Why Kula Believes AI Can Change The Face Of Recruitment Forever

Could artificial intelligence (AI) help businesses recruit staff more efficiently and effectively? Kula believes it can – the California-based start-up is this week launching an “all-in-one hiring platform” with AI tools built in that will do everything from sorting through job applications to providing feedback on candidates’ interviews.

Forbes first featured Kula in 2022, breaking the news of a $12 million funding round for the start-up. Since then, the company has more than doubled in size and grown its revenues year-on-year by an average of 70%. Now Achuthanand Ravi, the co-founder and CEO of the company believes many organisations are looking for additional functionality from recruitment software.

“The balance of power in the labour market has shifted over the past two years,” Ravi says. “It’s now much more of an employers’ market, with a better supply of candidates for each role; one result is that companies need more help to deal with the flow of applications they are receiving.”

Many companies believe AI can provide that help. Research published earlier this year by LinkedIn suggested 62% of recruiters now think AI has the potential to have a positive impact on their activities. It highlighted opportunities for AI tools ranging from help with writing job descriptions to managing candidate engagement.

In this context, Kula’s proposition is an applicant tracking system (ATS) which automates much of the work that companies have traditionally had to do manually when recruiting. The software includes outreach tools to help employers target potential recruits for roles that need filling – exploiting resources such as LinkedIn and GitHub, for example – as well as a screening tool that scans applications to automatically work out which candidates are the best fit for the job in question. Further down the funnel, process tools enable employers to stay on top of interview planning and scheduling. And an analytics tool sits in on interviews to provide an automated summary of the conversation.

MORE FOR YOU
Apple’s Update Decision—Bad News Confirmed For Millions Of iPhone Users
BlackRock Reveals It’s Quietly Preparing For A $35 Trillion Federal Reserve Dollar Crisis With Bitcoin—Predicted To Spark A Sudden Price Boom
Election 2024 Swing State Polls: Pennsylvania’s A Dead Heat—As Harris Leads Michigan, Trump Takes Arizona

“The goal is to substantially reduce the cost of recruitment through greater automation, but also to reduce the chances of making bad hires or missing out on good candidates,” Ravi says. By helping employers to systematically rank candidates at each stage of the process against the job descriptions and requirements they have set out, the ATS is intended to identify the best person for the job from the widest pool of talent possible.

On that issue of breadth, one critical question that companies such as Kula must face is whether they can put AI to work in the recruitment process without introducing biases. In the past, some AI tools have been criticised for appearing to discriminate against particular groups – showing prejudice on the basis of gender or race, for example.

Ravi insists robust governance has been a priority for the company as it has built AI tools into its software. “The issue of bias is something that all recruiters need to be aware of as the technology develops, but it’s our responsibility to protect them,” he says. “That means educating employers about this issue, but also ensuring that the software is built in a way that confronts bias and prejudice.”

Kula believes its newcomer status in the recruitment market can help it secure competitive edge as AI gains traction. While Ravi himself has a long track record in the field, with previous recruitment roles at companies including Freshworks, Uber and Stripe, the company’s four-year history is relatively brief. “We are the first major hiring platform to be built after the AI-boom, so we’ve harnessed many of the advances of AI into our platform and purpose-built them for recruiting use cases,” Ravi argues.

So far, around 20 of Kula’s existing customers have signed up to use the AI platform, enabling the business to trial and test its functionality. The company believes it is now in a position to take the product to market, targeting medium-sized businesses – with between 100 and 1,000 employees, say – in North America and Asia-Pacific, where its customer base is currently predominant.

The company’s existing funding gives it sufficient runway to pursue that strategy over the next year or so, but Ravi expects to launch further financing rounds in due course. In the meantime, Piruze Sabuncu, a partner at Square Peg, one of Kula’s existing investors, believes the company can make rapid progress.

"Kula is poised to disrupt a market that’s been eagerly awaiting a next-generation platform,” argues Sabuncu. “Recruiting teams are looking for bundled tools built with efficiencies enabled by AI, and designed intuitively by people who understand how they use products.”