Innovate. Invent. Experiment.
In this series, Imperial alumni tell us what they are working on.
WHO
Nikos Moraitakis (Computing 1999)
WHAT
Our company, Workable, makes software to help organise and run the recruiting process, from advertising jobs and scheduling interviews to collecting feedback about prospective hires. We are growing at 70 per cent per year and 6,000 companies currently use our software in 80 countries.
HOW
Most companies do a better job of hiring if the directors are also hiring managers. However, directors don’t have the time to look at 200 résumés, so the HR department does it for them. That means the director/hiring manager cannot steer the hiring process to better outcomes. We give them an online applicant tracking system so that hiring teams can collaborate on the sourcing and evaluation of candidates.
INSPIRATION
My co-founder Spyros Magiatis and I are both software engineers, so we wanted to build something that was product-centric. We’d encountered large enterprise recruitment software, and wanted a better tool for running our hiring process – so we made it. It turned out we weren’t the only ones who wanted it.
MOTIVATION
If you start your own company, you get to determine what type of workplace it’s going to be, and we wanted to create jobs that we would enjoy. Our customers are the small and many, not the big and the few.
THE FUTURE
Machine learning will mean that instead of just automating workflow, software will increasingly define the process, provide us with the appropriate information and do a lot of the clerical work. This will make recruiting cheaper and smarter because we’re going to spend more time talking to people and figuring out who’s right for us, and less time in the surrounding processes. We hope to be one of the agents that brings about that change.
Nikos Moraitakis is co-founder of Workable, a recruitment software company based in Boston, US and Athens, Greece.