Apli, the first flexible recruiting startup in Latin America, has generated more than 12,000 jobs since its launch last year in Mexico City.
Every day, hundreds of Mexicans look for work chatting with a robot on their cell phone. The Apli Facebook Messenger chatbot recognizes registered workers and offers them fixed or temporary vacancies to suit them. The majority of Apli users are students or part-time employees looking for additional income. “We have hundreds of candidates who are paying for their studies working weekends and nights with Apli. With a million university students in Mexico abandoning their studies every year, many of them for not being able to pay for them, the demand is enormous, ”says cofounder Vera Makarov. "We see a global trend towards flexible jobs led by both companies and workers."
With a team of 40 people, including 10 developers and data scientists, Apli is building artificial intelligence applications for recruiting workers. Co-founder José María Pertusa states that “there are studies that project the loss of tens of millions of jobs at the hands of artificial intelligence before 2020. We apply those same techniques to generate employment, eliminating inefficiencies in recruitment and finding the perfect jobs for each person". CTO Volker Mueller explains, “Innovation is being democratized. Today, a Mexican startup can develop pioneering software worldwide. ” Apli's AI models achieve 50% more accuracy in job assignments than human experts and 85% accuracy in predicting job attendance.
Apli's 500 customers - companies with 10 to 10,000 employees in the service, retail, restaurant, hospitality, manufacturing and logistics sectors - highlight the speed of the solution. “Typically, it takes our clients 2 months to fill a vacancy. With Apli, they get temporary workers in one day and permanent hires in a week, ”says commercial director Yeri Arenas. The recruiting experience is also better for people. By automating candidate profiling and interview coordination, hiring is accelerated and people get jobs up to 8x faster.
In the next year, Apli plans to expand to the main cities in Mexico and begin operations in two new countries in Latin America.
