“Revolutionary” recruitment tech platform established by LGBTQ duo promises inclusive experience

A “revolutionary” new recruitment tech platform promising to improve the inclusiveness, experience, and accuracy of hiring for both candidates and employers is set to disrupt the £40bn UK recruitment market.

SaaS platform Clu, founded by life partners Joseph Williams and Cayelan Mendoza, has created an updated hiring process that gives candidates an “equitable and safeguarded” opportunity to demonstrate their value to organisations and get hired into roles in which they would thrive.  

The pair’s reasoning for founding Clu was so that others would not have to face the same barriers to employment that they once faced themselves. Thus, Clu is built upon a foundation of “inclusion and empathy”, counter to more traditional recruitment platforms.

The software increases the amount of auditable and actionable data points in the recruitment process then uses a proprietary recommendation algorithm to match a candidate’s skills and other preferences to open jobs on the platform.

Clu uniquely challenges bias in the hiring process and removes systemic barriers to entry, such as cover letters and CVs. It “empowers candidates to demonstrate their technical and transferable skills”, preventing them from being qualified by what they’ve done, instead focusing on what they can do.

The new platform is a direct response to the current recruitment market where recent research found 83 per cent of candidates have reported a bad hiring experience, while 80 per cent of employees don’t have the right skills for the job.

This resulted in nearly half of new hires moving on within 18 months at a cost of 30 percent of the employer’s potential first-year earnings to each business.

Joseph Williams, Clu’s CEO, commented: “Talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is not. The way talent is sourced, selected and hired is not fit for purpose and we are on a mission to change that.

“We are increasing the accountability, transparency, and inclusiveness of the end-to-end recruitment process. We’ll be using machine learning and advanced data modelling to create clearer pictures of what organisations need from candidates and what candidates need from organisations, how we can start predicting success and how we can start automating elements of talent mapping and organisational design, but this comes with time.

Joseph continued: “The team are building bias-mitigation and inclusion safeguarding features that mean candidates don’t have to hide their identity anymore to qualify into a process. We are capturing the most detailed demographic and cognitive diversity data sets in the market to ensure we live up to our mission of making the working world work for everyone.”

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