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The right people in the right job using AI language technology.

Pera raised 5 million euros in fresh capital to further help companies strengthen their competitive position by identifying the right talent. Smarter and faster. The largest language and behaviour database in the world is at the heart of this scientific predictive method based on artificial intelligence.

With this new capital injection from investors such as the Brabant Development Agency (BOM) and current shareholders, including ECG Ventures, Pera will further develop its own platform the Pera Skope to expand its position in the Benelux and the United Kingdom. In addition, the company wants to consistently add intelligence for users, for example for specific IT profiles. “We want to be the basis for every HR decision: who to hire, who to develop and who to promote”, says CEO Rina Joosten-Rabou.  

Beyond bias. Measure performance. 

Pera was founded in 2015 to fundamentally improve the time-consuming, biased and inaccurate selection process of professionals by making it smarter and faster. Pera's analysis is inherently diverse and inclusive because it looks exclusively at objective characteristics of applicants that matter for job success, unlike other tools. Well-known multinationals such as L'Oréal, UPL and LyondellBasell, as well as impact companies such as Heliox and HeadFirst, are now working with the technology of this Dutch startup. 

“Companies are struggling with important issues. Look at the energy transition. You need the right people and skills for that. But who are they and how do you find them? The change agents of the future look different. Pera has spent years researching what leads to success in jobs and the answer is often completely different to what people think,” says Joosten-Rabou.  

Take out blind spots.  

With more than 5.5 million professionals in its database and 7 years of scientific research into organizational performance, Pera is a global leader in the field.  

“We can determine success after hiring much more precisely than a CV, a game or a conversation from the answer and language used. So quality increases. Because the method does not look at origin or background, we also discover candidates that would go unnoticed, and we tap into new talent groups. Therefore, ensuring more diversity based on talent and potential, not on background or experience.”  

3 questions to Pera’s CEO Rina Joosten-Rabou: 

Is Elon Musk right in his call to hit the pause button on general AI? 

“If you see the speed of developments in artificial general intelligence (AGI) and extrapolate to the next five years, it's a good idea to hit the pause button. The underlying models are not transparent, it is unclear how personal data is handled and who is ultimately responsible for the consequences of actions taken based on the output of the models. 

It is important to distinguish artificial general intelligence - to which Elon Musk's letter refers - from useful developments and applications of artificial intelligence. 

Many companies in the Netherlands (and Europe) are working on artificial intelligence applications that do not use public internet sources, but instead use non-public carefully curated data which makes a big difference in controllability and risks. 

Think of applications for doctors, artificial intelligence is used on lung scans to gain better insight into diseases than with human observations alone. The same applies to Pera, we have been studying, for years, which competencies lead to success in employees, helping managers make decisions without prejudice”. 

What is the difference between ChatGPT and Pera? 

“The only similarity is that both ChatGPT and Pera are based on language analysis. 

 ChatGPT is a huge, complex language model that produces language. It currently generates text based on pure statistical relevance. ChatGPT has not yet been taught to reason. 

 Pera provides insights into the competencies of professionals and how they contribute or do not contribute to impact and success in a job or organisation. This happens by analysing an employees' or candidates' personal and unique answers to 3 open questions in a digital interview. The Pera Skope applies advanced linguistic analysis in which it compares the answers to a unique dataset that details the career success of other professionals. 

These datasets have been collected in collaboration with companies and are not freely available. This means the data input, outcomes, validity and transparency of the models can be easily checked”. 

To satisfy our curiosity, we conducted an experiment to evaluate the impact of ChatGPT, click here to learn more. 

What is Pera’s method based on? 

"Pera's method is based on 30 years of science, where it has been proven that the way people communicate contains subconscious signals about their personality, motivation and behavior. In recent years, we have focused on collecting large data sets as the basis for our algorithms. In addition, we have bridged crucial challenges in machine learning with our R&D, so that companies can make valid predictions, even at the team level in their organization.” 

Link to our scientific whitepaper.