- Vilnius based NO-CV connects companies and job candidates through an app that excludes resumes
- The start-up was founded in 2020 and secured a total of 682,000 Euros in three funding stages
- Nordic countries are targeted for expansion
- $29 bln. – the estimated global market for online recruitment in 2021
The world’s first resume is more than 500 years old and it was written by Leonardo da Vinci. In present times, a Lithuanian start-up claims that it’s time to let go of the past and move into the future by resorting as little as possible to traditional resumes. After just one year, the company is now worth 2.5 million Euros.
NO-CV is a Vilnius-based company that was launched in 2020, offering recruitment services on a mobile app, through a process that requires no initial resumes. Instead, it offers recruiters and candidates an integrated chat and modern algorithms that claim to speed up the recruitment process significantly.
“We are changing the recruiting process”, says Gediminas Vilčiauskas, the founder of the NO-CV startup, in a written interview for ITKey Media. “We are getting the information about the candidate in a different way than through a CV. The candidate answers a detailed questionnaire and the answers are rated by the algorithm. For some positions, it really matters who you worked in the past, for some positions it doesn’t. In both cases, we are providing this information to the potential employer”, explains the entrepreneur.
Mr. Vilčiauskas has owned several companies for the past two decades and says he came up with the idea for NO-CV while he was searching for talent for his IT company, which he managed for 18 years. As is the case in most regions, IT technicians and other mid-low qualification personnel are some of the hardest positions to fill in a recruitment process, and many times requesting resumes from the potential candidates got in the way. That is why Gediminas Vilčiauskas decided to eliminate this stage from the process.
NO-CV is just one platform from a category of applicant tracking system (ATS) solutions that have been rapidly expanding in the past years, as the recruitment process has become ever more digitized and the need for talent especially in highly qualified industries has increased. Online recruiters use ATS solutions to screen candidates quickly since the ATS stores all of the requisite candidate data in one location. They will not have to read a resume before moving on to the candidate’s cover letter, portfolio, or appraisal because it will be on the same page. Recruiters are not the only ones who profit from online recruitment systems. Candidates can also apply quickly since the processes include auto-filling application forms and one-click apply buttons.
This saves a significant amount of time for both sides, though, as Mr. Vilčiauskas explains it, providing a specific metric for that can be challenging. “It’s challenging to measure because there are savings on both sides: the candidate does not need to write a CV and the company recruiters do not need to read it. Moreover, the company does not need to review all candidates, but only the best candidates. There are tools like chatting and auto messaging to the candidates. So, I would say the savings are huge”, according to the entrepreneur.
One year after the release, the NO-CV app now counts close to 50,000 users, and the founder estimates that by the end of 2022, this number will go up to somewhere between 150.000 and 300.000 users. He also estimates that close to one thousand companies will be using his services by the end of the same period. Currently, there are about 400 job openings listed on NO-CV, and for each position, the app can provide about 2.000 matching candidates, according to the company. “The candidates are ranked by our algorithm, so the recruiter needs to talk only with the best matching candidates”, added Mr. Vilčiauskas.
While the app is free for candidates, companies can use NO-CV through a subscription plan that ranges from 99 to 249 dollars a month. Last year, the company recorded 83.000 euros in revenues, but the estimates for 2022 project growth of 5 to 10 times.
”The most attractive aspect of NO-CV is that there is a lot of tension in the job market”, Živilė Skibarkienė, business angel.
The business model quickly attracted the attention of local investors. In December, the company announced it secured a 212,500 euros investment from members of LitBAN – the Lithuanian Business Angel Network. The investors received in exchange a total of 8,5% of the company shares, a transaction that places the company market value at 2,5 million Euros. But this was just the latest funding announced by the company. It benefited previously from two additional investments, placing the total funding secured last year at 682,000 Euros.
”The most attractive aspect of NO-CV is that there is a lot of tension in the job market”, says Živilė Skibarkienė, one of the business angels who participated in the latest funding round. ”These problems will be more and more relevant. The fact that NO-CV aims to make the process more automated is very attractive. They are building a bridge between those that are looking for a job and those who are searching for new employees”, believes the investor.
Andrius Dapkevičius, another Lithuanian business angel who decided to invest in NO-CV also thinks that the solution offered by NO-CV is very attractive for the recruiting environment. ”This startup was appealing because the job market is active at the moment. I know from my own experience that it is not easy to find suitable applicants. There are numerous CVs that applicants send and sometimes they do not take time to properly prepare the CV for a specific job entry. NO-CV solves this problem by connecting the right applicants with employers. It is also attractive because this solution is easily scalable. This problem is also relevant in other markets so it can be easily exported”, says Mr. Dapkevičius.
Expanding this service to other markets is something that Gediminas Vilčiauskas also planned. For 2022, the Nordics are in focus, a region that includes Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. But the companies are also thinking of Germany or US as the next big market entry, though this move needs an additional funding round. ”For sure will do another round for that purpose”, says Mr. Vilčiauskas.
Both in Lithuania as well as abroad, NO-CV will face an ever-growing competition that can vary from recruitment behemoths, such as LinkedIn or Glassdoor to new players with new technologies, such as recruiter chatbots and Artificial Intelligence. Like many other industries, talent recruitment is a process that shifted to an online environment and the Covid pandemic only accelerated this process.
The global online recruitment market had an estimated value of 29 billion dollars in 2021, according to a study published by The Insight Partners in September. It is projected to reach 47 billion dollars by the end of 2028, according to the same source, achieving a compound annual growth rate of 7.1% during this interval.
“We are changing the recruiting model, not improving the old one. The best decision was to start NO-CV because there is a huge interest from the recruiters and people looking for jobs. So it seems we are at the right time at the right place”, Mr. Vilčiauskas concluded.
Radu Racu is a freelance journalist, web content editor and digital consultant.
He has been covering business journalism for more than a decade, mainly for Romania’s leading financial newspaper – Ziarul Financiar.
