Founder Annika von Mutius
Does artificial intelligence help with job searches?
31.05.2024, 16:52
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Many companies cannot find skilled workers, while hundreds of thousands of people are looking for jobs. Startup founder Annika von Mutius wants to bring both sides together – with masses of data and advanced mathematics.
What does Empion want to do differently than many other job portals?
Annika von Mutius: Currently, job seekers go to large job portals and look for a specific position. Then you get thousands of results that are not much more informative than the company logo and the job description. We supplement this with factors that are very important for job satisfaction – the relationship with colleagues, the relationship with the boss and the like. In our case, you wouldn’t start with traditional job advertisements, but instead you would go to a questionnaire via social media that asks about value-based preferences, for example. And only then are you suggested a potential employer.
That sounds a bit like it would be something for highly qualified or highly specialized professionals. But many companies are currently simply lacking qualified employees. Would the system be suitable for them too?
We are actually concentrating on the market for office workers at the moment. In a salary bracket between 30,000 and 120,000 euros per year. This is also because the demand is very high. But it is of course also interesting for us to expand this, for example to less qualified workers. On the corporate side, we have customers who are simply looking for suitable people whose further training they then want to take on themselves.
One tool that is supposed to help with the search is artificial intelligence. That’s a label that’s being used everywhere at the moment. But often it’s just about making efficient use of large amounts of data. Where does Empion cross this threshold?
You could perhaps describe it like this: mathematically speaking, a classic interview when looking for a job has more than 100 million interaction possibilities. AI systems can reduce this to a minimum of eight to twelve questions. And it should still remain so individual that the right match is found in the end. We are currently testing different systems with our team, and a lot of effort is put into it.
But at the end there still has to be a traditional job interview, right?
We have also thought about this and created a model that is based on the levels of autonomous driving. And there is actually a level where everything from the application to the start is covered autonomously. Technically and legally, of course, that is not yet that advanced. But the question is also whether we even want that.
The German labor market is in a strange situation: on the one hand, many companies are looking for workers, but on the other hand, there is still unemployment, which has even risen slightly recently. Is this all just a matching problem?
We speak to many companies of different sizes. Often the problem is not that there are too few applications. There are just a lot of incorrect ones – in terms of skills, cultural characteristics and other things. So it’s a filtering problem, if you like. There are also companies in rural areas that don’t receive any applications at all because they may not be using the right channels.
With Annika von Mutius said Nils Kreimeier.
Listen in the new episode of “Zero Hour“
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