Maki People

What it is

Maki People is an AI-native hiring orchestration platform that replaces the early stages of the recruiting funnel — intake, screening, and structured assessment — with a suite of named AI agents. The core product is not a test library or a video interviewing bolt-on; it is a workflow layer that sits on top of your ATS and replaces recruiter labor from job intake through to a hire recommendation. The platform deploys specialized agents: Shiro handles skills screening across 300+ competencies, Mochi runs voice interviews in 45+ languages, Ken conducts deep assessments for 400+ skills, Tomo co-pilots live interviews with real-time structuring, and Kumi automates scheduling. The company claims 80% automation of screening and interviewing, 45% faster time-to-hire, and a 99% candidate approval rating (vendor-reported). Customers include H&M, PwC, Deloitte, BNP Paribas, and Capgemini. Maki raised a $28.6 million Series A in January 2025 led by Blossom Capital, bringing total funding to $35.3 million, with 300%+ revenue growth in 2024.

Why it shows up in recruiting stacks

• Conversational screening, not static tests. Where Harver and TestGorilla deliver static question banks, Maki deploys voice and chat agents that adapt the conversation to each candidate’s responses. For employers concerned about the impersonal feel of assessment steps — a direct driver of candidate drop-off — the conversational format measurably improves completion rates, which Maki supports with a claimed 99% candidate approval rating.
• End-to-end orchestration across 30+ ATS integrations. Maki connects to Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, Workday, Eightfold, SAP SuccessFactors, and Cornerstone, making it an overlay rather than a replacement. TA teams get structured scoring, radar charts, and consolidated decision cards inside their existing ATS view, rather than a parallel system to manage.
• Multilingual from day one. Mochi, the voice interviewing agent, operates in 45+ languages. For enterprises running hiring across markets — frontline retail, logistics, BPO — this eliminates the need to source bilingual interviewers or build locale-specific assessment workflows. This is the capability Harver does not offer at the same conversational depth.
• Science-grade validation. Maki undergoes independent audits for fairness and structured hiring methodology. For legal and HR teams operating under EU AI Act scrutiny or building SOC 2 audit trails, documented bias mitigation and structured scoring address a compliance concern that matters in the jurisdictions where Maki’s European customer base operates.

Pricing reality

Maki People does not publish pricing. The model is credit-based — you pay per candidate interaction and per agent activated — with the subscription tier set by selected functionality and organization size. No published floor price exists. Based on the customer profile (Fortune 500 brands, large-cap professional services firms), contracts are enterprise-scale, custom-quoted, and demo-gated. Capterra’s data from 2023 listed a starting price of ~$3,000/year for small deployments, but that figure predates the Series A and the current multi-agent product scope; treat it as a floor estimate, not a reliable current figure. Budget for a five-figure annual contract at minimum for any meaningful deployment; mid-market enterprise likely lands in the $20,000-$60,000+ range annually depending on candidate volume and agent modules activated.

Best for

Enterprise TA teams and heads of talent at organizations running high-volume hiring across multiple countries — particularly in retail, consulting, financial services, and BPO — where the recruiter-to-open-role ratio makes manual screening impossible to sustain. The specific use case where Maki compounds ROI is early-talent and graduate hiring: large cohort intake, standardized structured assessments, automated scheduling, multilingual candidate communication — all before a human recruiter touches the file.

Do not buy Maki People if you are a company under ~500 employees or under ~100 hires per year. The credit-based pricing model and custom-quote gate mean the per-unit cost is not competitive against flat-rate tools like Harver at smaller volumes. Skip it if your hiring is concentrated in technical roles where coding assessments matter — Maki’s assessment science covers soft-skill competencies, behavioral dimensions, and structured interviews, but it is not a code-challenge platform. Skip it if your TA team needs to own test customization independently without going back to the vendor for every new role template — reviewer feedback consistently flags limited self-serve customization as a gap.

Versus the alternatives

Harver is the incumbent enterprise volume specialist in pre-employment assessment with 450+ validated situational judgment tests optimized for frontline and high-volume hiring. Harver’s starting price is $5,000+/month (estimate, Harver publishes no prices) and its strength is psychometric rigor and brand-consistent candidate experience. Pick Harver when the buying decision is led by industrial-organizational psychology requirements and compliance, and when static SJT-style assessments cover your role types. Pick Maki People when you need conversational screening at scale — voice agents adaptable to free-form candidate responses — and when multilingual reach or automated scheduling is a deciding factor.

TestGorilla is the fastest-growing entrant in the segment, with a transparent freemium model starting at $0 and paid plans from ~$300/month, and a library of 400+ tests covering cognitive, personality, programming, and soft-skill dimensions. In October 2025, TestGorilla launched its own conversational AI video interview capability, making it a direct competitor to Maki’s Mochi agent for the first time. Pick TestGorilla when your org is under 500 employees, you need transparent pricing and a self-serve test builder, or coding assessment coverage matters. Pick Maki People when you are buying for enterprise-scale orchestration across the full hiring funnel, not for an individual assessment step.

Harver and TestGorilla dominate by installed base in pre-employment assessment. Maki People’s differentiation is the end-to-end agentic workflow — replace a human recruiter’s day, not just one test slot.

Watch-outs

• No self-serve customization for niche roles. Multiple G2 reviewers note that creating assessments for specialized or non-standard roles requires going back to the Maki team rather than building independently in the platform. In high-urgency hiring situations — a pipeline that opens unexpectedly — this dependency creates lag. Guard: during vendor evaluation, test-create a non-standard role assessment without vendor assistance; if the platform cannot support it, negotiate a custom-template service SLA into the contract before signing, with a committed response time.
• Candidate impersonation risk on voice and chat agents. Conversational AI screening creates a new attack vector that static assessments don’t: a candidate can have a third party complete the voice or chat interview on their behalf. Maki includes structured proctoring mechanisms, but the surface area is different from a supervised technical test. Guard: pair the conversational agent screen with a live structured panel for any role where impersonation risk meaningfully affects the hire decision — typically roles with direct client access, financial authority, or security clearance requirements.
• Enterprise lock-in on credit model. A credit-based, custom-quoted model means cost-per-hire scales with usage in ways that are difficult to forecast at procurement, and switching costs grow as the TA team builds workflows around Maki’s agent logic. Guard: require a per-candidate unit cost ceiling in your contract alongside the annual credit commitment, and negotiate data-export rights in full before signing — structured assessment data, candidate scores, and decision audit logs should be portable to your ATS on request without a vendor service request.