6-month-old AI recruitment startup bags $1.5m from Qualgro, others

Curious Thing team members (L to R): Han Xu, Amanda Parker, Sam Zheng, Yasaman Motazedi, David McKeague, Chainat Wongtapan / Photo credit: Curious Thing

Here’s a recruitment statistic: one job opening attracts roughly 250 applicants, of which only four to six will get called for an interview. Culling the herd may take months, and it requires a team to complete the task.

Sam Zheng, who was previously chief technology officer at an AI firm, along with Han Xu and David McKeague, are looking to fix the problem. They put up Curious Thing, a software company that created an AI-powered digital interviewer.

The Sydney-based startup just raised US$1.5 million in seed funding from Singapore-based Qualgro and Australia’s Reinventure Group.

Launched in July 2018, Curious Thing has already processed over 1,000 interviews and is looking to process 10,000 by the end of this year.

How it works

When companies post a job ad, they just need to link applicants directly to Curious Thing’s site. The candidates can then sign in using their own emails and a password provided that’s specific to the job post.

Once candidates are logged in, an AI interviewer will vocally ask a set of questions that applicants must answer. It uses natural language understanding (NLU) to digest and interpret information and ask follow-up questions on the fly.

After the interview, Curious Thing’s software will then send automated analytics reports to both candidates and hiring managers. The former receives insights on skills they need to learn or interesting courses they may want to take. The latter receives a report with scores for a candidate’s quantitative and qualitative skills.

“Saying things like ‘I don’t want to work with a team’ or ‘I don’t have lots of understanding of a certain thing’ will actually give [candidates] a slightly lower score,” points out Zheng. “However, if they say something based on NLU that is positive to the certain topic or attribute, they will have a higher score. Then all these things will be combined to give people the final score for a certain dimension.”

The analytics reports help hiring managers sort through the initial pool of candidates, or what Zheng calls the “upper funnel process.”

Curious Thing competes with other AI-powered digital interviewers like US-based HireVue and Singapore-based Interviewer.ai.

However, Zheng thinks their system asks questions in the most natural manner. “With other video interviewers, you have pop-up text and [candidates] have to record a video,” he explains. “The questions are also not automatically or dynamically generated with more follow-ups.”

He also says that other systems still require humans to manually review interviews to score the candidates. “If you have to review 200 videos… maybe it’s better than calling 200 people, but it still takes time,” he notes.

Curious Thing already has a large bank of questions that clients can choose from, but they can also request for customized questions and data points to be added into the system.

Future plans