0:00:05 Welcome to the HR Tech Spotlight podcast. I’m Deanna Shimota, CEO of GrowthMode Marketing. The HR technology market is crowded and we know it can be hard to find the best software solutions for your business in the sea of sameness. On this podcast, we shine a spotlight on some of the best up and coming technology options out there. Check it out if you are interested in learning about new innovative solutions available in the market and if you are with an HR tech company and interested in being considered for a guest spot, stay tuned for details at the end of the show.
0:00:46 Hello. Normally we put a spotlight on established up and coming HR tech companies that have been around for at least a few years. However, this time we’re going to look at a brand new technology in the market called Zeligate. I recently met the team at the HR Technology Conference and thought that what they are introducing to the market is pretty cool. So I wanted to share this with our audience here on the HR Tech Spotlight.
0:01:12 Zeligate is a smart AI helper engineered to simplify monotonous everyday talent recruitment tasks and empower leaders to focus on the important things that require a human touch. The platform learns from your team and your resources to become a part of the workforce, producing high quality work and doing your most laborious tasks like generating job listings, evaluating resumes and calling candidates to posting ads and automatically emailing calendar invites.
0:01:43 Joining me to talk about the platform is Denver Naidoo, founder and chief technology officer at Zeligate. It’s great to have you on the Denver.
0:01:52 Oh, thank you for having me. It’s pretty exciting times we’re living in.
0:01:57 Yes. You guys just launched literally about a month ago at the HR Technology Conference. Tell us about your background in the HR space.
0:02:08 Okay. Yeah, that is right. We launched just about a month ago in Las Vegas and that was at the HR Tech Conference and that was the actual brand launch of Zeligade. So my background in HR actually spans from my personal experience in It working with systems where we develop bits and pieces for HR over the years. But I think the actual brains behind it is Sam, who is my wife, and she’s an industrial psychologist. So she’s been in the air trial space for the past 22 years and she’s helped build the product from a product perspective.
0:02:45 Tell us a little more about what Zillegate does. I know I kind of talked about it in the intro, but it is so much more than what I explained. Of course.
0:02:55 : Yeah. So Zilligate is actually a workforce of AI helpers, and these AI helpers allow you to delegate all these low level, mundane, tedious tasks to bring you up for higher value work. And what that really means is there’s lots of things we do in the Atrial space that are actually tedious, repetitive, mundane, and very time consuming. And quite often we want to free ourselves to actually do a higher value work, like interacting with candidates, being able to talk to them.
0:03:24 : So Zeligate allows you to offboard all of those low level tasks to Zeligate. Zeligate actually does the doing. You could get Zeligate to call up a candidate, set up a pre screening interview, find out basic information, gather the information during onboarding, such as which bank do you bank with just the necessary insurances. All of those basic, tedious, mundane tasks are actually done for you. But that’s just the beginning of where Zelligate can help.
0:03:56 : Zeligate now becomes part of your AI workforce, so to speak, where just as how you’d hire someone into the team, you now have a Zelly AI helper that learns from your day to day tasks. Whatever you’re doing in terms of the HR space, whether you’re creating a contract, whether you putting new policies in place, zillion learns from this. And Zilli actually understands what needs to be done in terms of your systems, your processes and how you go about doing these things.
0:04:28 : So if a new employee is being onboarded, we found that there’s actually 42 steps to onboarding a new employee. And out of those 42 steps, 41 of them can be automated. And we take the approach of not going your traditional automation, but actually introducing AI, where Zelle is now this AI that goes and does things for you, gets information by sending up the emails, receiving the emails, reading it, understanding it, filing documents away, and almost getting to that level where Zelly’s actually nudging you. When you get back to your desk, Zelle actually says to you, hey, I’ve actually just onboarded Simon, and Simon’s ready to start tomorrow. Would you like me to schedule a call before he starts tomorrow so you can speak to him face to face?
0:05:11 : So it’s taking it to that next level, freeing you up to do more of those high value tasks.
0:05:17 That is such an interesting concept. And obviously AI has really been gaining momentum lately in the HR tech space. What is the story behind founding Zelegate and how did you come to be like, where did you come up with the idea? What problems did you see in the market that you felt you could address?
0:05:39 : So being in it for the past 22 years, I was fortunate enough to be exposed to many different technologies. And right from the very simple things such as APIs and integrations all the way to big data dealing with 300,000 transactions a minute, those are like real world class enterprise problems which were solved by technology, which was great coming all the way, full circle. When Sam and I decided we actually wanted to start up our own business, one of the things we needed to do was register the business, get a lawyer involved, get an accountant involved.
0:06:17 : There were so many things that needed to be done that were just the normal, mundane, tedious tasks that were repetitive. And then we got to the point where we actually got the business set up, and it’s like, right now we just need the right team. Let’s get the right team in. Because we all know team is what makes you succeed. And that proves to be one of the most difficult tasks, trying to get the right people into the team.
0:06:41 : Not only is it time consuming and tedious, there’s more than 100 resumes that we would receive for a particular job opening. And trying to go through all of that is one, it’s time consuming. Two, it could be error prone. After reading a few, it’s actually human judgment, human bias that kind of pushes you towards a direction of moving towards an interview or not. So it is born out of absolute necessity that we decided that, what if we hired someone to actually go through all of the resumes and read them?
0:07:14 : And that would solve that problem. But then when you’re hiring a lot more candidates, you need maybe more people to go through the resumes, and then that’s when the penny dropped. It’s okay. All these years of experience, all of this technology, what if we put that together, incorporated AI into it, and built it from an AI first approach? Where the HR space could start off with recruiting and AI could remove all of that Tedious tasks for you and just present you with the candidates that are sort of ready for the next round of pre screening interviews or candidates that bubble up to the top in terms of a score or ranking.
0:07:51 : Just something to organize it and push me forward in the right direction. And that’s where it was actually born. And then we realized the A trial space is just the beginning, and that’s exactly where we should start with. And then we realized it’s kind of like an inch wide and a mile deep because there’s so many areas that we started to interest in the Atrial space. We started initially with just recruiting, but then that actually goes further into an actual application tracking system.
0:08:20 : It goes further into policies and procedures. And then we realized, you know what, there’s so many things that an AI helper could actually do to free HR and recruiters to be more involved in the more valuable, high level tasks.
0:08:37 So there’s obviously bits and pieces of what Zelegate can do in other technologies out there. From a competitive landscape, how is Zelegate different from all the other solutions out there?
0:08:54 : So what was great was we didn’t try to hammer AI into a solution. It was born out of AI first, which allowed us to actually break a few rules and create our own rules. So instead of file on the know menu on the left, we actually now have an AI helper that you can see, you can talk to the AI helper can see you, and now you’re interacting with your AI as you would with a normal person. So you could say to Zelle, hey Zelle, please can you call Simon, schedule an appointment at 04:00 P.m.?
0:09:25 : And while you’re at it, can you also call Tom and tell Tom I’d like to speak to him at 04:00 P.m.? So what we found is a lot of things that we did were different. One, because we were not trying to break rules. There was a need to change with the way AI is working. So you can type, but you don’t have to. Now you’re actually talking and interacting with your Zelly, which makes it different from that regard. The entire experience is different.
0:09:54 : And then taking it further, Zelly actually steps in and does some pre screening interview for you. So you could ask Zelli to do a pre screening interview. But Zelly actually arrives and just like how you and I are chatting, you’d actually see Zelle on the screen. And Zelley now asks those basic questions. Hey Simon, I just want to confirm, are you able to come into the office three days a week? Because I understand you prefer a hybrid working model. Does Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays work for you?
0:10:21 : So this type of information that usually takes about 30 minutes in an interview, you could get all of that information up front. Zelley transcribes all of that, understands that, makes real time decisions on that and gives you the information that you need. And that’s just one part of it that sets us as a differentiator in terms of what we do. And then further to that is we have an entire workflow. So we’re not just producing documents or we’re not just sending emails. It’s an entire workflow that solves a problem.
0:10:49 : And the approach that we’ve taken was not how does technology solve this problem, but instead it was what is the problem we’re trying to solve? And we took real world scenarios. We took real world people and tried to get the best product market fit so we could serve the customers best. And what we found is a lot of the times it’s a very simple problem that people were trying to solve and hammer a solution into.
0:11:12 : So if you look at it, back in the day, people thought that they needed a faster horse and what they actually needed was a car. So quite often people would look at you from a tech perspective and say, you know what? I need this system to integrate into LinkedIn. I needed to integrate into all of these other systems and I wanted to do it automatically. And what they’re trying to do is actually solutionize.
0:11:36 : But what they really want is as a recruiter, they want to be able to hire the right candidates so that their clients can get the best value from the candidates that they’re hiring. And when we look at it at that perspective, at the very lowest level on what problem we’re trying to solve. I think that sets us apart because we actually solve the problem as opposed to ticking boxes on a technology stack.
0:12:01 That makes sense. And I think to your point, a lot of organizations, they already have their technology and then they tried to figure out how to insert AI in there to do things versus your team built from scratch with the intention that this is an AI tool. I’ve got to ask though, if I’m a candidate coming in for an interview and I’m doing a screening with your AI assistant, do I know going into that interview that it’s not a real person I’m going to be talking to?
0:12:31 Or do you just pop in and have the interview and they may or may not notice it’s not a real person?
0:12:40 : Absolutely. We want everyone to know that these are actually AI helpers. We want them to know it’s AI. And it’s so interesting because when we’ve done the market research, we found that we use this just for the prescreening interview, not the actual one, and people are actually more free. When you’re talking to another human for the very first time, you have no idea who they are. There’s no baseline. There’s a first impression that you both gauge very quickly and then as you start to say something, if the other person kind of frowns a little or lips away, it automatically kind of gets you on the back foot. You kind of think, oh, did I say the wrong thing?
0:13:17 : Did I do the wrong thing? But what we found is with the prescreening interview with an AI helper and you know that this is AI, people are actually a lot more free. They can be themselves and they’re actually not being judged. It’s such a great way to remove the bias.
0:13:33 I could totally see that. And that thought was actually crossing my mind as I was asking you the question. It’s probably less nerve wracking for some candidates to go in there because it feels less like you’re right. You read the expressions and kind of the way that someone comes across. And if it’s an AI assistant, you’re not going to take it personally unless you guys have a sense of humor and built in reactions to your AI assistant to come and be like, OOH, really?
0:14:05 : Right.
0:14:10 I was just going to say you might get more of a flavor of the person’s actual personality in those screening interviews if you go back and watch them later because they felt less censored in talking to an AI bot versus talking to a real life person.
0:14:29 : Absolutely. And the questions you can come up with are actually quite interesting because there’s basic information you want to get and you might ask a question at the end. So tell me, what could you do with a fishbone? And you get someone’s real reaction like, what are you talking about, a fishbone? Well, you got 30 seconds. Think of something. I could use it to maybe, I don’t know, make a soup, and it kind of just breaks the ice a little, and it allows for so many more possibilities other than just the traditional conversational chat bot.
0:15:05 Yeah, I love it. I could see where you could totally have fun with your chat bots and your AI assistance, sending them into those interviews and throwing people for a loop with some of the questions they throw at them. What do you see Denver as a big challenge or problem facing HR departments today that Zeligate can really come in and help minimize?
0:15:33 : So HR, what we found has become one of those industries that seems to be inundated with documentation. There’s a file on employees, there’s a file on payroll, there’s a file for everything. And then you got to try and find those files, bring them together, and then you got to go through process. HR seems to have a lot more process and legislation very close to the legal side of things, I’d say, because you want to do things right, and you got to make sure that you’re actually abiding by the laws of the country, industry standards, et cetera.
0:16:06 : There are things that most people won’t know. You can come into an organization and start to hire people, but when you actually get into human resources, there’s so much more that needs to happen. And this is where Zeligate actually comes in. And the approach that Zelligate does is we actually prompt you as the user. So Zelle would say to you, hey, you’ve just done an interview on this candidate. You need to get a reference check. And I see that there’s two reference checks on that resume. Would you like me to go ahead and do those reference checks for you, or would you like me to schedule an appointment for you to do those reference checks? Once the reference checks are done, zelle prompts you to the next thing, hey, this is what you need to do. If you’re trying to put out a job out there and you’re way below market value, Zelly would give you some idea of what the market is expecting for that job and say to you, you know what? Chances are you’re not going to get the right candidates because you’re going too low on the salary range.
0:17:01 : So Zelly becomes this little helper that’s just helping you along the way and making you smarter in the process, because every time Zilli nudges you on something, you would be like, oh, okay, I didn’t know that. Now I do.
0:17:17 How does Zelly work with different organizations? I’m assuming part of it is the data. In creates the data, right? Like, how do you train them for each individual organization?
0:17:30 : One of the beautiful things about Zelly is that, once again, we didn’t try to hammer AI into a solution. We’ve actually built an HR helper, which means Zelly comes pre trained, out the box pretrained with the understanding of HR pre trained with regulations of your country and your state, depending on where you are pre trained with the latest information out on the web. So we have curated sources where Zelli is continuously learning from the outside world day in and day out. So Zelli is actually up to date as we’re going along.
0:18:06 : So when you receive your Zelli, your Zelli is actually pre trained, and it becomes your Zelli from day one the moment you start to supplement more data to your Zelli. So we’ve removed all barriers in the sense that I want to get a document to Zelle, how do I do it? Do I create some integrations and do some of that funky stuff where I need an It guy? No, you don’t. So, simply as you would onboard a new employee, you’d often email them a set of documentation.
0:18:34 : So you email your documents to Zelley. Zelly receives it in real time, reads it, files it away, understands it, does all of the data crunching behind the scenes. And that’s part of the secret source, the way we organize the data and work with the data behind the scenes. And then further to that, Zelli is continuously learning from your business. You have the opportunity to type to Zelli, talk to Zelli, upload videos, upload documents, and Zelli is continuously learning about your business.
0:19:00 : A few days down the line, you ask Zelli a question, Zelli gives you an answer, and someone else in another organization asks the exact same question and they’ll get a different answer because Zelly’s now learned from your business.
0:19:14 Very cool. So, who would you say, from a company perspective, what type of companies are the perfect fit for your solution?
0:19:24 : Right now, I would say it’s small to Medium Enterprises and it’s a B to B offering where you’d want to have recruiters and HR that are in house using Zelly to start with. And we find that recruiters are actually trying to use Zelly in very different ways. So there’s a good use case for recruiters as well.
0:19:49 So I know you guys are brand new. You probably haven’t built up a huge client base yet. What type of impact, though, do you expect organizations that work with delegate to experience?
0:20:02 : Interesting enough, we’ve actually got interest from large organizations with thousands of employees and the ability to onboard thousands of sellers. What we’re doing is running a closed beta with a selected number of users from different parts of the country, different industry, in fact, some outside of the country as well. And we just want to get that last bit of product market fit right, because every time we present this to a test group, there’s some kind of feedback that we realize, okay, this would be great.
0:20:30 : We didn’t quite think of that. And that’s really the beauty of it. Every time Zelly goes out, there’s always some positivity towards Zelly and then there’s positive feedback. I wish Zelly could do that, and that’s what we’re doing at the moment, getting that product market fit right.
0:20:48 When do you expect the platform to be readily available to the companies out there that are interested?
0:20:56 : Yeah, we’re planning on opening the doors in early Q One, 2024, and that’s to the global world. Yeah, very soon. And we do have a select small group that we currently running with at the moment, and we might just open up that group to a few others.
0:21:15 What is the future vision for Zelligate?
0:21:19 : The future vision for Zelligate is to be a workforce of AI helpers, and not just in the HR space, but you’d want to have a Zelly in HR. You want to have a Zelly in legal, sales, marketing. So whatever type of work you’re doing, you want Zelly to be able to help you to get to the next level. And the ultimate goal is every person in the world should have access to a Zelli, whether you’re a first time mom, whether you’re trying to do yoga, trying to cook a meal, and eventually every hustle in the world should ideally have Azelli helping them.
0:21:51 I would love to have Azelli helping me someday. So, Denver, what things would you say, someone who will be evaluating or purchasing this type of technology in the future, what type of things should they take into consideration as they evaluate the options that are out there?
0:22:13 : I think the first thing to start with is because we’re in such groundbreaking space with really no one doing the full suite of what we’re doing, and we’re actually removing all barriers to entry. So instead of making an enterprise model that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to get into, we actually want anyone to be able to get in, get a free trial, and see it for yourself, because it’s actually unparalleled. If you look at the moment, you don’t have someone that you can see, talk to and have things done.
0:22:41 : So I would say just get in there, start using it, understand what you like, what you don’t like, give us some feedback, and we’ll make those Zellies readily available to you. I think the key is, when evaluating products, a lot of times you have to go through the entire sort of competitor analysis and tick what does the product have, what doesn’t the product have? But when we creating the rules ourselves this time around, with the old advent of AI being so prolific in the industry, I would say just get in there and start using it.
0:23:15 And what final thoughts do you want to leave our audience with?
0:23:19 : Yeah, I think that we’re at a very interesting time in the world where the way we walk, the way we play, the way we do, life is going to change. And AI has been a catalyst for that. And 2023 has been quite experimental in a lot of areas. I think 2024 is going to become even better in terms of what we can do and how we push the boundaries. My sort of final words would be is be open minded. Give it a chance, no matter who it is, because there’s a lot of barrier to entry from a human perspective as what AI could and couldn’t do in terms of ethical values and morals.
0:24:01 : But from where I’m standing and what we see, we see that AI is there to help. So I would say give it a chance.
0:24:08 Where can our listeners go to learn more about Zeligate?
0:24:12 : You could go to WW zelligate AI and you’d find a lot more information about Delegate.
0:24:20 Excellent. Thanks so much for being a guest on the show, Denver. I look forward to seeing Zeligate grow and make its mark in the industry. For those listening, be sure to check out Zelegate to learn more. Yeah.
0:24:33 : Thank you for having me, Deanna.
Thanks for listening to this episode of The HR Tech Spotlight podcast, where we showcase some of the best up and coming HR technology options in the market. If you are an HR tech company leader who would like to be considered for a guest spot on this program, please contact me via growthmodemarketing.com or reach out to me, on LinkedIn. And if you found this show informative, subscribe, connect with us on social media and leave a review.
This is Deanna with GrowthMode Marketing signing off. Thanks for listening. We hope you’ll tune in again next time our channel.