Basecamp caught up with University of Bristol alumni Adam Chambers, who has start-up business; Applichat. Adam won the Development Stage of the New Enterprise Competition and has shared some of his experiences below.
1.) In a nutshell, what’s your business idea?
Applichat source, automatically pre-screen, then assign job candidates from Facebook & Instagram to recruiters’ workflows.
2.) When was the idea conceived and how did it all start?
I created my first recruitment chatbot for a client in May 2019. The idea arose from recognising some problems in the online English teaching industry:
Too many applicants: Unqualified candidates (often up to 50%) wasted recruiters’ time.
Communication barrier: 68% of candidates offered a job did not accept it, often because Chinese emails were caught in firewalls & never read.
Time zone: The industry is based in China. That makes it 14 hours ahead of most teachers in the Americas.
Using a chatbot for recruitment solves all these: it can pre-qualify & segment candidates, delivers content with 80% + open rates on Facebook Messenger & communicates 24/7.
3.) Which competitions/schemes did you apply for and what was the result?
I applied for the New Enterprise Competition and was awarded £400. (more…)
paid work experience opportunities for final year students and graduates who completed their degree in the last 18 months.
It seemed like a great opportunity to get some work experience in a field I was actually interested in – a welcome change from the plethora of ads for graduate schemes in recruitment or finance. 
