This platform offers ‘swift and unbiased' HR screening

It is an ai-powered recruiting assistant that can conduct first stage screening and interviews.

From heaps of paperwork to countless hours of interviews, the hiring process has always proved to be difficult work on top of a company’s regular operations. Executives continue to expect to snap up the best talent, however as Singapore’s job market grows increasingly complex and competitive, they are also finding it more difficult to handle both candidates and hiring managers at the same time.

With this challenge in mind, impress.ai chief executive officer and co-founder Sudhanshu Ahuja and his colleagues teamed up to find a way to provide a fantastic candidate experience at scale and give every candidate a proper structured interview, all while minimising human bias in hiring. Ahuja describes impress.ai as an artificial intelligence powered recruiting assistant that can conduct first stage screening interviews by itself, thereby generating significant cost and time benefits for the enterprise and also enhancing candidate engagement and experience.

Ahuja’s team initially funded impress.ai using their earnings from Ideatory. Afterwards, they joined Zeroth.ai, an accelerator in Hong Kong, to help them create the first working version of the product. Recently, impress.ai received funding from Javelin Startup-O Victory Fund, the process of which was very smooth, according to Ahuja. Javelin Startup-O continues to work closely with impress.ai through the Venture Building program. “We are capturing Singapore very fast. Southeast Asia and India are very next on our list. The client demand is very strong for our product. We have recently tripled our team size to serve this demand,” Ahuja adds.

When one company’s CEO started receiving e-mails from candidates that the talent acquisition team was not being responsive, impress.ai configured their platform to be the virtual recruiter for the candidates. Ahuja says that they do not only do the first round of interviews anonymously, they also provide hiring updates and answer candidates’ questions.”While not completely a ‘personal’ experience, 76% of the candidates we surveyed reported that they like it better than ATS based application processes,” Ahuja adds.

Ahuja, an alumnus of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore, has several years of experience in both drafting market policy and working on sales and strategy. He founded impress.ai with chief operating officer Amrith Dhananjayan and chief technology officer Vaisagh Viswanathan. Dhananjayan has a Ph.D. in Engineering in design of complex systems and human/machine understanding from NTU and four years of experience in managing large-scale projects. Meanwhile, Viswanathan has a Ph.D. in Agent Based Simulation (sub-field of AI) from NTU and was a research fellow for modelling and simulation of complex systems at TUM CREATE.