Dublin’s Swyg aims to reinvent hiring with €1m raise

10 Sep 2020

Members of the Swyg team. Image: Swyg

With the latest round of funding, Swyg aims to strengthen its team and further develop its AI-powered recruitment platform.

On Wednesday (9 September), recruitment technology company Swyg announced that it raised €1m in a funding round led by Frontline Ventures.

Other participants in the funding round include angel investors such as Pointy co-founder Charles Bibby and Pipedrive co-founder Martin Henk.

Founded in 2018 by Vincent Lonij, Dublin-based Swyg aims to simplify the process of hiring.

While announcing the funding round, the start-up acknowledged that while technology and automation are changing the face of work, the way that companies hire has not changed much over the last 50 years.

Swyg’s technology

In a statement, the start-up said: “As a result, today’s hiring practices are no longer fit for purpose. Both candidates and employers are frustrated. Based on outdated assumptions, companies run biased interview processes, often unknowingly.”

According to Swyg, this can lead to bad hiring decisions and “fierce competition”, which can in turn lead to high turnover.

Through the start-up’s platform, candidates interview each other while artificial intelligence (AI) moderates and corrects for bias.

The platform aims to provide a better candidate experience by giving feedback to every candidate and make companies more competitive in the search for talent by giving them more insights into their candidate pool.

With the latest round of funding, Swyg plans to strengthen its team and to further develop its product. The start-up’s existing team includes experts in technology, psychology and recruitment.

The company wrote: “The most exciting thing about the funding is that it takes us a step closer to our goal of creating a more fair and inclusive hiring process for all.”

While there is an increasing amount of businesses using AI technology in recruitment and interviewing processes, the start-up said that “taking a pure AI approach to interviewing is wrong.”

“Companies will always want to hire people to do the work that computers and AI cannot do. So it’s unreasonable to expect an AI interviewer to do a good job testing those skills,” Swyg wrote.

“To solve the problem, we have created a unique hybrid approach that keeps people at the centre. We include candidates in the interview process, in order to draw on a more diverse pool of interviewers and we incorporate interview best practices by design.”

Kelly Earley was a journalist with Silicon Republic

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