Case Study
Aveni

Overview

Aveni.ai is an Edinburgh-based Fintech with deep expertise in Natural Language Processing (NLP). They design digital client service solutions to enhance professional advice with AI, making it more meaningful, more accessible, and more human. Their aim is to make adviser-client interaction more efficient by wrapping technology around advisers, whilst keeping the human at its core.

Aveni aims to transform businesses’ interactions with clients by automating functions such as customer relations management (CRM), fact finding, risk monitoring and adviser prompts.

Its NLP software is tailored to the financial and professional services sectors, to enhance what current video-conferencing platforms can offer.

Challenge

Aveni secured seed investment in May 2020, which allowed them to accelerate their growth and expand their team. With a core team already in place, the next step for them was bring onboard additional talent including developers, product managers, business analysts and data scientists, ranging from recent graduates to senior level.

As a lean start-up, they suffered the typical challenges faced by many companies within the sector.  They experienced high cost and an impersonal service using traditional recruitment methods and their time to hire was excessive, due to their lack of internal expertise in talent acquisition. There were very few recruitment systems or processes in place and planning was at an early stage. The senior leadership team were wrestling with admin and processes, which was taking focus away from important business issues.

Candidates are hard to find and even harder to attract in this competitive sector, especially when also contending with the knock-on effects of the Covid 19 pandemic. As a scaling organisation they knew they needed to improve and streamline their recruitment process, in order to meet their 2020 agenda.

Solution

As well as finding and attracting the right candidates, our challenge was to design and implement a thorough and robust end-to-end recruitment process, with a great candidate experience. We put in place an internal recruitment manager, to help design the recruitment process around the company. They helped design the EVP, strengthen assignment briefs, and create advertising that reflected the company’s positioning, keeping their distinct tone of voice and employer branding. Alongside this, we also developed a large talent pool of possible target candidates and contacted hundreds of individuals to introduce the opportunities of our client to them.

With the SLT swamped with product development and client onboarding, our focus was to filter out as much as possible, providing a short-list of high quality, pre-screened talent, resulting in a high interview to offer ratio.  

Outcome

• Reduced typical recruitment spend by over 50%

• Hiring time was reduced to an average of 16 days

• CV to interview ratio of 2:1

• Interview to hire ratio of 3:1

• Implemented a new and proactive recruitment strategy, developed job briefs, and helped improve candidate onboarding process

• Single point of contact for day-to-day recruitment duties. This freed up the SLT’s time and enabled the client to ensure their recruitment needs were being met, without having to add to their internal team

Aveni CEO, Joseph Twigg commented "we decided to partner with Zuse Talent Solutions due to their unique offering and expertise in talent acquisition across the start-up and tech sector. Their level of service and knowledge in this area improved our internal processes, resulting in cost and time savings, and resulted in us hiring an exceptionally high level of talent".