The New Reality of Talent Acquisition
Artificial Intelligence Is Going to Be an Important Part of This Human Activity

Светла Симидчиева и Екатерина Михайлова
How do you reach candidates to hire? At a global scale there are new trends inspired by the innovations in this area. There are already possibilities for a remote work no matter the distance between employers and employees. This is valid only for professions where digital transformation has made it possible. Good examples are platforms like UpWork, Fiverr and Transformify, connecting the two sides of the working process.
Made in Bulgaria
There is an increase in technological innovations in talent acquisition based on artificial intelligence at a global scale. Maj.io (abbreviation for Matching Applicants & Jobs In Order) is a company, founded in Bulgaria. It already has two products launched - one in the US and one in Bulgaria. Placement Feed is used by large IT recruitment agencies in the USA, while Sloth.Works makes easier the recruitment of tech talent in our country.
Speed
Using artificial intelligence in hiring platforms makes the whole process fast and effective. Employers are flooded with CVs of candidates and with the help of AI recruiters exclude the non-suitable without reading carefully all resumes. They focus only on candidates whose CVs match the job requirements. Thus the recruiter can pay careful attention and engage with the candidates who actually match the job requirements.
Sloth.Works
The goal of Sloth.Works is to make the hiring process more pleasant and transparent for the candidates. After a member-company posts a job in the platform, only candidates who match its requirements can see the job opening. If any of them shows interest in this job, their anonymous profile is automatically sent to the company. Candidate’s profile is anonymous until the company declares they are interested to meet the candidate. The company has two working days after receiving their contact information to connect with the candidate. After the interview between a company and a candidate, the last receives a feedback for their performance no matter the result. This makes the hiring process simple and clear, explaine Svetla Simidchieva and Ekaterina Mihaylova, founders of Maj.io.
Man and Machine
Artificial intelligence does the part in the recruitment process which is most time-consuming and inefficient both for recruiters and for candidates. Machines are not creative and humans are not good at boring and repetitive tasks. It is better if humans focus on finding appropriate solutions and AI is their right-hand in tasks which it does much faster.
Efficiency
Placement Feed is a product designed for mid-sized to large staffing firms in the USA. When a recruitment agency has 1000 job openings, its recruiters cannot know all jobs so they can offer the most suitable to their candidates. On such scale a technological assistant could significantly improve the agency efficiency. In Bulgaria, however the staffing agencies are small. So their recruiters know all job openings in details and do not need a product like Placement Feed.
It Is a Matter of Scale
The more standard the use cases for artificial intelligence and the wider its adoption, the lower the price. And vice versa - the more custom AI is, the more expensive it is. This is one of the other reasons why Placement Feed is suitable for the American market - there are many and large staffing firms. Currently the monthly fee for using Placement Feed for US recruitment agencies can be as low as USD 40 per seat. It is precisely because of the scale that technology shows its advantages on a large market. In the USA there is already a competition in this market segment, but there is also a great demand.
What’s Next
“We are the ones who create the new reality of recruitment”, assure Svetla Simidchieva and Ekaterina Mihaylova. Sloth.Works is originally created for the Bulgarian market. The platform is in Bulgarian, but the jobs and candidates’ resumes are in English. The intent of the platform’s creators is to expand in other CEE countries.
Why
Maj.io products are based on natural language processing and machine learning. Every day the machine is learning to read and comprehend better and as a result it becomes smarter. Artificial intelligence will enter more and more into recruitment and selection. “We are not developing technological solutions because it is fun, but because they can make humans’ work easier and smarter”, underline Svetla and Ekaterina. When building a technology product, It is a vital skill to extract all the information from customers to make it work for them. The creators of Placement Feed and Sloth.Works keep close contact with the users of the two products and this makes it possible for the products to constantly improve performance and functionality. Adoption of new AI technologies is still slow and its creators should consider thoroughly the needs of the end user. Machines are going to be an increasingly irreplaceable assistant to humans in talent acquisition, but they will not fully replace us in this important activity.