Established in 2018, Metaview is on a mission to improve the quality of candidate interview insights and data through the use of AI, counting HelloFresh, Deliveroo, and Marks & Spencer among its client base.

In March 2024, the London-based startup announced a successful $7 million funding round, bringing its total funding to date to $15m from investors including Plural, Vertex, Fly, Seedcamp, and Village Global.

John Brazier: What is Metaview’s USP? What makes your proposition special?

Siadhal Magos: We’re laser focused on a particular part of the hiring process that we believe is incredibly important. But it’s also been, up to now, pretty much a black box – the interviews.

The conversations that occur as part of the hiring process are the most determining, the most important part of deciding who to hire. And yet, even the best companies on the planet in many cases have very little idea what is happening in those interviews.

You know they care about this data because up to now they have been asking their highly-paid workers to try to note down what’s being said during those conversations.

It’s just not something that humans are very good at; it’s very hard for them to do that alongside having an engaging conversation.

People are obsessed with candidate experience right now and rightly so, because how you differentiate yourself in this world is probably the human-to-human contact you have with candidates.

But you’re spending half of our mental energy on noting down what they said. What makes us unique is that we focus on improving those interactions and pulling higher quality data from those conversations.

That’s why we’re seeing a lot of success recently, as people are starting to realize that’s a huge problem.

JB: How is Metaview trying to change the world?

SM: We started Metaview because, frankly, believe hiring decisions are the most important business decisions.

I was at Uber at a time when we were scaling like crazy. I was involved in interview and hiring loops every week, and if I think about the impact I had at Uber – it could have been the products I worked on but most likely it was actually some of the people I hired who are still there five years later.

They’re having far more impact than me, frankly, given the fact that they’re still there. So, I really believe those hiring decisions are incredibly important.

I also really believe that hiring decisions are made in incredibly unreliable ways. There is a lot of bias that crept into how decisions were made; what you remember, or maybe what you don’t remember, so let’s just go with the person with the good resume.

Maybe you’re part of a hiring loop with a peer or colleague, or even a boss, and you don’t want to disagree with their perspective, so you go along with it. There are all of these things creeping into hiring decisions, more so than any other business decision.

We really believe we can help individuals involved in hiring have much better data and much better confidence around their hiring decisions.

If we can give the organizations at large data to understand what’s happening in this process, then they’ll be able to build better processes rather than just leaving it to luck.

JB: What is your key message to HR leaders?

SM: Our key message to HR and talent acquisition leaders is that now is the time for play, for experimentation.

It’s important that leaders in any business set an example within their organization, which is that we all have a duty to build some intuition around how AI can help us.

Very soon that sort of responsibility to build that intuition is going to become a responsibility to have executed and deployed AI into organizational processes.

It’s really important now to build up that intuition and start to understand where AI can help you, because I think that’s going to separate the great leaders from the not-so-great leaders in this inflection point.

JB: What are the next strategic goals for Metaview?

SM: Right now, Metaview is incredibly popular with recruiters and recruiting leaders.

We have tens of thousands of interviews every week, millions per year going through the platform predominantly in the recruiting specifically via recruiter – not totally, but predominantly.

What we are seeing more and more is that organizations quite rightly view hiring as a team sport, it’s not something just done by recruiters.

It’s also being done by hiring managers, interviewers, VPs or directors who are approving the hire at the end of the pipeline; there are all of these constituents.

So, our big strategic drive right now is to be the platform that enables those team collaborations to occur, because we have the data from what happened in the interview. That is the content upon which people are collaborating to make a decision on a candidate.

We think we can play a really important role in helping people collaborate on who to hire, because we are the home of this really important data.

JB: What one trend will be top of mind for HR leaders in the next 12 months?

SM: I’m going to probably say the same thing that everyone else does, which is that it has to be AI.

There’s a lot of talk around but let me caveat that with a lot of the trends that are also really positive around talent density and quality of hire.

They’re the right thing to look at from an elite efficiency of how you get those folks in from an outcome perspective.

But the thing that is new that’s going to enable you to do a better job on those on those categories is AI. There is no more meaningful change than AI.