The End of the Keyword Triage: A Chat with the Founder of WhyBrilliant Tearing Down Traditional Hiring
The future of hiring is being reshaped by AI, here's what we have uncovered during our exclusive discussion with Patrick Böert.
Patrick Böert and Aleksander Heimrath joined the Merantix Venture Studio as founders-in-residence last year to explore opportunities at the intersection of recruiting and AI.
With their entrepreneurial backgrounds, speed of execution, and conviction around how AI could reshape the hiring market, they quickly impressed us. Since then, they have founded WhyBrilliant, with Merantix backing them on the journey.
Their starting point was a simple observation: while AI has made it easier than ever to apply for jobs, it has not necessarily made hiring more efficient. AI-generated applications and increasingly automated recruiting processes have created more noise, making it harder for strong candidates to stand out and for companies to identify the right talent.
WhyBrilliant is taking a different approach. Instead of asking candidates to apply to hundreds of roles, the company is building an AI-native recruiting platform where companies discover and approach relevant talent. This is essentially need of time and reflection how processes must be reshaped to keep up with the trends in the era of AI and technology.
We sat down with Patrick to talk about the changing hiring market, WhyBrilliant’s approach to matching talent and companies, and what an AI-native recruitment experience could look like. Continue reading to find more!
Could you share a bit of your background and how you came up with WhyBrilliant’s ideology?
I have spent the last 15 years at the intersection of tech and consulting, where I mostly worked on building companies, machine learning, and consulting. Last year, I was looking for something new to build while also navigating the job market myself. It was very frustrating to witness how hard it is to stand out as a strong candidate. The signal in the hiring market completely gets lost in the crowd of AI-generated applications and automated filtering. Current AI recruitment is very transactional, annoying for both the candidates and the recruiters. Candidates don’t get attention and recruiters waste time reviewing useless information. The bottleneck in recruitment has always been time.
I have always liked working on algorithms and thought, why not create something for the people centered on their careers and ambitions? And that is why we created WhyBrilliant: to restore the hiring signal and make the whole process more human.
What is the underlying matchmaking technology at WhyBrilliant?
We believe we can create a signal out of the noise. Instead of talent applying to companies, WhyBrilliant reverses the hiring model, allowing companies to apply to talent. Our platform relies on conversational AI and voice conversations to build a deeper candidate profile rather than just a CV. At WhyBrilliant, we make use of this conversational AI to gather rich and unstructured data from the candidates that helps us to understand what they want, their ambitions, and their skill-mapping to job roles. With the help of this information, our platform matches them to nearby real-time jobs being offered.
Can you walk us through the candidate and recruiter perspective of WhyBrilliant when they use the platform?
From the candidate perspective, we onboard you with a very quick process that takes only 10 to 12 minutes. In this process, we start off by building the candidate’s profile that includes their functional and industry preferences. Once the profile is set up, WhyBrilliant does the heavy lifting for you by scanning up to 14,000,000 jobs daily in the European market and matching you against suitable roles. WhyBrilliant’s agentic partners are available for chat 24/7 and are there to help you to track your progress and current status. You can share all your information with our agents without the fear of being exposed, as WhyBrilliant is 100% secure.
As for the recruiters, we are currently focused on German-speaking markets. From startups to corporates to even professional services in fields of engineering, sales, and operations, WhyBrilliant assists all technology-driven businesses. We actively work with each client by using our extensive candidate database, including new talent. As for our revenue and commercial model, we only actually earn money after we successfully place candidates into our client’s organization.
How does ‘WhyBrilliant’ use the drastic AI change to its advantage?
The recruitment process has evolved from handwritten applications, to LinkedIn applications, to AI-mediated job search. The trend clearly has been reduced to zero-cost distribution, and the process has become nearly frictionless. The main advantage that WhyBrilliant has in the drastic AI change era is speed of building and iteration. If our team identifies a problem in the morning, they ship out a feature by the same evening. Speed has just increased by a factor of 10. Here at WhyBrilliant, we start on a ‘new stack’, operating AI first.
Typically, a recruiter looks at a CV for 6 to 12 seconds before making a decision, whereas models can assist better in matchmaking candidates to jobs. WhyBrilliant benefits from these AI changes by identifying the best technology, processes, and security layers.
What are Nova and Atlas? Can you introduce them?
Basically, Nova and Atlas are the AI agents. Nova is the candidate-facing agent who conducts conversations with the candidates and translates them into skill-role matches. It helps skim through 14 million jobs a day and gives relevant results within 24 hours. Nova is a little bit of an explorer.
Atlas, on the other hand, is the company-facing agent that helps HR and recruiters to manage candidate information and go for the talent acquisition. Both agents are available via email, WhatsApp which are accessible both on mobile phones and computers. A worth mentioning co-incidence: Atlas and Nova also happen to be the names of one team member’s children, so we called it a happy coincidence.
Do candidates feel safe sharing their personal information with Nova?
Our team first started working on Nova, seeing how conversational AI works for the candidates. Surprisingly, we got better results than external recruiters because people feel more comfortable sharing information with AI as it’s unbiased and non-judgmental. Nova really provides a listening edge, so naturally candidates share more, which helps Nova to suggest realistic opportunities. We’re also continuously working on improving Nova. Every version that we ship is the worst possible version of Nova that you will ever see and there is more to come.
On a privacy and security level, WhyBrilliant strictly follows GDPR, the EU AI Act, and state-of-the-art security principles. The candidate is always in control of their information. In fact, introducing them to companies works after the candidate’s approval.
You started with Merantix as a Venture Studio candidate. How has your journey been so far?
I think of Merantix as the perfect launchpad for whatever you’re building in AI. Building with Merantix has been the best decision for me from day one. Besides funding, I really value the support Merantix has provided me through its ecosystem, AI campus, network, early customer access, and German AI community. It’s a trusted community of experienced and reputable people in tech and AI.
We set our sights on Merantix and made it happen. Looking back, it’s the exact reflection of how we wanted to start the journey of WhyBrilliant, and now we are very much eager for what’s coming next. To me, Merantix stands for trust, growth, and AI credibility.
How do you see the future of WhyBrilliant?
WhyBrilliant is still young, but we do have big plans for it. Right now our current focus is on building the team, proving to customers that it is going to scale-up recruitment in Germany, and leveraging early traction. We have ambitions that go well beyond our initial business.
A lot of the processes involved in finding opportunities in 2026 are not representative of what technology can do. In the next 10 years, recruitment will be completely reinvented, becoming more elaborate, focused, and tailored.
Thanks Patrick for sharing your insights with us!
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