London-based entrepreneur Matt Wilson's AI recruitment platform Jack & Jill recently announced a $20 million seed funding round led by European investment firm Creandum. The platform reimagines the traditional hiring process using conversational AI technology, and has already launched in London with nearly 50,000 users. It plans to use the new funds to expand into the US market.
Wilson pointed out structural issues in the current hiring market. He said that after posting a job on LinkedIn, a company might receive 1,000 applications within the first six hours, but due to the extremely low signal-to-noise ratio, many companies do not even review these applications. On the other hand, job seekers face endless job listings and numerous fake candidates using AI to apply en masse, making the job search process chaotic and inefficient.
Jack & Jill uses a two-sided design. The "Jack" side is for job seekers, who go through a 20-minute AI-powered interview to build a user profile, and then are recommended matching jobs from an online database. This side also offers mock interviews and career coaching. The "Jill" side serves employers, creating a profile of requirements for specific positions and screening suitable candidates. Similar to LinkedIn's logic, the platform aims to keep both job seekers and employers active, allowing the system to automatically match them at the right time. The platform collects a standard commission upon successful hires.
Wilson believes the value of conversational chatbots goes beyond optimizing matching algorithms. By building a process around chatbot interviews, he is trying to find a scalable alternative to the endless cycle of job listings and resumes. This approach could change the fundamental elements of modern hiring processes.
Using AI systems for initial interviews is already common in some regions, especially in China, where many multinational companies have adopted this practice when hiring local positions. Although sudden interviews with AI recruiters may feel alienating, Wilson hopes that Jack & Jill's approach can overall improve the intelligence level of job matching.
Wilson said, "I think the way people match with companies is extremely inefficient. Billions of people around the world could find more suitable jobs, and this is a mission worth striving for."
From an industry trend perspective, the emergence of AI recruitment tools is both a response to current hiring challenges and brings new controversies. On one hand, traditional recruitment platforms indeed face the problem of massive low-quality applications; on the other hand, over-reliance on AI screening could filter out talented candidates who do not fit the algorithmic pattern. Whether Jack & Jill can find a balance between efficiency and human experience remains to be verified on a larger scale. Early data from London shows some user acceptance, but the recruitment culture and user habits in the US market may differ from those in Europe, which will be a challenge in its expansion process.
