Maki People: Building the Future of AI-Driven Recruitment with ElevenLabs

Maki People is a leading recruitment platform that helps HR teams at global brands—including The Restaurant Group (TRG), PwC, H&M, Nespresso and other large chains—automate the screening process. By leveraging ElevenLabs, Maki has transformed the traditional, friction-heavy hiring process into a seamless, human-like conversational experience that identifies the best talent at scale.

The Challenge: Humanizing High-Volume Hiring

In industries like hospitality and retail, speed is critical. However, traditional screening methods—such as long forms or robotic IVR systems—often lead to high candidate drop-off and a poor employer brand perception.

Maki People set out to solve this by building AI Recruiters: intelligent agents capable of conducting first-round interviews. To succeed, these AI recruiters needed to overcome three major hurdles:

1. Latency: Real-time conversation requires near-instant response times to avoid awkward pauses.
2. Empathy & Realism: Candidates in high-stakes interviews need to feel respected and heard, requiring a voice that sounds human, not clinical.
3. Global Scalability: Large clients like The Restaurant Group require multilingual support to hire diverse teams across different regions.

The Solution: Real-Time Conversational Intelligence

Maki integrated the ElevenAPI to serve as the voice of their AI hiring assistants. Rather than treating voice as a simple "text-to-speech" output, Maki treats it as a strategic component of the interview experience.

The ElevenAPI provide the technical backbone for Maki’s AI Recruiters, offering:

• State-of-the-Art Voice Quality: Expressive realism that reduces candidate anxiety and builds trust.
• Low-Latency Performance: Optimized for the "ping-pong" nature of live interviews, ensuring the conversation flows naturally.
• Multilingual Capabilities: Allowing Maki to deploy the same high-quality experience across various languages as they expand globally.

The Impact: Better Signal, Better Experience

By switching to ElevenLabs, Maki has seen significant improvements across the hiring funnel:

• Higher Completion Rates: Candidates are more likely to finish an interview when the interaction feels smooth and respectful.
• Improved Candidate Signal: When voices feel human-like, candidates give more natural, detailed, and honest answers, providing HR teams with better data to make hiring decisions.
• Strengthened Employer Brand: Large restaurant chains are able to offer a cutting-edge, professional, and consistent first impression to every single applicant, regardless of volume.

Key Results

• Seamless Multilingual Support: Ability to interview candidates in their native languages with high-fidelity voices.
• Reduced Candidate Friction: Natural prosody and low latency lead to a more "human" interview feel.
• Enterprise-Grade Reliability: Reliable performance for large-scale customers with thousands of concurrent applicants.

"ElevenLabs provides state-of-the-art voice quality with the flexibility required for real-time, multilingual applications. For Maki, this combination is critical. Voice AI interviews demand both expressive realism and technical reliability at scale."

— Juliette Santelmo, Founder Associate

A Differentiated Approach to AI Hiring

What sets Maki apart is their use of context-aware voice technology. By tightly integrating the ElevenAPI with their own conversational logic, Maki’s AI doesn’t just read a script—it listens, understands, and responds with the appropriate tone and pace. This makes the interview feel like a dialogue rather than a checklist.

Looking Ahead

As Maki People continues to expand its footprint in the global recruitment market, voice remains the central interface. The partnership with ElevenLabs allows Maki to push the boundaries of what is possible in HR tech, delivering interviews that are not only efficient but also consistent, fair, and human at scale.

Looking to build voice agents? Get in touch here.