Founded only a year ago, Helio AI is already changing the rules of the game in the labor markets around the globe. The platform employs artificial intelligence to streamline recruitment and uses situational gaming to assess candidates’ soft skills. According to founder and COO Nini Mosiashvili, Helio AI’s rapid progress is driven by its team of professionals and users who help refine the technology every day.
Imagine you are on a cruise with your friends after graduating high school, and the ship suddenly starts sinking. In this challenging situation, you have to make a series of decisions that will ultimately determine how you get out of the crisis. This is not a movie, and you are not actually in any real danger. It is one of the scenes from a game created by the Georgian startup Helio AI, which profiles your behavior and determines how well your soft skills match a specific position.
The traditional employment model has long needed updating. On one side, there is an email inbox overflowing with CVs and references; on the other, candidates are waiting in vain for feedback from potential employers. There is huge space for innovation somewhere in between, which the Helio AI team has successfully exploited.
“While working at other companies, the co-founders and I regularly faced a common problem: we wanted to hire people, but the selection process needed a lot of resources. Controlling when a vacancy was posted, checking how many CVs were submitted, downloading the CVs, going through them with my employees, and responding to the applications was a very tiring process,” says Helio AI’s COO Nini Mosiashvili.
Before founding her own company, Nini used international digital tools to automate processes. However, as none of these programs could read Georgian, she could not use even half of the functions: “When we saw that there was no recruitment tool that could be customized in the local language, we decided to work on solving this problem ourselves,” says Nini. Helio has three other founders: CEO Iako Jikia, CTO Natia Kukhilava, and Product Development Director Sulkhan Sakhvadze.
Today, Helio is the only AI-based recruitment platform that knows the Georgian language. According to Nini, she was often told that implementing the company’s idea would be complicated due to the language specificity: “Before we created the model, we were told that we would not be able to find an AI engineer in Georgia who could handle this complexity. We are fortunate to have Natia on our team because her experience and vision steer us in the right direction.”
Natia Kukhilava is a graduate of the Master’s Program in Automation and Test Engineering at the Georgian Technical University and is currently working on emotion detection from human brain signals (EEG) using deep learning. According to her, creating a model that works in the Georgian language was not easy. High-quality data is one of the most critical components in creating an artificial intelligence model, and there are very few Georgian-language texts of appropriate quality on the internet. “While we take pride in the uniqueness of the Georgian language, its limited presence in the global digital landscape is disheartening,” Natia notes. Helio has managed to solve this problem through consistent efforts and a focus on continuous technological development. “We are constantly collecting and sorting data from various sources. In addition, we actively cooperate with German and French AI research institutes that are working on creating AI models for low-resource languages. Most importantly, we are learning every day and conducting numerous experiments to improve our results,” says Natia.
High-quality data is also needed to ensure that artificial intelligence does not repeat and systematize discriminatory views when analyzing trends in the labor market. “We processed the initial data in a way that fully insured us against this risk. Since we created this model and do not rely on any existing artificial intelligence, we have the levers to ensure its proper operation,” Nini explains.
Helio AI covers the full cycle of candidate selection: users can generate the requirements for a position, publish vacancies on different platforms, receive CVs in one space, communicate with applicants, and conduct reporting. Artificial intelligence facilitates the processing of a candidate’s data, while situational gaming analyses their behavioral patterns and soft skills. Helio AI can review 500 applications in 10-15 seconds and assign them a percentage figure based on their relevance to the company’s needs. After receiving AI’s recommendations, the employer “teaches” Helio what criteria to pay attention to in the future so that its assessments can be even better tailored to the company’s needs.
“The main fear or concern about using AI in recruiting is that the human perspective will gradually be lost. In fact, Helio takes over routine tasks. You no longer have to open all the emails one by one and write down candidates’ contact information, so you are left with more time to do the truly indispensable tasks,” says Nini.
The Georgian labor market badly needed this kind of innovation. Founded in late 2023, the startup is already being used by over 100 companies, while the number of job candidates analyzed has exceeded 100,000. One of the advantages of Helio AI is its ease of use. No integration or implementation is required. If a company decides to use Helio’s service, the entire system becomes available to them in precisely five minutes. The business model is flexible and simple: companies can choose a monthly payment plan starting at ₾250.
“We were particularly interested in introducing gamification elements that help us create behavioral profiles of candidates,” says Salome Godzelandze, HR Director at Daily. She uses Helio to improve the efficiency and speed of recruitment at her company. “Helio offered us a simple reporting system that allows us to measure different parameters and helps us make data-driven decisions.” Salome also points out that the Helio team pays special attention to customer support and is always ready to listen to new ideas.
Helio recently took first place among 300 startups at the largest regional summit, INMerge, where 25 countries were represented. The evaluation criteria included the ingenuity of the idea, the results achieved, market and scalability potential, and effective presentation. Earlier, the startup also received the Merito Award for using gamification in recruitment and the Care Caucasia Award in the Women in Innovation category. The company has already attracted ₾700,000 in investment, notably from GITA, 500 Global in Eurasia, and Axel.
“Winning at INMerge brought us tremendous benefits. We had barely left the stage when we were approached by a representative of a major bank, who told us that they were looking for a partner like us. We learned that Azerbaijan had the same problems as Georgia regarding recruitment, and their level of acceptance of innovation was very high,” says Nini. Helio was not planning to enter the Azerbaijani market at that point, but the success at INMerge was enough of an impetus for the company to make this step.
According to the co-founders of Helio AI, audiences at international conferences and summits are showing particular interest in the game module. The Helio team worked with psychologists and used time-tested methodologies to develop the scenario and mechanics of the game. In Nini’s opinion, it is essential that during the recruitment process, companies pay attention to those aspects of a candidate that point towards their potential rather than their existing knowledge: “We believe that soft skills are critical. Our experience in other companies shows that it was mostly due to soft skills when people became important team members and stayed for a long time.” The game will be further improved both in terms of content and visuals. New versions tailored to specific companies can also be created.
The story of Helio AI is only just beginning, but the company has already transformed the hiring process. Helio simplifies hiring by automating tedious routine tasks, allowing employers to identify suitable candidates more efficiently, and providing job seekers with an engaging way to showcase their abilities. According to Nini, the startup aims to change the field of recruitment not only in Georgia and the region but also throughout the world. The path towards this goal lies in constant communication with partner companies and continuous product improvement.
“At Helio, the most daring ideas are often met with the greatest excitement,” notes Natia, the startup’s technical director. “The product improvement ideas we discuss during meetings may seem unattainable initially, but they become real and tangible after a while.”
“We are constantly evolving,” adds Nini. “The future of employment will be even more personalized, and we are at the forefront of these changes.”
