Arkemys · Verified skills infrastructure

Ask an employer why they rejected their last hundred candidates.

Their systems were never built to answer. Volumes multiplied, AI polished every CV, and tools built for a slower market can no longer tell candidates apart, while hiring has never carried more strategic weight.

The job market needs new infrastructure, built on signals that can be trusted and verified: skills and capabilities.

See the productHow it works
The gap

Everyone says they hire on skills. Almost no one can show it.

85%of employers say they hire on skillsTestGorilla · State of Skills-Based Hiring
1 in 700hires actually changed as a resultHarvard Business School × Burning Glass Institute

The intent is real. The evidence is missing. Nothing in the market produces the record that would make a skills-based decision provable, so hiring falls back on the CV, the school, the name.

The infrastructure

Verified skills enable data-driven hiring.

01Skills ontologythe foundation

Two people describe the same ability in ten ways; a job advert in ten more. 13,900 standardised skills give them one set of terms, and the ontology maps onto whichever reference the client already uses: ESCO in Europe, a national framework in the Gulf, an employer's own grid. Without that mapping, nothing above can be compared.

13,900 skillsmaps to ESCO and national frameworksone term, one meaning
02Verificationmachine

Every level is earned, never declared. Requirements are read twice, by independent passes, before they count. Levels come only from supervised work: a live machine-led interview, a timed test, code that ran. An unsupervised test proves nothing, so every assessment runs with anti-fraud monitoring built in.

double-pass extractionscored interviewtimed tests · codeanti-fraud monitoring
03Data-driven decisionhuman in the loop

With a shared definition of what makes a great fit, and scores based on real, anti-cheat assessments, recruiters make the right data-backed hiring decisions. And they have the record to prove it.

weighted scoringpublication thresholdfull audit logreplays identically
And it compounds.

Ninety days after each hire, we learn whether the decision held, and the system adjusts what it weighs. The more it is used, the better it gets.

The product

The product, as a recruiter sees it.

Candidate booklet with verified skills, levels and assessment signals
The booklet: skills with their level, the assessment signals, and how each one was verified.
How each skill was verified: proven, discussed and claimed
See how a skill was verified: proven, discussed and claimed, each with the test behind it.
Shortlist of identity-verified candidates with evidence counts
The shortlist: identity-verified candidates, with the evidence count attached to each.
What changes, and for whom

Visible Candidates. Augmented Recruiters. Hires that hold.

AI does the reading, the interviewing and the grading. The ranking is not AI, it follows rules a person can read, which is why every decision can be opened and explained.

01 · Calibration and sourcing

Requirements are read across eight sources and mapped to the ontology, with a second pass checking the first. Candidates are matched against the verified pool and the gaps are named.

02 · Assessment

A conversation in natural language, not a form: a real-time voice interview, timed tests, code, anti-fraud. Levels come out earned.

03 · Scoring and engagement

Explainable weights, a publication threshold, a full log. The recruiter receives a pipeline they can work: prioritised, data-backed, manageable.

What leaves the recruiter's week Reading three hundred CVs to find ten · building and tuning a test for every role · justifying a rejection from memory.
Where it sits Built API-first to sit beside the HR systems already in place, rather than replace them.
What hiring at scale should feel like

Precise hiring, at high volumes, without the usual hassle.

Volume stops costing quality

Every applicant is assessed the same way, at any number, and the shortlist arrives ready to work.

Every choice can be defended

To the ministry, to the board, to the candidate who was turned down: criteria, levels and evidence attached to the decision.

It improves cohort after cohort

What happened to the last hires corrects what the engine weighs on the next role.

Quality of hire at 90 daysstill in role, and rated by the hiring manager
Time to a workable shortlistfrom the day the role opens
Cost per qualified hireall sourcing and assessment included
Decision coverageshare of hires with a complete, replayable record, held to 100%

Baselines are set with each client on the first cohort, and we report against them every cohort after that. Market evidence points the same way: skills-based search is linked to +12% quality of hire, and skills-based hiring to +10 points of retention.

Who buys, and why now

Companies where a bad hire actually costs something.

They are growing fast

Headcount doubling, roles opening faster than anyone can screen. Volume arrives before process does, and quality is what gives way first.

The role itself is unforgiving

Client-facing, regulated, technical, safety-critical. One wrong hire is not a line in a spreadsheet: it is a lost account, an incident, a team that stalls.

The law is watching

National employment quotas turn a hiring shortfall into a penalty, and every decision into something that may have to be explained.

Why we start in the Gulf

On the region's largest job site, 17.4 million applications chased 65,900 open roles last year. Agency fees already take 20 to 33% of a first-year salary. That is the budget we come to capture. Abu Dhabi is where those employers are.

Where we sit

An AI-powered hiring system that gets better with every hire.

Employment administrationPayroll, contracts, compliance Where we differThey begin once the hire is made. We produce the decision that makes it. RelationshipPartner. We hand the hire over; they run the contract.
Skills assessment platformsPoint-in-time testing Where we differThey score a candidate on the day. We carry what happens at ninety days. RelationshipHead on. The ninety-day record is the asset a test alone cannot produce.
Agencies and search firmsRelationships and judgement Where we differThe consultant's reasoning leaves with the consultant. Ours stays in the system. RelationshipChannel. We sharpen their shortlist; they bring us volume.
We were the customer

We ran our own hiring on one of these platforms and stopped using it. That failure is the specification we built against.

Business model

USD 3,600 a year, whatever the salary.

TeamUSD 3,600 / year One hiring team, three campaigns included. The market charges USD 60 to 100 per recruiter per month; we charge that for the whole team.
Additional campaignUSD 750 / campaign A campaign is the unit of value: one role opened, sourced, assessed, ranked and recorded. Never a share of the salary.
Enterprisefrom USD 15,000 / year Large accounts: delivery run alongside them, our ontology mapped onto their own grid, service levels.

A Gulf agency charges the employer 20 to 33% of a first annual salary, per hire. Arkemys is flat, per team, whatever the salary.

Track record

We built this out of the work, in that order.

  1. We designed and delivered Morocco's national upskilling programme in tech. A thousand people trained and placed across Casablanca and Rabat on JobInTech.
  2. We worked hand in hand with the most demanding IT recruiters. The multinationals whose standards decide whether a candidate is taken seriously anywhere else. DXC Technology Concentrix Capgemini Atos Intelcia
  3. Then we became our own first customer, running this exact process. The ontology, the supervised assessments, the ranking a recruiter can defend, the record of what happened next: each part was built because the work demanded it, and used on our own hiring before it was offered to anyone.
88%into a job, across 1,800+ people trained
120+recruiters and employers worked with
2 yearsrunning it on our own hiring before selling it
Founders

Two people who have already sold to, and built for, this exact buyer.

Hamza Debbarh
Hamza Debbarh
Founder & CEO
  • Fifteen years selling to the buyer we are pricing for. Global offshoring and IT services companies; their hiring pressure is the one Arkemys is built around.
  • Built and ran the funnel this product encodes. 1,800+ trained, 88% into work, 120+ employers, and Morocco's national upskilling programme delivered end to end.
  • HEC Paris and the Sorbonne, fifteen years inside the public and institutional side of employment.
Mounssif Bouhlaoui
Mounssif Bouhlaoui
AI Tech Lead · CTO
  • Built the platform end to end, from idea to running system. Skills ontology across 13,900 skills, anti-cheat assessments, AI interviews, explainable ranking.
  • Engineers the cost, not just the feature. Assessment infrastructure designed to stay cheap at volume.
  • Came from the candidate side. Founded a technical community of 3,000+ engineers, ran 70+ events, then recruited 100 qualified candidates in 48 hours through it.

Between us we have stood on both sides of this transaction: the employer who cannot verify a claim, and the candidate no one will believe. Arkemys is the thing we each needed and could not buy.