Start-up firm launches revolutionary recruitment platform

MANILA, Philippines - Kalibrr, a cloud-based startup software company, launched a recruitment, assessment, and talent management platform after receiving P83 million in fresh investments from several investors led by Kickstart Ventures Inc. of Ayala-led Globe Telecom Inc.

Paul Rivera, co-founder and chief executive officer of Kalibrr, said  the company also received investments from Omidyar Network established by E-Bay founder Pierre Omidyar, Siemer Ventures, Learn Capital, and other investors.

Rivera said the revolutionary talent recruitment platform would initially cater to the business process outsourcing (BPO) but would also cater to other sectors.

He pointed out that the platform would speed up the recruitment process especially now that more foreign companies are setting up shop in the Philippines that is considered as the second fastest growing economy next to China.

 â€œMany companies are investing in the Philippines. They choose the Philippines as the base of their operations as we are creating knowledge workers,” he explained.

According to him, the platform is expected to revolutionize how jobseekers and employers connect.

 â€œKalibrr has been identified as a promising company.  We aim to become one of the fastest growing cloud-based software companies in the Philippines in terms of revenue, and to become the industry-wide standard for assessment and recruitment software.  That is why we are thankful to our investors for having faith in what we do,” Rivera added.

The revenue base of the country’s business process outsourcing industry is expected to hit $20 billion.

While the BPO Industry is growing, he lamented that its growth is being threatened by an inability to find skilled workers since existing recruitment practices “are extraordinarily inefficient and cannot scale to meet the labor demands.”

He said Kalibrr streamlines the recruitment process eliminating inefficiencies in sourcing and screening candidates.

By using advanced machine learning algorithms and online assessments, Kalibrr matches job seekers with jobs based on the skills a candidate possesses.

Kickstart Ventures president Minette Navarrete said the BPO industry shows fantastic job creation and industry revenue opportunities.

 â€œBut industry insiders worry about how inefficient the hiring system actually is. Newspaper classifieds and online job board postings attract thousands of applications, but resumes are not an accurate indicator of job fit, so BPO recruitment teams still spend hundreds of hours and dollars sifting through resumes and doing interviews to find the few candidates to fill the roles. That’s time and money lost, for both the hiring company and the applicants,” she explained.

Kalibrr was the first tech startup from the Philippines to be accepted into the prestigious Y Combinator, an American seed accelerator based in Palo Alto which provides seed money, advice, and connections at two three-month programs per year.