Dublin start-up Swyg raises €1m in pre-seed funding for recruitment platform

Dublin-based start-up Swyg has raised €1 million in pre-seed funding for its platform to reduce bias in recruitment.

The round was led by Frontline Ventures, with angel investors including Pointy co-founder Charles Bibby and Piperdrive cofounder Martin Henk also participating.

The funding will be used to grow Swyg’s technical and product team, and further develop its platform. The company combines peer-to-peer interviewing technology with artificial intelligence. Candidates interview other applicants through one-on-one video chats using using pre-defined structured questions, with the AI running in real-time to detect and correct bias. Swyg says this ensures a fair assessment for all participants, while also providing hiring managers with insight into the technical and interpersonal skills of applicants.

Swyg was founded in 2018 by Vincent Lonij, with the aim of making hiring simple. Mr Lonji has eight years of experience with machine learning and AI with Bloomberg and IBM, and developed the Swyg solution because he believed current AI technology was not up to the task of judging humans directly. He said taking a simple approach to automating hiring was wrong, as it dehumanised the process.

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“Swyg is on a mission to make hiring simple and human again by giving every candidate a chance to shine, regardless of background or origin,” he said. “We want to make it easier for candidates to find the right job and for companies to hire the right people. The only way to achieve this is by combining the best aspects of human adaptability and AI efficiency in the hiring process.”

Remote interviews

Swyg’s platform facilitates remote interviews, which is particularly relevant in the current pandemic. It also eliminates the risk using automated systems that may miss highly qualified candidates because they have not used the correct keywords on their profile, with Swyg’s system also providing much-needed feedback for applicants.

“The way companies hire is fundamentally broken. Resumes, cover letters and other traditional hiring practices are ineffective at best. These dysfunctional practices often let bias creep into the hiring process, where the best candidates for the job often don’t even get past the first round,” said Finn Murphy of Frontline Ventures.