Every week we feature a new startup at Fundsup that forces a radical breakthrough. This week we chat with Miguel van Bodegom, Founder of CorTexter: the digital recruitment assistant that brings diversity and inclusion to the labour market.
Hi Miguel, what do you identify as the hot topics in the labour market?
That is for sure diversity, inclusion and belonging. I think people around the globe are currently realising more and more that what we as society accepted as norms, values and customs are not always fair to everybody. The bewilderment at this societal unfairness echoes in the labour market, too. For example, a ‘strange’ name, ‘odd’ career path, ‘wrong’ skin colour, or a particular gender could have significant impact on career opportunities.
How is CorTexter to change this unfairness?
First we look at the intersection of this societal debate with an organisation’s business case. Unfortunately, not much of private beliefs make it to the shareholder’s meeting, so a financial incentive is where most traditional organisations look for in a solution, first. In recruitment that is time (reduction potential of 40%), vacancy fulfilment ratio (82%) and bad hires (10-46%), of which the first two are most commonly mentioned. Our recruitment assistant is able to solve some of the pain points associated with these inefficiencies, by helping gather information, provide analysis and coach on decision making. This is all very data driven, without forgetting that the contexts of jobs and candidates are much broader and reality is far more complex than any AI system will ever be able to comprehend. That is why we have not chosen to substitute recruiters, but to augment them.
How does this result in diversity and inclusion?
By the methods we use. Diversity and inclusiveness are actually about the quality of the recruitment process and its outcome. They have intrinsic values, can be seen as the mean in a Bell curve that we aim to recover, and are therefore closely interlinked with neutral, value-free information and processes. Therefore, we need to get unbiased data and use it without bias. CorTexter does all that in the background making use of the latest insights in computational linguistics, a sub-domain of natural language processing. There’s a lot of secret sauce in this dish.
If I understand correctly, your business is to bring quality and fairness while making recruitment more efficient. Where do you stand right now?
You can put it that way, except that we’re still a bit of a stealth project and not on the market, yet. We are now at the stage that we’ve tested our market assumptions, we’ve tested our service designs, and we’ve done technical assessments on critical technology to confirm that our core technology works. Currently, we are developing the prototype to be able to demonstrate to investors how powerful CorTexter potentially can be at a global scale. Development will take another few months of hard work.
When will CorTexter hit the market?
Our SaaS-solution will launch just before the summer of 2021.
Did CorTexter raise funding before?
The Province of South-Holland has invested in our potential to strengthen the HR Tech ecosystem. Further, Erik -my co-founder- and myself bootstrap whatever we can. Besides that, we are now looking for equity daredevils that are not afraid to fuel a societal shift while earning a good return on investment. Seed investments of 650k will let our development peak, launch our services and unfold our bold plans.
What are you looking for in an investor?
Undoubtedly a partner, someone -or a group of people- that is willing to coach our company, love HR Tech, switch-on for conversational AI and advanced computational linguistics, and acclaim our mission for diversity and inclusion. Without these, the check that an investor writes is not worth as much.
Good luck with everything!
Thanks a lot! Don’t forget to check out our Fundsup pitch.