How Canvider AI Offers Small Businesses Faster, Fairer Hiring Without Old ATS Limitations

I was recruiting engineers and interns for my teams when I was working as Data Science Tech Lead, then I saw that our HR wasn't checking the majority of the CVs at all. They were just checking a few and just skipping the rest. I felt that this was unfair and informed my superiors to fix this issue. Later on, I decided that AI can reduce the issue here by doing some sort of initial analysis on each candidate fairly. Then, I did some research on the ATS-like products and how much the companies were paying for them. Once I saw that stone-age tools were costing thousands of dollars per month and the companies were very happy to pay those crazy costs without hesitation, I decided that I wanted to build something better, cheaper, and fairer for companies of all sizes. So, basically I wanted to supercharge recruiters with artificial intelligence, so they are not rushed to make unfair decisions.

The biggest flop is the LinkedIn Ads, they cost so much while bringing no results at all. Although our client base was hanging on LinkedIn, somehow we could never make it work as we wished. The tactic that created the most return is the natural posts that we are doing. For example, I sometimes post a video where I talk about recruiting, and sometimes it's just a text with some image. They do bring more attention and they create a more authentic experience for our followers. We are not very successful at doing our marketing, but there were times when we consistently posted content on our blog and on our social media portals. We saw the most amount of traffic both on our pages and also on our website. As a bonus trick, I can tell that converting our existing blog posts to other languages worked very well; it opened a whole new group of audience that searches the web in their own languages.

They complained about integrations the most, we are handling them one by one. Sometimes it is easy, like just paying a service or an API to handle that integration/connection. But sometimes big brands do not care about smaller companies, so we have to implement our in-house solutions. Our way of handling any request is basically using our weekends and prioritizing the request over what we think is more important. When a client needs something, we build and ship it. That's how we recently built a Google Suite integration for emails, so clients can send recruitment emails from their own addresses instead of ours (for some reason they care about it a lot; we already had an emailing system through our domain). Another example of an issue is that sometimes it's not possible to handle because big corporates like LinkedIn don't partner with "random" startups, so even if the user asks for a specific LinkedIn feature, we can't enable it because they simply won't work with us.

Most people get irritated when they hear "ATS" because they just think it's some sort of system that blocks people from applying to jobs and makes life hard by requiring specific formats and so on. But that assumption is only correct for old ATS applications that big corporates still use today. The reality is, normally no one needs to format their CVs in any way to make it through an ATS (at least for our ATS). Most new tech like us is handling everything with advanced OCR tools anyway. We built our system (Canvider ATS) specifically for small to mid-size companies that don't have dedicated HR departments. These companies need something that actually helps them hire faster, not create more barriers. But those small companies avoid trying new things even if it’s free sometimes, thanks to the mentioned stigma. We're not trying to filter people out with some rigid keyword matching system from 2005. We're trying to help founders and hiring managers who are drowning in applications actually find good people without spending 20 hours a week screening resumes.

We intend to expand our team of operations. Our product is already technically capable of solving people's hiring problems, and it is more functional than 90% of our competition, but now we need to scale faster and market it better. So, we will be hiring professionals especially focused on sales and marketing. If everything goes as planned, we should scale our team to 20 people. Our intention towards the end of next year is to publish our in-house trained LLM that doesn't use any of the existing LLMs as base models.

8 customers and 5 hired professionals directly from our ATS, some of those customers.

Started completely from scratch, but I used to work as a Data Scientist / Software Engineer and also as a team leader for a while, so I knew that I could build any product in my mind. And although I had no experience directly in HR, I was involved a lot in recruitments to know how does it work (more or less). Before Canvider, I actually tried building something completely different called Aktifall. It was supposed to be an online all-in-one gym card that people could subscribe to and use at multiple gyms. That project showed me what not to do. I learned that dealing with physical locations and partnerships as a solo founder working abroad is not possible.

Assuming that clients will find our product themselves and that all the people who have seen it in action would actually pay and start using it. When we started showing the idea to people, they all loved it and said they would use it, but once the product was ready, they were not as excited, although we delivered exactly what we presented to them. We learned that someone saying that they "like" something doesn't mean that they will talk with the business unit to drop their existing ATS and then move to us because they like ours more (apparently most people just live by the tools they have, even if they hate them).