're starting to do others, working with a lot of our customers to try to make sure the models improve their multilingual capabilities so that the the interviewer [01:12:43] S3: is well set [01:12:44] S5: up for that. [01:12:45] S1: And, I I presume that India is a market of choice for you guys. But what... Are there any other hotspots around the world where you're seeing a lot of, like, talent saying, hey. We really wanna be part of this new marketplace that you're building. [01:12:54] S5: Yeah. Well, so actually the majority... The vast majority of our hires come from The US now, over 60%. India is the second largest geography that we hire from, but also seeing lots of Eastern Europe, lots of South America. One thing to note is that the average pay rate in our marketplace is over $90 an hour. And so it's very different from most labor marketplaces in that way. It's, you know, a totally different league from what you would find with the crowdsourcing platforms like Scale and Surge that sort of built these legacy labor marketplaces with more in the range of $10 to $30 an hour pay rates.
01:12:54 · Brendan Foody, Alex Wilhelm
[01:12:54] S5: Yeah. Well, so actually the majority... The vast majority of our hires come from The US now, over 60%. India is the second largest geography that we hire from, but also seeing lots of Eastern Europe, lots of South America. One thing to note is that the average pay rate in our marketplace is over $90 an hour. And so it's very different from most labor marketplaces in that way. It's, you know, a totally different league from what you would find with the crowdsourcing platforms like Scale and Surge that sort of built these legacy labor marketplaces with more in the range of $10 to $30 an hour pay rates. [01:13:31] S1: But you guys are currently targeting a much more educated and verified employee pool, again, as your starting point, as your wedge. So I wanna talk about how good your system is at finding and placing people because it sounds good in theory, but in practice, of course, that's what matters. So what's the right metric that you guys track in terms of finding the right person for the right job and then having both sides of that, equation be happy? Is it repeat business? Is it successful completion of a contract? What's the KPI there?