HRTech Interview with Matthew de la Hey, CEO and co-founder at inploi

Welcome to HRTech Cube, Matthew. We’re excited to have you with us to discuss inploi’s vision and innovation in the hiring space.

To kick things off, could you please share your professional journey and what led you to co-found inploi?
Inploi’s genesis goes back to when my co-founder Alex and I were students and on the job hunt using digital channels. We were amazed at how dated and inefficient the systems were – the reliance on CVs and job boards didn’t seem to match up with what modern employers and job seekers were after.

We wanted to create something better, a platform that truly addressed the pain points on both sides – particularly when it came to the candidate experience.

We started out building a labour marketplace, which was derailed by the pandemic. We made it through, however, and when the world reopened we executed a pivot from marketplace to SaaS solution. And that’s what we’re doing now!

Innovation in the candidate experience is a central part of inploi’s five-year strategy. What inspired this focus, and how do you define a modern candidate experience?
The focus on innovating the candidate experience comes from a deep understanding of the challenges enterprises face in high-volume hiring. It’s no longer enough to just fill roles quickly; companies need to provide a seamless and engaging journey for candidates while achieving better recruitment outcomes. This is where inploi comes in.

We define a modern candidate experience as one that is intuitive, personalised, and powered by data. It’s about ensuring that candidates find the right roles efficiently and feel valued throughout the process. Our technology plays a key role here with features like improved accessibility and candidate matching that make job searches smarter and more tailored, while orchestration tools streamline the entire hiring journey for both candidates and employers.

Hiring should be seamless, inclusive and scalable – and the candidate experience is one of the most powerful levers organisations can pull to achieve better results.

inploi is set to release AI-powered tools in 2025, including Natural Language Search and dynamic candidate matching. How will these features transform the recruitment journey for both employers and candidates?
AI is there to free up hiring teams by automating repetitive tasks like job distribution and candidate screening. This way, they can focus on high-value human interactions.
For candidates, AI can help them find and evaluate opportunities which are suited to their skillsets and tastes, building a more efficient and successful hiring process for both employers and candidates.

inploi’s Natural Language Search feature is a cutting-edge enhancement to the job discovery experience, designed to go beyond traditional keyword-based search by leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP) and vector embeddings.
inploi’s AI CV Scoring and Candidate Matching intelligently evaluates candidate profiles in real time, identifying the best-fit applicants based on role-specific criteria such as skills, location, and availability. Rather than relying on generic filters, our models learn from real hiring outcomes to surface high-quality matches, helping hiring teams focus effort where it matters most — and reducing time-to-hire for critical roles.

Can you explain how inploi’s orchestration features and fully-composable, headless architecture contribute to scalability and flexibility for enterprise clients?
inploi’s headless, fully-composable architecture gives enterprise clients the freedom to integrate only what they need, embedding features seamlessly into existing systems and brand environments. Paired with powerful orchestration tools, it enables configurable workflows, automated candidate journeys, and unified data flow — delivering the scalability and flexibility needed to support complex, multi-brand hiring at speed, across multiple ATS platforms.

One of inploi’s major differentiators is its ability to integrate with existing HR systems. Why was this an important design decision, and how does it benefit your customers?
Talent Acquisition and HR teams are dealing with more systems than ever. You’ve got applicant tracking systems, human capital management systems and assessment tools to name but a few. So, there’s a rising need for technology that can easily integrate across such platforms. Interoperability is the new standard to hit – that’s made up of open APIs, bi-directional data flow, and configurable architecture.

All of this helps to build a truly connected hiring ecosystem, rather than fragmented workflows which can lead to data silos and missed hiring opportunities.

With inploi capturing data from multiple sources, how does the platform use these insights to drive smarter hiring decisions?
There’s no point having data if it’s not usable. By capturing data from multiple sources and displaying it via real-time dashboards, talent teams can access metrics like behavioural insights and outcome tracking that enables them to act fast. They have a single source of truth to make smarter, more informed decisions.

For instance, they can spot where in the process candidates drop off, how accessible and inclusive it is, and compare the effectiveness of different candidate application sources. This allows them to adopt more strategic and responsive hiring.

What are some of the biggest challenges enterprises face when modernising their recruitment technology—and how does inploi help overcome them?
One of the biggest challenges enterprises face is that their ATS is often the root cause of poor candidate experience, limited flexibility, and data silos — but replacing it is costly, disruptive, and, frankly, most alternatives aren’t much better. inploi solves this by sitting over the top of the ATS, transforming the candidate journey, enabling powerful orchestration, and delivering deep insights — without the need to rip and replace. It’s the fastest way to modernise recruitment without starting from scratch.

On a personal level, how do you approach strategic decision-making when steering a fast-growing SaaS company in such a dynamic space?
I approach decisions from first principles, starting with the core problem we’re solving.
Customer insight is the anchor—I stay close to users, watch behaviours, and listen hard. Market context matters: I track shifts in buying patterns, tech trends, and competitor moves.
I balance long-term direction with short-term execution—what moves the needle now? We design for scalability early, not just growth for growth’s sake. Clear alignment across the team reduces noise and speeds up the right calls. Where data is thin, I draw on pattern recognition and diverse perspectives. I stress-test big decisions, but avoid paralysis—velocity still matters. Ultimately, it’s about asking the right questions at the right time.

What advice would you give to business or tech leaders looking to build sustainable, scalable platforms that deliver real user value?
It might be a cliché, but perseverance is underrated. We’ve faced plenty of challenges, but a clear vision has kept us moving. Everything else becomes a problem to solve.
To build something sustainable and scalable, obsess over delivering real value to real users—early and often. Talk to them, watch them, iterate fast. The strongest platforms evolve with their users, not just for them.
Don’t over-engineer for scale before you’ve nailed utility. Prove value first, then build systems that can carry it forward.
And critically, surround yourself with sharp, mission-aligned people. The quality of your thinking—and your outcomes—rises or falls with the team around you.

Finally, any closing thoughts on what’s ahead for inploi in 2025 and beyond—and how you see the future of hiring technology evolving?
We’ve got big ambitions for this year. We’re striving towards over 100% year-on-year revenue growth and have plans to double our enterprise customer base following +150% growth in 2024. This could also include raising a Series A round to drive further expansion both in the UK and globally.
Growing our partnership network is a key area. We’re building strategic alliances with ATS providers and similar tech platforms where we can act as a complementary solution. Specifically, we’re looking to increase the integration capabilities of our platform with other HR technologies to over 150, and our recently signed partnership with workforce agility provider Cornerstone is one such example.

A major focus for us and the future of hiring technology is of course AI. It will continue to free up time for recruiters to focus on high-value interactions while personalising the experience for candidates with greater accuracy. By using AI to match people to more suitable roles and analyse behaviour to adapt the application process in real time, the success and engagement of the candidate experience will continue to improve.
Ultimately, businesses need technology that enables data-driven decisions, better candidate engagement and seamless integration with existing HR stacks. These will be ongoing areas of focus for the future of hiring.