Unconscious Bias, Responsible AI, and the Future of Workforce Decisions

Susannah de Jager: Welcome to Oxford Plus the podcast focused on innovation around Oxford. We look at everything across the ecosystem, the institutions, the people, the technology. If you need to learn anything about Oxford, whether it's how to take a first step in through the door, or as an experienced investor wanting to go deeper, this is the podcast for you.

What if the next breakthrough in HR didn't start in a corporate, but in a lab? Riham Satti's journey shows exactly how that can happen and why Oxford is uniquely positioned to make it possible. While studying for her masters in neuroscience at Oxford Riham, never imagined she would become a founder. Yet, through the support networks and an incubator programme run by Oxford University Innovation, she found the space to explore ideas, test them, and gradually turn curiosity into a real business. That business is MeVitae, an AI driven platform transforming workforce decision making by consolidating HR data, identifying biases, and helping organisations make fairer faster and smarter decisions. Today, MeVitae works with global clients leveraging cognitive science and technology to create workplaces that are not just more efficient, but more equitable.

Her story is proof that you don't need a fully formed plan to start something impactful. The right environment, the mentorship, the experimentation, the connections, allows ideas to grow organically. For academics, it's a blueprint for translating curiosity into enterprise. For investors, it highlights the kind of untapped potential that emerges when Oxford gives founders the tools, guidance, and space to discover what really works.

Riham, thank you so much for being here today.

Riham Satti: Thanks for having me.

Susannah de Jager: You didn't think you would be a founder. You thought you'd be an academic.

Riham Satti: I did.

Susannah de Jager: What was your academic pathway?

Riham Satti: It's very an interesting one. If I go all the way back to childhood, I'd say that it even started then because my family have always been in their academia, science based, so I thought that's just the norm, right? You assume that's what you're going to do. So I was one of those people who would pick up the Barbie and play with the Lego sets. I was the one who would talk with family about all random science stuff.

When I got to that point of GCSE, A-Level time, I thought, okay, I don't know much about humanities, I'm not great at drawing any of that, so I kind of ruled myself out of those and I was left with the sciences. Someone actually was talking to, it was one of my aunties, she said, have you heard of medical engineering? I thought what is medical engineering? And this is back in the early two thousands. It's a new industry, new sector, and it was literally the intersection between medicine and engineering. So I went to go study that at Imperial, then went to Oxford because I had a huge fascination about how our minds work. How we think and so my path was always going to be finish a PhD, go do a postdoc, become a professor research.

I thought nothing, absolutely nothing, was going to stop me in my tracks.

Susannah de Jager: So what did?

Riham Satti: The world of entrepreneurship that I didn't know what it was until I stumbled across it. I remember my first interpretation of entrepreneurship was watching the Social Network, that movie. And I thought, what is this? Absolutely, what is this? And I said, I'm not going to be one of those. Definitely not going to be one of those. I don't know anything about business. I know nothing about building a business or any of those things. But I always had this mindset of trying to solve problems that was always my core, I guess, value. It wasn't only until I met one of my co-founders, Vivet, that we've stumbled across a problem that we thought no one was solving.

That was around how do you create fairness in the workplace? How do you make sure that decisions, especially people decisions, are fair and as accurate as possible? That is what kind of got us stumbling into the world of entrepreneurship. But back then, I wouldn't call it entrepreneurship. I thought back then it was us trying to solve a problem really, which, what most academics do anyway, solve problems.

Susannah de Jager: And how did you come to focus on that problem? Because given your own pathway, it doesn't seem obvious, but I may be wrong, that it's something you had been subject to?

Riham Satti: Correct. It isn't an obvious link and it's a funny story how we got to that link. Vivek at the time was studying computer science and was exploring what should be the next career path that he should take. And he wanted to be a software engineer, and I said to him, you could apply to the usual grad schemes. But the amount of applications that organisations get I said there must be another way to try and grab the attention of these amazing recruiters and HR managers that will differentiate you.

And I'm always a fan of what we call the prove it model. If you say you can do something, prove that you can do it. It makes more sense to them to write it down. And so we spent a couple of days, we built this app of  Vivek's CV. We put it up on the Microsoft Windows Store. Microsoft comes back and rejects it and says, sorry, we can't release this app. It's  Vivek's CV. What, why would we have it on the Windows store? Went back to the drawing board and we let just other people interact and upload their resumes a bit like a CV in their pocket before kind of LinkedIn was a thing.

Before we knew it, that app had about 50,000 downloads. It was ranked the top app on the Windows Store. It was had about a hundred downloads a day. And the next thing you know, you get an email from Microsoft going, can you come over to the office in Reading? And we thought, sure. Hopped on to Thames Valley where Microsoft's UK headquarters is. Had a conversation with the team and they said, how did you capture all this data and this insights? Which explains why they've acquired LinkedIn now.

And we thought, can you get Vivek a job now? Because this was the entire objective. We're here we've done it. And they thought, you know, why don't you look at the industry in the space? And that's when we started to realise and uncover how fragmented the industry is. The pipeline is very convoluted and it isn't always as straightforward and as efficient as it could be. And that's how we stumbled into the world of entrepreneurship, getting Vivek a job and Vivek has a job now he's the co-founder of MeVitae. So let's go onto the next task shall we?

Susannah de Jager: Talk to me a little bit about how you actually started, did you get some funding? Did you have investors initially? I'd love to understand that side of your journey.

Riham Satti: It's a very interesting journey our funding process. So when we started out, no funding, nothing at all. I was doing my PhD at the time and Vivek was just recently just graduating from university and we wanted to take a good go at this and build this organisation from the ground up.

I didn't know what investors were back then, and I will hold my hand up to that. It was a very new experience for me. But as I was talking to investors, the questions, okay, tell me about attraction. Tell me about how far you've got. And I was like, we've just, started building. And I knew, okay, that is not an opportunity we should go to yet, until actually we've built it. We've got clients and we've got revenue. So the next best thing was grant applications. I guess having that academic side is you know how to write applications. That's the skillset that I've managed to unlock. We spend a lot of time applying to different grant process Innovate UK, Oxford Council, European Space Agency, where we're currently based, and we managed to accumulate several hundreds of thousands pounds of grant funding.

That was the kickstart to getting this built from the ground up. So we used that grant funding to hire some people. We brought some technology and we went in this kind of stealth mode building phase and then used that to then talk to prospects and started generating revenue.

Susannah de Jager: What point was that out of interest?

Riham Satti: So that is when we got our first clients. But it was a large enterprise, about 30,000 employee size. We were making at least over a 100K. So it was very, very early stages. Our first revenue. I then went to the investors and went, were growing, we've got clients, here you go. At that point we had a bit more leverage and we started talking and networking with investors and our strength at MeVitae is our board. They have been influential and they're very, very supportive.

So we have investors like SFC Capital, we started off our journey at Oxford University Innovation. We've got Apex Black, and we've also got fantastic non-execs like Dhiraj Mukherjee, the co-founder of Shazam, Jeff Hughes, one of the key members in Microsoft when we started our journey at the very beginning.

Susannah de Jager: It doesn't strike me as a massively capital consumptive scaling journey.

Riham Satti: No, we've been bootstrapping our way from the ground up as much as possible because I guess you get more leverage and you can kind of build what you want to build on the back of it and I think our board have been really supportive on that journey. We've been striving for that profitability piece that gives us that control and so therefore we haven't had to raise another round and we can grow organically, which is a nice position to be in because the market out there is very tough at the moment.

Susannah de Jager: And so you've articulated that part of the problem, that it's fragmented, but you started by describing that you are trying to fix a more fundamental problem, which is fairness and how companies can try and look at things through a lens. So talk about how it's actually evolved and what it is that you are doing now.

Riham Satti: Absolutely, and I guess with any organisation, they always evolve. They change. They adapt. They innovate. And if you don't innovate, you die. And for us, the core value of MeVitae, and I think this comes down to the culture and the team and the organisation. Fairness is ingrained in everything that we do and our definition of a fairness is every decision that is made, especially people decisions, are as consistent as possible and treat everyone as equally as possible. So if you run the test over and over again, you get kind of similar results, if not the same.

That has always been the essence of everything we've built from back then when we were starting to now. We started off, I guess from a B2C perspective, because it was an app that people could use to put the details on there and apply to jobs et cetera. But then when we looked at it from the employer's perspective, we uncovered that actually there's lots more steps involved. And that in fact, every single step has its own challenges. And what typically in our organisations will do is have a job description. They'll post it out, applicants will apply, they'll screen it, they'll then review those, do interviews, et cetera. From a candidate perspective, you typically just see, I've applied to a job, here's an update I've accepted or rejected, and here's an interview. There's a lot more steps involved. And every single step of that process is got its own complexities and challenges. And therefore this is where MeVitae kind of evolved and adapted to.

What MeVitae has become is a system that sits on top of these HR systems, or sometimes they're called HRIS. These systems that manage the recruitment process for organisations. And we have developed a whole suite of tools that automate and help drive efficiency. Everything from how do you ethically screen applicants in the fairest way possible? How do you make sure you are anonymizing to make sure that in fact you're not looking at someone's name or photo because that's not a determination of talents. Last time I've checked. All the way through to how do you actually really make decisions that are absolutely fair in that hiring process.

That's All driven by data and so as a lot of these HR systems often don't communicate with one another, we can aggregate a lot of that workforce data and identify where risks are in organisations and where growth opportunities are and what they can do to optimise their organisation as well. So it's evolved drastically. So it's very kind of enterprise B2B AI software solutions.

Susannah de Jager: And you spoke about this, because the size of the companies you're interacting with is that larger level because these inefficiencies are more evident there.

Riham Satti: Absolutely.

Susannah de Jager: And they're more open to using a system. But you and I discuss the fact that actually these problems are everywhere.

Riham Satti: It's a universal thing. Any organisation of any size will stumble across this and it could be at the very beginning where you've just got a small team as you scale and as you grow, you're going to have to hire people. You're going to have to look at how you're using data and making data driven decisions all the way to the beasts and organisations that are quarter of a million size.

But in this case, they've got more complexity. There's data that's there but's a bit more messy. So in fact, I'd urge the smaller organisations look at these stuff now because actually you're setting yourself up for success.

Susannah de Jager: And how do you bring your clinical neuroscience into those processes for your clients at MeVitae?

Riham Satti: Multiple ways. I think neuroscience is one of those things that's very adaptable and you can link it pretty much to any industry and there's always some applications of it. I would say that, and I'll give you some examples of this, what we did very early on is we asked different recruiters and hiring managers to look at different resumes, and we tracked their eye movement to see where they were looking, and we connected them up to what we call EEG headsets to check their neural activity. That uncovered a lot of insights and uncovered the, in fact, if we spend 10 seconds in a resume, a large proportion of it is on someone's name. Then it's also on someone's university or educational university name. It's on the company name. If they've got a photo, it's there, and also on their hobbies and interests.

So automatically just actually by doing studies like this, you are uncovering actually how we're making decisions and in that 10 seconds, that's not a lot of information get to go off. But a lot of assumptions come on the back of that, that could lead to potential biases in hiring processes. Automatically that study allowed us to uncover from a scientific perspective that we can make changes.

But then also whenever we onboard any of our clients, we do sessions on the psychology in the neuroscience decision making because we think it's really important. There's no point just applying or using a tool for the sake of using it. But actually knowing the science of why you are using a tool, the impact that tool is having and actually how does our brains make these decisions, allows individuals and organisations to actually think about human nature and how we've evolved as people and that's translational across anything. That's my favourite part.

Susannah de Jager: There's nothing that frustrates me more than when you hear people saying that they don't have biases, because you sort of think, well, hang on, that's evolution. We all have prejudices because that's part of our survival. That you make an assumption and it might help you survive on a basic level.

Riham Satti: A hundred percent.

Susannah de Jager: And so when people say no, I don't have any, you're like, you do. The terrifying thing is you're not even trying to become aware of them.

Riham Satti: I cringe when I hear that because you are right. It's an evolutionary, neurological thing, and there's a really good book called sapiens that kind of covers this. But our brains, we're making a ridiculous number of decisions every day. Tens of thousands decisions every day and your brain has to have shortcuts because otherwise, if you don't have these shortcuts, every single decision is going to be painful and take a long, long time Neurologically, everyone has biases and there's over 140 types of biases. There's confirmation bias, there's halo effect bias, you know, a whole vast range. They're not there because they're a bad thing. They're there because it helps optimise how we make decisions on a day-to-day basis.

It's normal to have biases. It's important that we understand that we have them. But the conscious ones and the unconscious ones. And the conscious ones are, we know we can do something about it because we're aware of them. The unconscious ones are harder to discover, but if we kind of think and take longer to make decisions, your emotional decision making kind of slows down and you go more into the rational thinking and that rational thinking is where you want to spend most of your time in making decisions.

Susannah de Jager: So your clients have the benefit of being able to bring in a system such as the one you've designed to try and mitigate some of this. They have the benefit of you being a clinical expert in neuroscience, so you are able to explain it in ways they can accept. If anyone's listening and they're running a smaller firm, what simple steps would you give them to try and get in front of their unconscious biases

Riham Satti: Good question. I would say there's a few things you can do that aren't costly or timely. But it will save a lot of, I guess, hassle in the long run. When you are screening applications anonymizing information will help because you're not looking at that name, you're not looking at the photo, and you can decide the level of redaction you want to do. So that will help automatically. Biases has happened in the milliseconds timeframe. It's so fast. You don't know you are doing it. Automatically that will help.

Also when you are screening applications or at that interview stage, having a diverse panel range because not everyone's going to think the same. Even actually what I'd recommend is sometimes, you know, the loudest person speaks. But in fact, if you everyone writes down what they think of a candidate, then come together and present it together. You've got more efficiency that way because it's more kind of subjective across the board. So that would help as well. If you notice that people, and this is where you got to just communication. If you notice that people are, they have these opinions that you think actually it's okay to question them and have those conversations and discussions, because that's how we all learn, how we all adapt.

And then lastly, I guess it's was that emotion over rational decision making? The way I think about it's a bit of a seesaw, when you are immediately presented with a decision, you tend to go with a gut reaction. That's your first emotional response, and that's normal. But in fact, the more time you give yourself to make a decision, that emotional response kind of reduces and suppresses and the rational starts to creep up. And that seesaw kind of flips over. And actually, so when making decisions, taking a bit more time to make those decisions is absolutely normal and that will actually help mitigate some of those biases as well.

Susannah de Jager: That's so helpful. I had the slightly terrifying experience of putting in place with an investor that was on the advisory board. I think he was the HR manager at Black Pink, and he was at DeepMind before that, and then he was at Octopus Ventures. Shout out to Jonathan Dunford Smith if he's listening. He was fantastic and at a company that I was interim COO for, we put in place a hiring system, and if I'm candid, all it made me realise was how dreadfully I had run this process at previous times in the firm that I'd run before.

Because it was so subjective and we were all, I'm sure, guilty of asking the same questions at each round, which is another mistake people make. A lack of focus on reporting back so that you get everyone's feedback. But also just going with the people that we probably on our gut instinct liked. Which often are the people that are most like you.

Riham Satti: Yes. You get drawn to people that are like you.

Susannah de Jager: Yeah. Yeah. And so, it made me cringe slightly. But I was pleased that at least we put in some of what you've just mentioned.

Riham Satti: No, I'm glad and I'm good and I think that's, organisations if we're thinking about it from that perspective. It's important to kind of consider what to do because that's how you can evolve and you adapt and makes you more efficient. And even if you think about it from just a screening perspective, what I've seen happen over the years is organisations will have screening tools, right? That are kind of keyword, brilliant search matching of candidates between a job description and a I guess a CV or a cover letter to an application form. And what typically happens is that the system is then matching between those words to see actually, so the more words you have in your CV, that's how you game the system in essence.

But in fact, with the use of AI and technology adapting, there's a lot more different kind of hiring algorithms that are there. But one thing as my recommendation is for organisations to question how these algorithms are being built, how they've been designed. Because you want to make sure, again, I guess from that fairness perspective, that it's treating all applicants equally as much as possible. So that in fact it's not ending up with the same situation that Amazon used to have back in the day where it actually screened I think women out and that you don't want that situation. And to avoid that, it's really important to scrutinise the AI and how it's being built, and how it's being designed, and how it's evolved, and what's it been tested on so that actually it's future proof.

Susannah de Jager: And so that brings me on, you know, we've spoken about some of the problems and you've alluded to the benefits that it can bring. But when you are pitching to your clients what are the benefits beyond the obvious?

Riham Satti: The value propositions, I would say, when it comes down to using technology like MeVitae, is the quality of hire and making sure that it's governed and effectively built from the ground up. So you are making sure that it is fair, you're getting top quality candidates, it's saving you time in screening those applications and you might have seen this already, is that the number of applications to jobs are shooting up. Skyrocketing at the moment.

But also very important bit as candidate experience, and I think that's really key to mention here. Because a lot of applicants, when they apply, sometimes never hear back. They get ghosted in essence and that I think has a huge reputational impact to an organisation and employer branding impact. It's very, very hard to get back to all applicants. But what we've done is built a system that actually does do that. It gives every candidate feedback on why they didn't get through, what they can do to improve next time. So in fact, they get some feedback, which will also help an organisation's employer branding.

And also then I guess the last thing is from a data perspective, it's making sure that all organisations the risks are being identified before they even happen. I think prevention is absolutely key and identifying where risks are in organisations so you can do something about it because you don't want to surprise all of a sudden.

Susannah de Jager: I think the point that you just made there about feedback is so important and so underestimated because you have no idea if that person in a future role is going to know the VC that you want to raise money from and will come back and say, yeah, you know what? It just felt chaotic. They never got back to me. I had three rounds of interviews. They asked me the same questions and it's such an important data point that people don't focus on enough. I always have an analogy for this, which is that sometimes when a hotel or an airline, I guess I'm thinking about holiday experiences here, but they make a mistake.

The way that they manage it, can leave you with a better impression. And so there's always an opportunity in these moments to make yourself still look great. And I think it's the same if you're losing a client. Make their exit from your business as absolutely frictionless as it can be and they'll probably go, God, why are we leaving again? Or at least if not, if they ever get asked about you, their experience would've been positive. I think people really underestimate this.

Riham Satti: I completely agree. I think it's absolutely fundamental and it's in every industry, it touches every part of any process in essence. When it comes down to recruitment and hiring, you want to make sure that your best advocates are the candidates, in essence. Because they are the ones who are going to be communicating with other organisations. They're going to be the ones giving you potential referrals and so it's candidate experience is key to a lot unlocking and differentiating a lot of organisations. And just doing that one extra step will have a huge difference.

Susannah de Jager: And additionally, often people are quite loath to give feedback if their process isn't great. So you are giving your clients feedback that they're comfortable giving because they feel that it's properly backed up by a stringent process. I think that those people who know, inherently, that their process is a bit more subjective, are less inclined to give feedback.

Riham Satti: Agreed, and when it comes down to things like this, I think the key word is transparency. What candidates are always looking for is that transparency. Because sometimes it feels like a black box. There's a bunch of inputs, there's an output. You didn't make it. But actually you want it to be a clear box or a translucent box as much as possible because then they know where they stand.

They know, okay, I didn't make it through, this is how I can improve. That has a lasting impact for the candidate, but for the organisation, and that is how organisations can differentiate itself from others. That's how you get your top talent.

Susannah de Jager: You spoke earlier about risks and picking them up early. Can you broaden that out a little bit? What kind of risks should people be thinking about that perhaps they're not capturing in their existing systems?

Riham Satti: Really good question, and in fact, we literally just released an infographic that kind of covers some of this. So, HR systems there are different types. There are things called ATSs or Application Tracking System that manage your entire recruitment process. There are systems like HCMs and Human Capital Management systems that manage everything from candidates all the way to employees.

Now, some of these systems will have their own kind of data points and you can get a gather just general insights like how many applicants have applied to a role? How many candidates have been rejected? What is the success chance of candidates making it through? What is the diversity makeup of our work? Those are kind of just the standard kind of data points that you get in these systems.

But where the power lies is when you connect the systems together because then you start finding patterns and these are where the risks and opportunities sit. So if you then start connecting pay to employee retention, you can then identify actually are people who are happier in the organisation, more likely to stay? And if so, why are they happier? What is making that difference? So that's a good opportunity where organisations, if they uncover that, they can do more of it.

Whereas on the other flip side is let's say they've put a new system in place and that system has had an impact on how many applicants are making it through. But actually even just the diversity makeup, that is a potential risk there because that means the system's not treating people fairly. That is, if you don't take that out, you've got a big reputational, but I guess potentially even discrimination, case sitting right there. And so that intersection of this data allows you to uncover where in your systems inefficiencies lie and how do you potentially change that? Where is the intersections of opportunities that exist between your systems, but also as a HR director or leader, how do you strategise to improve that? It will tell you where systems that you've putting in place should potentially be removed and actually costing you more running them than non-running them.

The possibilities are pretty much near endless, but the key bit is making sure you're connecting the right things together and have enough data to be able to kind of backtrack on the back of that.

Susannah de Jager: Amazing. And you are putting all of this to work in your own company. So how have you taken those lessons and how has it impacted the way you've shaped MeVitae?

Riham Satti: Yeah, no, absolutely. It's a really good question. You've got to practise what you preach, right?

Susannah de Jager: Absolutely. I mean, you really do.

Riham Satti: Oh, we have to, absolutely. MeVitae is built on, and every organisation is built on, its people. We want to try and make sure we're making data-driven decisions in everything we do, because then you can quantify it, you can optimise on it, you can make changes, because otherwise it's taking a stab in the dark and so for us, we try and connect up as much information together. We will connect up sales metrics to retention. We connect up everything from our hiring data across into employee happiness and retention. We will connect up customer success to finance. Everything is interconnected in our organisation because that's the only way you can scale and grow and make those data driven decisions and so our reporting is stringent on that basis.

That allows us to go, okay, actually this is a pattern we didn't even discover or notice. we didn't notice thatwe've got more clients in this certain sector that we are driving more growth in or actually it's quicker to close clients in this sector or a actually we've noticed that we've added a new reward programme and people are more happy on the back of that.

All of these things are coming on the back of initiatives that we've put in place that we can quantify, but then we can measure the impact of them and I think that's the key word there. When you put any system in place, you don't want to be able to just figure out the pattern, but you want to be able to know what difference did it drive?

So before you put this in place, what was the results? And after you put this in place, what were the results? And that comparison is what allows us to make the changes and that's, we sit in that margin of those differences.

Susannah de Jager: And in terms of happiness, because I think it's a really interesting one to measure, what have you put in place that perhaps has surprised you that's made a difference?

Riham Satti: Retreats in our organisation was the thing that made a huge difference. We're pretty much a remote team. We've got people all the way down south, near London, and the furthest north is near Liverpool. So full spectrum and everyone's dotted around and we do meet up often to kind of just brainstorm have get togethers, et cetera.

But, in fact, the thing that made a huge, huge difference was company retreats and these are couple of days away with the team in different locations. So we did Cyprus last year. Before that we did Bath. We've done York. We've done Wales. Couple of days where everyone actually gels together and its most proudest moment I have at me inside because everyone's getting along really well. Everyone's still diverse, right? Some people are more introverted, some are extroverted. But actually, if you can spend a couple of days together, all locked up in, in a place, then you know, you've done good.

I think everyone's morale shoots up. Everyone's really excited. Everyone feels energised. Everyone feels like we've all gelled together and it's a really, really beautiful thing to see.

Susannah de Jager: How are they structured?

Riham Satti: Very unstructured, I'd say. But it's down to our amazing ops manager that we have. People get to vote on where they would like the destination to be. They kind of put their proposals in which is what we've done recently. Then we kind of plan how many days shall we stay? Typically anything between three to kind of five days is the stay where we'll find availability for everyone in the team. The first day is always a meal where we're always either kind of eating something out together as a meal, just everyone to kind of chill out and rest because they're all shattered.

The next couple of days are strategizing. So it's more around, what's worked really well. We call them kind of all hands in our team. It's kinda like that retrospective session of what's worked, what's not worked, what do we need to optimise? And then it's just a bunch of fun activities depending on the location. So we've done everything from safaris, we've done scuba diving and that's just doing something fun together as a team where you're not just always thinking work, work, work makes a hell of a difference.

Susannah de Jager: And in those all hands meetings, you spoke earlier about the people that are louder in teams versus others. Do you do anything to try and tilt the playing field for those, because I guess what I'm driving at is what are you doing with all of your knowledge?

Riham Satti: A couple of tips that we've used and I think that's really, really helpful. So in our all hands, everything is divided up into different departments and areas. So we have our overall company goals, where are we relative to those? Then every department has an opportunity to raise what they've done, what's worked really well, what their concerns are. And no one else can interrupt because that's their chance to raise those concerns. We do that for every single department and then at the end we have an area where, is there anything that wasn't raised that should be brought up?

If they feel like they can't say it at that moment, the door is open for them to reach out separately to myself or anyone in the management team to have those discussions and then we have the kudos at the end. And this is my favourite bit, where, you know, people who, have done something amazing over that timeframe that you just want to give them credit for.

Thank you for even just sending this email for me or I really appreciate that you've spent extra hours out of work hours doing this for me. And I think that just kind of gives people a little boost of morale and say, actually I feel like I've been given credit and that kind of grows and gives them confidence.

And then when we do our employee engagement and we do those quite regularly, well, we ask people, okay, what are your concerns? What are you worried about? Completely anonymous. And then us and the management team go together and go through every single piece because I think it's important that people feel like they've been listened to and however small it is, can we just move on meetings rather than start at nine, can we move at 10 for instance?

Or actually some of our meetings are taking too long. Can we Toucan some of those conversations? However small it is, we go through every single one of them line by line and create an action attached to each one and then we present that back to the team and go, actually someone's mentioned this, this is what we're going to do about it. So they can see that they've been listened to, but actually the important bit is the action that's associated to it. So then they can feel like they actually are being heard and they can speak up more and more and creating that validation and that habit is important. Because you can't just do it one off and that's it. You've got to do it regularly, quarterly,bi-annually, whatever it is. That's how you see the difference and you see people growing on the back of that.

Susannah de Jager: Yeah, and it makes sense.

Riham Satti: It makes sense. A lot of things make my sense, don't they?

Susannah de Jager: Doesn't mean we do them.

Riham Satti: No.

Susannah de Jager: You've alluded to lots of job applications, lots of shifting going on in the workplace. How do you see MeVitae within its own industry?

Riham Satti: Recruitment is always one of those areas that's very competitive. There's lots of players in this space, but that's because the problem is so vast and it's important and it involves human brains and human decision making, which has that on top of it in other complexity.

AI and technology, it's probably the biggest buzzword that's being used and flown around at the moment in the industry. But I think for us, important, that it's not just AI, it's responsible AI. That for us is the foundations of how do you make sure that you are not just making decisions, human decisions, but making AI decisions. That's going to be a threat that if we don't focus on now, it's going to have huge knock on impact for every decision in anything in HR really and beyond. And so for us, one of the big fundamentals and things we're working on is making sure that our technology and leading the field in that responsible AI. We've sat with government officials and we've built frameworks with them to drive these agendas, but actually build the frameworks that these organisations are being tested on.

I want to make sure that every company that uses MeVitae has that reassurance and that stamp that it's all built with that in mind. Because I think that's the key differentiator when it comes down to this space and this industry and knowing that every technology piece has been built with that, from how it's been designed, the data that's been used, the decisions are transparent, it will tell you how it came to the conclusion that it did. That for us is how we want to see the space evolving and can and leading the charge on that. Which I think we are doing and we need to do more of.

On top of that, it's around that kind of globalisation piece. MeVitae has clients are scattered all over the world. We alluded earlier that a lot of them are kind of these larger enterprise organisations and these are where there's a lot more complexity and layers and levels to them, but there's also a lot more challenges that are yet to be uncovered. So it's got a gold mine of opportunities that are yet to be solved and that either through data or through hiring automation with that kind of responsible layer sitting across it.

Susannah de Jager: What size are you at now and how do you see MeVitae as a company evolving in the next couple of years?

Riham Satti: So we are approximately a team of 20. We've been doubling the team pretty much year on year. We've continued to kind of wanted to grow that double year on year and continue to show the impact. We've saved organisations at least 90% of their time, at least a hundred thousand in savings. We've actually made sure that their talent pool has actually doubled. And so we want to make sure those metrics continue to grow on the back of that and continue to make sure that whilst doing all this doubling that we're doing, making sure that everyone's happy and they feel like they're a part of it.

So for me, the team culture is fundamental and I want to make sure we kind of retain that. I'm very protective of it because I believe that we have a really good culture and I believe that everyone feels that they're making a difference. And I want to make sure we're continuing that as we scale and grow.

Susannah de Jager: Amazing. Riham, thank you so much. This has been fascinating to hear more about your journey, your path from academia to entrepreneurship and I love what you're doing and I hope it continues to go brilliantly.

Riham Satti: Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you, Susannah.

Susannah de Jager: Thanks for listening to this episode of Oxford+, presented by me, Susannah de Jager. If you want to stay up to date with all things Oxford+, please visit our website, oxfordplus.co.uk and sign up for our newsletter so you never miss an update. Oxford+ was made in partnership with Mishcon de Reya and is produced and edited by Story Ninety-Four.