Starting a company often begins with a spark, a moment that sets a future entrepreneur on an uncharted path. For Rina Joosten-Rabou, co-founder and CEO of Pera, this moment occurred during a job interview, highlighting the limitations of traditional recruitment methods. “There’s so much that is not objective when it comes to people’s decisions,” she recalled during her speech at the LEVEL UP event in Eindhoven. “So what if we could actually objectify that better?” she wondered. Her mission to revolutionize recruitment using artificial intelligence was born from that pivotal moment.
The seeds for Pera were planted in the early 2000s, shortly after Joosten graduated from university. At that time, job opportunities were scarce, and she found herself in a grueling six-round interview process. “I was already five months into this process, and I really wanted a job,” she remembered. What followed was a conversation with a psychologist that left a lasting impression. Thrown into a complex case study without preparation, Joosten quickly realized she was in over her head. “At some point, I said, ‘Okay, let’s stop the conversation. I do feel that I’m in a completely different corner than you are thinking.'”
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The experience ended with her being dismissed as “green as grass,” leaving her questioning traditional recruitment’s objectivity and fairness. This encounter planted the idea that recruitment could—and should—be more objective and data-driven. Years later, this frustration would lead to the creation of Pera, a company using artificial intelligence to predict job performance based on three open-ended questions.
A call for higher productivity in Europe
Joosten pointed out a critical challenge: Europe’s lagging productivity compared to China and the US. “If we look at productivity rates, we’re 20% behind the US,” she emphasized. This gap, compounded by Europe’s aging population, requires organizations to “do more with less.” This economic reality propelled Pera’s focus on predicting productivity through AI. Pera aims to identify patterns that correlate with job performance by analyzing language and behavior.
“Our system can predict competencies that significantly lead to performance in organizations,” Joosten explained. One of their success stories involves the well-known brand Rituals, whose customer relations team saw a 26% increase in productivity using Pera’s method. “Imagine if that goes up by 26%—you can actually help far more clients in far less time,” she added.
The science behind the magic
Developing Pera’s AI platform was far from a straightforward process. “It took us years to figure it out,” Joosten admitted. Through a decade of research, the company has built what she describes as a “world-leading platform” that can infer behavior from language. They identified that performance follows a “power-law distribution”, not the usual bell curve many assume. “Some people disproportionately add more value to companies than others,” she stated. Understanding this helped them focus on identifying competencies that best predict outcomes.
Interestingly, they discovered that traditional performance reviews often fall short. “Manager ratings from annual performance reviews showed close to zero correlation with actual output,” she noted, based on data from over 200 companies. Instead, the key lies in assessing how colleagues view one another, forming the basis of Pera’s AI-driven model.
Power law
The power law is essential for reflecting Pera’s impact. The impact and performance of employees in a company often follow this power law. Twenty percent of the people provide 60% of the output. The output is different for each company; it could be sales performance, profitability, or innovativeness. “If you understand what makes that twenty percent different from the other eighty percent, you can identify people who will perform best in a specific job. With that, the impact, i.e., sales or profitability, also increases. If you manage to shift one percent of employees from average performance to top performance, that has a 2.5% impact,” Joosten states.
Perception over perfection
Reflecting on Pera’s development, Joosten shared key insights she wishes she had known earlier. One significant lesson was not to strive for perfection too early. “Perception even over perfection,” she declared, highlighting the importance of launching with a minimal product and iterating with clients’ feedback. When they first started, the product was a simple ranking result delivered via Excel. “We often start to build stuff and use many resources to figure out that nobody’s waiting for it. So basically, don’t do that.”
Another vital lesson was the impact of perception on business success. Joosten recounted one such moment during her time living in Shanghai. “It was a weekend; I was at the playground with my kids,” she shared. As her children played, she struck up a conversation with another parent. “He asked me what I did for a living, and I explained that I was building a startup to make recruitment fairer.” That parent turned out to be a journalist for the BBC. This serendipitous playground conversation eventually led to a documentary about Pera. “Although we didn’t change anything inside our company, when the documentary was published, suddenly, everything changed,” Joosten said. “Investors started to call, clients became interested, and people wanted to join us.” It was a clear example of how perception and visibility can transform the trajectory of a company, turning a simple day at the playground into a pivotal moment in Pera’s journey.
On the flip side, negative perceptions can also derail opportunities. Joosten recounted a deal that fell through simply because Pera had an entity in China, despite stringent security controls in place. “It felt so unfair, but it happens. Perception is reality,” she said.
Overcoming Challenges
As an entrepreneur, Joosten has learned that leadership starts with oneself. She spoke candidly about managing stress and finding support. To maintain her focus, she has returned to meditation, drawing parallels between entrepreneurship and elite sports. “Finding peace in myself is sometimes the hardest bit.”
Joosten ended her speech with a call to action. “Keep going. There are many VCs here today; there is money enough, but we often lack people with great ideas and people that actually do it. So enjoy the ride.” With Pera’s journey, Joosten exemplifies how a single spark can ignite a revolution in how we assess talent, productivity, and ultimately, impact.
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