Emergent
- Emergent CEO Mukund Jha tells BI he uses ChatGPT to make hiring more objective.
- He feeds interview transcripts into the chatbot to rate the candidate and remove bias, he said.
- The use of AI in hiring has gained traction as companies seek to streamline recruitment.
Emergent CEO Mukund Jha says he uses ChatGPT to make one of the most subjective parts of his job more objective: hiring.
The founder of the fast-growing vibe-coding startup told Business Insider that he feeds interview transcripts into ChatGPT to evaluate candidates and check his own judgment.
"I actually paste all of my transcripts back into ChatGPT and ask it to rate, like, how did the candidate do," Jha said in an interview last month.
Jha said he wants to scale that process "across the board," mandating that each interview includes an AI recording.
"We should be able to put it through, you know, a prompt, and get an unbiased score on things that we are trying to calibrate on," he added.
Jha said the startup has more than 100 employees and is aiming to hire 30 engineers by March.
The vibe coding startup has grown rapidly, and Jha said that the industry is still in its early stages, calling it the "bitcoin $1" moment.
In February, Emergent announced it had reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue just eight months after launch. ARR refers to the yearly revenue a company expects to generate from subscriptions and other recurring payments.
Business Insider reported in January that Emergent had raised a $70 million Series B round, bringing its total funding to about $100 million. Investors include Khosla Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Lightspeed, Prosus, Together, Y Combinator, and Google's AI Futures Fund.
AI in hiring
The use of AI in hiring has gained traction as companies seek to streamline recruitment and make decisions more data-driven.
Becky Frankiewicz, the president of staffing firm Manpower Group, said during the World Economic Forum in January that résumés can be processed "a lot more quickly with AI." AI can also be taught not to have bias, she added.
Nathalie Scardino, Salesforce's president, said during the WEF discussion that the company has looked at "how AI could augment any of our recruiters' capacity."
However, she emphasized that a human recruiter is still responsible for assessing a candidate's learning aptitude, which she deemed crucial in the AI era.
Beyond hiring, some CEOs have also considered AI use as criteria for promotion.
Julie Sweet, the CEO of Accenture, said last week that AI is built into how the consulting firm evaluates performance.
"Today, AI at Accenture is how we do work," Sweet said on the "Rapid Response" podcast episode. "So if you want to get promoted, you've got to do the things that we do in order to operate at Accenture."