Yobs Technologies, the startup that innovates HR through the study of personality, soft skills and emotional intelligence, announces that it has raised €2 million in its seed financing round, reaching a valuation of €10 million. Among the investors who have chosen to bet on the project there are professional figures and experts in the field such as the famous work psychologist Adam Grant, the young founder of the Silicon Valley startup unicorn Scale AI Lucy Guo and the former Head of Product of Ironclad and Facebook, Kat Orekhova.
Founded in 2018 by French Raphael Danilo and Italian Federico Dubini based in Los Angeles, and since 2020 incubated in I3P, the incubator of the Polytechnic University of Turin, Yobs has developed a "smart" platform that revolutionizes companies' talent decision-making processes to make them more inclusive, meritocratic and performant and that, in the era of remote interviews and video calls, is more necessary than ever.
The startup has in fact developed - together with the best work psychologists - an API (Application Programming Interface) that, through video interviews, allows to collect and analyze more than 400 parameters and capture key data such as facial expression, syntax, behavioral signals to analyze key performance parameters such as personality, emotional intelligence, learning ability and team fit. A data-driven approach that ensures objective, explainable and accountable internal processes that protect the values of diversity & inclusion.
Chosen among others by Nissan Motors, Nova Talent, ManpowerGroup and Leroy Merlin, the Yobs project supports companies in the selection of candidates taking into account a more complete and relevant spectrum of data, which also evaluates soft skills: this allows to significantly speed up the hiring process, improve performance and diversity.
In the talent management phases, moreover, the software developed by Yobs assists companies in understanding who is ready for a promotion, how to build complementary teams, and develop and retrain talent as positions become obsolete due to technological evolution. You are then able to manage the entire growth of an individual within a team and the company.
"Businesses are made by people: our goal is to bring back to the center of the discussion the importance of talent," explains Federico Dubini, co-founder of Yobs. "Forming a heterogeneous team is one of the variables that affect the success of startups, and companies need to achieve goals and evaluate the performance of their employees, especially from the new ways of working remotely. The future of work sees companies with more remote and diverse teams, with increasingly dynamic positions that on average become obsolete every two years. For the companies of the future, it is imperative to develop processes of selection, management, development and retraining of personnel based on potential and not only on 'pedigree'."
Based on a hybrid system of cognitive service and human-in-the-loop (HITL) modeling, Yobs' software can deliver the same result as a talent assessment but at a fraction of the cost, time and with a more scalable infrastructure. It thus allows companies to get the same granularity of data across the entire company population that until now they can only get for the executive category, making the entire recruitment and staffing process actually data-driven.
"The financial raising capacity of two million euros in the first investment rounds testifies to the technological solidity and growth potential of the model proposed by Yobs," comments Giuseppe Scellato, President of I3P. "Yobs' solution intercepts a growing demand for innovation in the human resources sector, offering tools that guarantee effectiveness, efficiency and transparency."
