Backed by notable angels and VCs, Chinese startup Bello’s AI driven recruitment solutions are attracting a slew of brand name clients.
Bello is a Shenzhen-based artificial intelligence (AI) driven human resources solutions provider. It specializes in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products for small and medium-sized companies, as well as designing systematic hiring plans for big companies.
Founded in 2016, Bello focuses on building human resource knowledge graphs and natural language understanding (NLU) technologies. For example, one of its services provides analysis of uploaded resumes using AI.
The company’s website says its software can analyze 25 English or Chinese resumes within one second. For job candidates’ school information, its software can detect keywords from their resumes and also provide background information of the schools.
If the job candidates have any “risk factor,” such as frequent changes of jobs and career gaps during which a job candidate remains unemployed for a long time, the company’s product will flag these “risk factors” to employers.
Its product can also help to recommend candidates who best fit the job descriptions, saving the hiring companies a lot of time in the search for suitable candidates.
Credible founders and funders
Larry Li is the company’s Chief Executive Officer. He previously worked for the China offices of big international human resource companies, such as Michael Page and Robert Walters. According to his LinkedIn profile, he served as the associate director and the head of Southern China for Robert Walters before founding Bello in 2016.
The company’s core team members also include chief technology officer Zhang Weihong, who has a PhD from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The chief scientist is Ronal Zhang, who has a PhD in linguistics from the University of Delaware. Zhang also previously founded a company specialized in advanced natural language processing.
Bello was a part of Tencent’s and Baidu’s AI Accelerator programs. The company also received angel investments from Cloud Angel Fund and Dreamfly Capital. The company also said that in June 2020 it received tens of millions of Chinese Yuan in funding from SEAS Capital and Hillhouse Capital in a Series A round of financing.
Broad and reputable client base
A 2017 news report said that Bello had acquired a series of big companies as clients — among which were Facebook and China Resources Group. Another 2019 news report said that it had added Tencent and Ping An Insurance to its client list.
At a previous speech in a technology conference, Mr. Li said the main problem that Bello tries to deal with is the amount of time companies spent on looking for and selecting candidates, which leads to high recruitment costs. Therefore, many companies have the need to automate the recruitment process.
The entire recruit process includes talent sourcing, screening and interviewing. The most labor-intensive part is talent sourcing, he explained. Compared with many European companies that outsource talent sourcing, many Chinese companies are still heavily relying on human labor to do talent sourcing, which is the area that Bello wants to upgrade and optimize with AI.
Bello is now developing a talent sourcing system that can help recruiters to avoid repetitive work to save labor and time costs. As at the end of 2020, it has a customer base that consists of more than 100 big company clients and more than 400 human resource companies/small and medium-sized clients. Some notable clients acquired in 2020 include Huawei, Meituan, Kuaishou, Midea Group and China Merchants Bank.
If Bello can somehow also resolve the problems that many Chinese resumes have of containing exaggerated claims or fake credentials, that would truly be an AI breakthrough and time saver!