Founder of the month: NextStepHR

17.12.2024 Aline Kinzie Founder of the month

How do we find new employees? The founders of NextStepHR want to answer this question for companies as easily as possible. With the help of artificial intelligence, the KIT startup manages to automate processes such as selecting suitable job portals, optimizing job ads, and managing applications. NextStepHR's approach even reaches particularly passive candidates who have great potential. With AI to the optimal recruiting process: Our founder of the month for December!

What does your company stand for?

NextStepHR stands for innovative, new and data-driven AI solutions for recruiting. Our vision is to support companies throughout Germany in finding the right qualified applicants more cost-effectively, quickly and efficiently, 100% in compliance with data protection regulations. We also want to help companies gain more insight into the countless recruitment opportunities.

Where and how did you get the brilliant idea to found the company?

Lorenz got the idea from working in his father’s recruitment company. Through his work in recruiting, he was able to test many different recruiting tools and portals and at the same time talk to many companies about the same problem: How do we find new employees? He lacked data-based decision-making tools for choosing the right channels to advertise jobs. He wanted to solve this problem. This is how the first thoughts and ideas for NextStepHR were born.

How did the founding team come together?

Finn and Lorenz got to know each other at the PionierGarage (PG), an entrepreneurship university group in Karlsruhe, as both were studying at KIT in Karlsruhe; Finn physics and Lorenz industrial engineering. When Lorenz presented his first start-up called vamos! four years ago, which emerged from the GROW start-up competition, and Finn was active as a member of the PG, they met for the first time and have remained in constant contact ever since. After Lorenz’s idea for NextStepHR, he got talking to Finn again. He quickly became enthusiastic about the potential and possibilities of the topic and became part of the founding team. So we worked hard to turn this idea into reality.

Where do you see the hurdles in the start-up process?

The first hurdle is always to validate the idea and to see whether other people or companies have the same problems. After that, it’s best to test and validate the first prototypes directly using real pilot projects. Other hurdles and smaller challenges will be the time and bureaucracy involved in notarization, entry in the commercial register, registration with the authorities, etc. as part of the start-up process.

Where did you get support?

Since our time at the KIT, we have been in close contact with the startup ecosystem. We had contact with the KIT Founders Forge and the PionierGarage early on. At the same time, we became part of various startup accelerators, which gave us a great deal of knowledge and expert mentoring, enabling us to develop enormously in a very short time. In addition to all these programs and contacts, we were able to talk to many experienced founders at a wide range of startup events, enabling us to gain useful practical knowledge and keep learning new things.

Through these programs and the contacts of the initiatives, we came into contact with potential pilot customers at various startup fairs early on. In addition, we were well connected with many people from the startup ecosystem from the very beginning and have maintained and steadily expanded these contacts. In 2023, we became a member of the AI Garage, an accelerator of the Baden-Württemberg Foundation. We won the accelerator and were subsequently accepted into the AI-Rise program of the same foundation. At the end of 2023, we were accepted into the ARISE program of the BadenCampus in Breisach. In March 2024, we were selected by the Dieter Schwarz Foundation for their AI Founders Program (at Campus Founders Heilbronn). This made us a member of the IPAI network, the major Heilbronn AI project with members such as Audi and Zeiss. We are currently in close contact with the CyberForum, as we are part of the new CyberLab batch.

What was the biggest challenge during your start-up phase?

The further development of our product directly with the customer, while at the same time continuing to implement customer projects. Especially in a team with a developer and a business person, it was not an easy phase.

What are your next big milestones in the next 12 months?

Our first milestone is definitely the founding of our company as a GmbH, we are moving together as a team to the same city (Heilbronn) and we can finally start scaling.

What qualities do you think you need to be a founder?

Openness, both about successes and about difficulties and problems, and above all, being open to exchanging ideas with many different people and being able to take criticism, but still not letting yourself be deterred from your goal.

Do you have any practical tips for other young company founders?

Go to lots of networking events and talk to industry experts. Get tips from start-up advisors and other start-up founders as soon as possible; they know exactly what is important and can ask the questions that you may not have really thought about yet.

From today’s perspective, what would you do differently?

Work together on site earlier for an optimal exchange and really focus 100% on one thing, don’t do too many things at the same time.

Thank you for answering the questions!

PODCAST

Listen to the podcast episode with Lorenz about the founding story, plans for the startup and the optimal recruiting process.

Founder of the month: NextStepHR

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