36Kr's first | "Avocado Technology" completed tens of millions of Pre-A round of financing, and enabled large-scale recruitment through AI video interviews

36Kr learned that "Avocado Technology", a SaaS service provider that provides intelligent solutions for large-scale recruitment, has completed tens of millions of yuan of Pre-A round of financing in October last year, led by Shunwei Capital, followed by old shareholders Sequoia China, GSR Venture Capital and Qiji Chuangtan, and the amount of this round of financing will be used to invest in product research and development and sales team system construction.

Founded in August 2019, Avocado Technology is a technology company that empowers the recruitment process with artificial intelligence and SaaS services, and its recruitment management system "Instant Noodle Recruitment" is committed to providing online solutions for large-scale recruitment scenarios represented by white-collar and blue-gray-collar workers.

At present, white-collar online recruitment represented by technology companies in China has gradually become the mainstream, and HR SaaS for Internet school recruitment, technical talent recruitment management and other scenarios has also been increasingly accepted by customers. But at the same time, the recruitment scenario requirements of large-scale positions have not been well met. Whether it is a large number of recruitment positions such as online course teachers and front-line sales in the white-collar industry, or blue-and-gray-collar recruitment in the new era, digitalization is at a low level. In addition to hiring a large number of recruiters, enterprises have to use offline recruitment provided by HRO (Human Resources Outsourcing) as the main scenario in the case that their recruitment capabilities cannot meet business needs, while the long-tail market is also full of traditional redundant recruitment habits such as store recruitment and hometown recommendation.

Even under the impetus of the epidemic dividend, the online recruitment rate of blue and gray collar is still no more than 30%. Since most blue-gray collars don't have resumes, or resumes don't provide enough information, large-scale hiring is difficult to complete based on competency reviews such as online pen processes. However, for large-scale labor-intensive enterprises, large-scale job recruitment capabilities represent the core competitiveness of enterprises in the future, and digital transformation is a foreseeable trend.

At present, China has nearly 1 billion labor force population, including 100 million white-collar workers and 400 million blue-gray-collar population, of which more than 100 million people in the retail and service industries, large-scale batch recruitment is a trillion-dollar market, and enterprises pay more than 100 million yuan in costs every year. Under the recruitment needs of tens of thousands of people, offline interviews have caused a lot of overlapping resources and wasted costs. The average recruitment cost of domestic enterprises for front-line employees is 2,000 yuan / person, and the peak season recruitment cost of logistics, manufacturing and other industries can reach 5,000 yuan / person, and with the disappearance of the demographic dividend, this unit cost will become higher and higher.

"The large-scale recruitment scenario in the future must be online." Chen Long, founder and CEO of "Avocado Technology", told 36Kr that the low level of digitalization and the large space for standardization are the two major characteristics of large-scale recruitment at present, and they are also the market driving force that can commercially productize it.

In addition to the imaginative market prospects, "Avocado Technology" emphasizes the empowerment of service scenario transformation by the change of user habits. The maturity of the mobile Internet has spawned the emergence of today's video era. In the video era, C-end users have a large number of behavioral habits and consumption every day through video and live broadcasting, which first penetrates the daily life of ordinary people, forms a scale effect, and then reaches a higher level of demand, providing high-value business opportunities for standardized digital services. The maturity of user behavior can greatly save customer education costs, and the business logic of "Avocado Technology" is to rely on the online recruitment means of "AI +video" to provide intelligent services within the user's standardized needs and behavior definition domain.

Avocado Technology's online recruitment service has three core service modules:

1. AI video interview. The interview video is analyzed on the recruitment end, and the automatic evaluation is carried out through information collection and algorithms in view of the characteristics of large-scale positions that have relatively fixed standards for the quality of people, reducing the cost of manpower screening and improving the efficiency of objective decision-making. At the same time, on the talent side, compared with the traditional recruitment telephone or one-on-one interview, the interview video can reflect and retain personal information more standardized, distribute the job search video, and improve the delivery and matching efficiency.

Second, the ATS intelligent recruitment management system for large-scale positions. Video and other content forms can generate a large amount of data, and better judgments on investment behavior and talent qualifications. Standardized process management can help enterprises better operate large-scale job seeker resources, establish a private domain for talents, and form data barriers and industry insights through behavioral precipitation, and flexibly optimize intelligent processes according to needs.

3. Live recruitment. After last year, live recruitment is no longer rare in high-end talent recruitment scenarios such as the Internet factory school recruitment season, and live recruitment can help enterprises to establish contact and trust with large-scale job talents more efficiently and output company culture.

Chen Long, founder and CEO of Avocado Technology, graduated from HIT and the University of Southern California with a degree in computer science, studied natural language processing and artificial intelligence, worked in Baidu, Microsoft Azure, Square, and has more than 10 years of experience in AI, system research and development, and enterprise service SaaS. The team accounts for more than 60% of the production and research personnel, including senior technical personnel from large enterprises such as BAT, and the core business team has more than 10 years of human resources and recruitment experience.

"Avocado Technology" can compress the average unit cost of large-scale talent recruitment from a few thousand yuan to dozens of yuan, and adopt a payment model according to the use of corporate customer accounts and AI interviews, with an average corporate customer unit price of about 60,000 yuan. At present, "Avocado Technology" serves more than 30 medium and large enterprises, including Longhu Real Estate, Mercedes-Benz, JD Logistics, Hongzhuangyuan, etc., involving technology, finance, real estate, education, consumption and other fields, and the customer scale is expected to exceed 100 by the end of this year. From the perspective of effective data, "Avocado Technology" has helped customers reduce the number of manual interviews by 70%, while increasing the speed of resume screening by 43%, and with the optimization of data models and product iterations, the efficiency of AI solutions is still improving.

"By increasing the density of information exchange between the two sides and reducing the cost of communication, the investment and recruitment really become a two-way choice process."

In Chen Long's view, job seekers are often at a disadvantage in the recruitment process, and a large amount of time and energy costs, complex recruitment assessment processes, and unprofessional review standards for some human resources suppliers essentially compress the job seekers' right to choose. The characteristics of white-collar and blue-gray-collar groups without obvious career planning aggravate the situation of pseudo-matching and unequal demand. In addition to empowering the recruitment management of enterprise customers, "Avocado Technology" also wants to help large-scale job seekers access more employment opportunities and obtain accurate matching with enterprises and positions from AI services.

In the future, "Avocado Technology" will be committed to laying out more large-scale recruitment scenarios, such as campus recruitment with too long recruitment cycle and needing to process a large number of resumes on the spot, Internet recruitment with scarce talents and rapid changes in job demand, etc., and using AI and data to drive the two-end decision-making of human resources and job seekers.