The Swedish startup Fika Jobs has raised 4 million dollars (about 3.5 million euros) for a platform where you're no longer interviewed for a job by a person - but by artificial intelligence. The candidate connects their LinkedIn profile, goes through a roughly ten-minute conversation with an AI agent, and the answers are automatically cut into short video clips that employers then scroll through as if on a social network.

The funding is led by Luminar Ventures, with participation from Alliance VC and the founders of the well-known gaming company King. Behind Fika are the brothers Jakob and Alexander Duboa from Stockholm. „When we were building our previous project, we spent a lot of time on hiring and almost missed a candidate just because his CV didn't shine“, says Jakob Duboa, the company's CEO. The system, which runs on Google Gemini, reviews the CV and generates questions specifically for each candidate.

The business model is what will appeal to employers: free for job-seekers, while companies pay 10 percent of the employee's first annual salary - versus the usual 20 to 30 percent charged by classic recruitment agencies. Cheaper, faster, more scalable.

And this is where it's worth pausing. The idea that an algorithm can judge whether someone is good for a job based on a ten-minute video sounds efficient - until you find yourself on the other side of the camera. What happens to the candidate who does better in a face-to-face conversation than in front of a lens? Who answers when the model rejects you by criteria no one told you about? Automated hiring promises fairness through a machine, but the machine learns from the same people whose biases it was supposedly meant to remove.