Dojo graduates aim to transform recruitment and workplace health

The latest group of entrepreneurs to graduate from Block Dojo, the London incubator programme for startups building on the BSV blockchain, are sharing their ambitions on CoinGeek Conversations over the next three weeks.

In the first show, two founders describe their business plans. First, Ash Yarro’s Trackr HR is designed to bring technology, particularly AI, to bear on the inefficiencies of the highly-lucrative recruitment business. 

Ash was already an experienced entrepreneur. But when he talked to his girlfriend about her work in recruitment, he was astonished at what he heard: “it became apparent that there were just so many complexities and long, laborious processes within being a recruiter.”

Ash realised he had found his next project. He contacted friends who work in recruitment and HR and asked to spend time with them at work to learn about their business. He says he discovered “so many problems in terms of fragmented systems, outdated practices and just so many spaces for top candidates to slip between the cracks”. Unlike in the working practices of lawyers and accountants for instance, he said, new technology was rarely being used.

So how is Trackr HR going to fix that? Ash says it will be a “multipronged solution”. AI will be deployed right from the first contact between the recruiter and their client, to analyse conversations that describe the role the client wants to fill and the kind of candidate they’re looking for. From that, AI will generate a brief. 

Then throughout the process, AI will continue to improve efficiency by analysing applications and video responses by candidates, saving the recruiter time and allowing a more systematic approach. Ash believes the business is ready for innovation.  

AI is also an important component of Kofo Are’s Thier idea. She describes it as “a mobile platform for the prevention of obesity and type two diabetes”. Her customers will be big businesses who want to improve the health of their staff - not least, Kofo says, because obesity costs companies $3,000 to $15,000 per employee per year. 

The first part of the idea is to give users an app that will track the exercise they take and their food and drink consumption. This information will then be used to recommend interventions - anything from changing your diet to something more ambitious: 

“We will match you with a health care practitioner who will offer interventions tailored to your specific needs. We'll also match you to groups on the platform because we plan to have communities where we group people based upon their risk. The purpose of the communities is because we believe in the power of peers: when you're in groups and you know you're suffering from the same type of disease, we tend to encourage one another to make the right choices around food, around exercise, around the hours of sleep.”

One of the benefits of Thier, in the UK at least, is that it would take some of the pressure off the National Health Service. Kofo agrees that would be a “great thing”. But of course, working with businesses, she knows she also has to incentivise them financially, by pointing to the benefits they’d enjoy with fewer staff absences and by slowing the growth of ever-increasing health insurance premiums. 

Don’t miss next week’s CoinGeek Conversations, to meet more Block Dojo entrepreneurs.