Fika Jobs raises $4M to build a video-first hiring platform where AI agents interview candidates

The hiring process has agelong been criticized for its inefficiency and opacity. Candidates walk hours penning applications and submitting screen letters, lone to vanish into what often feels similar a achromatic box. Generative AI has lone made things messier, with employers progressively relying connected AI-powered screening systems to sift done an overwhelming fig of submissions.

Stockholm-based startup Fika Jobs thinks there’s a amended way. The institution is gathering a video-first hiring level that combines AI interrogation agents with short-form video profiles, creating thing that feels similar a transverse betwixt LinkedIn and TikTok. Instead of relying solely connected resumes, candidates implicit AI-powered interviews designed to showcase their property and connection skills.

Fika Jobs announced connected Tuesday a $4 cardinal pre-seed round, which volition beryllium utilized to proceed processing the platform, turn the team, and hole for a wider motorboat aboriginal this year.

For occupation seekers, the process starts by connecting a LinkedIn profile. Fika’s AI reviews the candidate’s inheritance and generates personalized interrogation questions. Candidates past implicit a astir 10-minute video interrogation with the AI agent, presently powered by Google’s Gemini models.

After the interview, Fika automatically turns responses into abbreviated video clips and organizes them into a profile. Instead of applying to each caller role, candidates support a unrecorded illustration that employers tin observe and revisit arsenic caller opportunities arise.

Image Credits:Fika Jobs

The thought came from co-founders and brothers Jakob Dubois (CEO) and Alexander Dubois (CTO) portion they were gathering their erstwhile startup.

“When we were gathering [social app] Gaff, we spent a batch of clip recruiting and astir passed connected a campaigner due to the fact that his resume did not truly basal out,” Jakob Dubois told TechCrunch. “We ended up speaking with him anyway, and wrong minutes, his grit, drive, and ambition became obvious. Exactly the benignant of idiosyncratic we wanted to hire.”

That acquisition convinced the founders that immoderate traits that employers attraction astir about are hard to seizure connected paper.

Unlike astir competitors (Alex, Maki, and Mercor, among others) that absorption connected helping employers source, screen, and lucifer candidates much efficiently with AI, Fika is gathering a level wherever candidates support video-first profiles and employers browse a excavation of radical who person already been interviewed and evaluated by AI.

If successful, Fika Jobs could assistance employers measure connection skills and taste acceptable aboriginal successful the hiring process, complementing accepted resume and exertion reviews. This attack whitethorn beryllium particularly invaluable for early-career professionals and candidates from non-traditional backgrounds, whose imaginable is not ever evident from a resume alone.

Of course, video profiles present existent bias risks that are besides worthy acknowledging. When employers tin spot a candidate’s race, age, gender, carnal appearance, and accent earlier evaluating their qualifications, it opens the doorway to favoritism that a resume, for each its flaws, astatine slightest partially obscures. There’s a crushed immoderate companies person moved toward unsighted resume screening.

The level plans to unfastened aboriginal entree to candidates this week, with a broader nationalist motorboat expected this fall. The institution volition initially absorption connected Sweden earlier expanding internationally. Fika presently has a tiny squad but expects to thatch astir 10 employees by the extremity of the year.

More than 100 companies are connected the waitlist, accidental the founders, though they declined to disclose which ones. Separately, they said much than 50 companies person tested the platform, including Plenty Labs, SICS.ai, Kognity, and Rebtel.

The level is escaped for occupation seekers. Employers wage thing up front, but Fika takes 10% of a candidate’s first-year wage upon a palmy hire. (The institution notes that this is little than the 20% to 30% placement fees often charged by accepted recruiters and headhunters.)

The circular was led by Luminar Ventures, with information from Alliance VC and King co-founders Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi, the duo champion known for creating the deed mobile crippled Candy Crush.