According to some of the latest statistics, employers are swamped by job applications. In the UK alone, employers running graduate training schemes received an average of 140 applications for each job in 2024, 59 per cent more than in 2023, according to the Institute of Student Employers. And despite some trepidations amongst a few recruiters, plenty of companies are turning to AI platforms to assist, especially given the Gen Z generation has now even surpassed the Millennial population in numbers.

No doubt this was a factor in the news that Maki — which has a conversational, skills assessment-based AI agent for job interviews and candidate filtering — has now raised a $28.6 million Series A funding led by the UK’s Blossom Capital. Also participating was DST Global and existing investors Frst, GFC, and Picus Capital. It had previously raised €11 million in earlier funding rounds. The money will be used to accelerate the product roadmap, expand in the US, and expand the team.

Founded in 2022 by Maxime Legardez, Paul-Louis Caylar, and Benjamin Chino, Maki’s platform interviews candidates through voice, video, or text. The company claims to have experienced over 300% growth in 2024, after securing hiring contracts across 50+ markets with companies such as H&M, BNP Paribas, PwC, Deloitte, FIFA, Abercrombie, and Capgemini. It also claims its platform can streamline hiring, create a better experience for candidates, and reduce employee turnover.

Maki’s AI-based agents converse with prospective candidates in natural language, and, says the company, can automate the process by 80%, with a 3x reduction in time-to-hire.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Maxime Legardez, CEO of Maki said: “We use AI to build agents that our clients can customize to their needs, and basically the agents to replicate task made by humans in recruiting. Our agents can source, screen, schedule, and interview candidates.”

He said the agent built for clothing giant H&M is called Maria. It can call candidates over the phone or be a visual avatar on a video call: “We have an embedded avatar with Synthesia, so it’s a very visual experience. She can talk 24/7 to candidates in multiple languages and have 5, 10, or 15-minute conversations with candidates to assess hundreds of skills,” said Legardez.

He added that the AI is capable of assessing the candidate for customer empathy, collaboration, or resilience, among other things. 

However, if this sounds impersonal, it’s far from that, especially given the number of candidates it has to interact with, said Legardez: “If a candidate gets rejected, they get personalized feedback, with some tips to learn new things to help them improve their chances next time, thus also making them a good ambassador of the brand.” He said: “98% of the candidates for BNP Paribas now say this is the best recruitment process of their life, and it increases their willingness to join BNP Paribas.”

Furthermore, despite this being a so-called era of the death of DEI, Legardez said Maki shows far less bias than humans: “We have been audited by the state of New York, and it has been proven that our AI creates less bias than a human toward ethnicity, gender and age, and the more data we have, the better we can calibrate and pre-train it.” Who knows, perhaps AI recruitment will lead to even more diverse workforces in the future?

Maki’s competitors include companies such as SHL, EON, Pymetrics and Saville. Recruit CRM, BrainTrust , Recruitee, Manatal, and many others. 

However, Legardez says Maki is less selling traditional HR software so much as “work through our agents, automating the work of humans.”

Legardez previously built out Everoad, a digital freight-forwarder, which was acquired by Sennder.

In a statement, Ophelia Brown, Partner at Blossom Capital, said: “We believe Maki’s agents have the potential to enable large organizations to reach the next level of efficiency and decision-making, redefining how HR drives business success.”

Maki’s fundraising is certainly on-trend. Today, LinkedIn released a new AI product, Jobs Match, immediate advice on whether a particular job opening is worth the time to apply.