Origin story

Fitch's story

Fitch grew up in a London dormitory town in the Home Counties, in a family where university was the obvious next step. His siblings went. Fitch never much enjoyed school and ultimately left with virtually no qualifications. He did a ski season after leaving school and then managed to get into art school on the strength of his portfolio. He dropped out a year later to start a snowboarding brand that was, in his own words, naive and fairly ill conceived.

It's perhaps no surprise that a snowboard brand built in Essex didn't take off in quite the way Fitch had hoped, and he then spent much of the next few years working in warehouses and on factory lines. Whenever he went to an employment agency to look for something better, the first thing they always asked him was whether he had any steel toe cap boots.

After about six months picking and packing in the warehouse of a cosmetics company, he applied for a job answering the telephone in that same company. Fitch hated factory work and felt that answering a phone, whilst hardly the pinnacle of his ambition, would at least have been a meaningful improvement. He wasn't invited in for an interview, and the rejection letter told him he wasn't qualified to answer the phone. They had decided this without ever having spoken to him. By this point Fitch was struggling to see an optimistic professional future, and had begun to believe that getting a forklift truck licence might be his best realistic ambition, which was a difficult thing to accept when he felt sure he was capable of so much more.

What got him out of this rut wasn't a qualification. It was the internet. In the late 1990s and early 2000s nobody really knew what they were doing with it. Fitch bought a book on Flash. Flash is a difficult thing to describe now that it has gone, but it was a rich and highly dynamic tool for presenting things on the web. You could have interactive video, stuff that was really novel for the time. For Fitch it was a way in, because the interface was much like the design and animation software he had used at art school. He became pretty competent, and as he became more ambitious with his ideas he learned ActionScript, and that led on to JavaScript, HTML, CSS and the rest of it. He had always struggled to learn things at school, but with a project, like his failing snowboarding brand's website, he was able to learn and build furiously.

Fitch's break came at an online golf retailer, where he was working in the warehouse when the managing director did a tour. He stopped and spoke with Fitch and listened to what he had been building in his own time. He went home that evening, looked at the website, then came back the next day and offered him a job as a graphic designer/front end developer. This was massive for Fitch and gave him the opportunity to break free from the underemployment that had plagued his career to that point.

However, even after that break, getting a job through the standard application process remained more or less impossible for him. He was filtered out again and again for having no academic credentials. What he knew by then was that if he could just get in front of people, present himself and talk to them, nine times out of ten he'd be offered a job.

Every day, many potentially great candidates experience this same frustration. They are overlooked because of assumptions made about who they are from their CV. It's a disaster for candidates, and for employers too, who lose out on great talent. Today AI is presenting the same kind of opportunity that the internet did for Fitch back in the early 2000s. As AI commodifies more and more of the technical skills, the human layer is becoming the real differentiator: how someone thinks, how they communicate, who they are.

That is what Humans.id is for. A video CV that lets candidates get in front of employers and tell them who they are and what they can do. It's fairer for candidates and richer and more effective for employers.

Willem's story

Willem came to Humans.id from inside the recruitment industry. Before co-founding the company, he ran his own recruitment business across multiple countries, placing candidates in roles from engineering to sales to finance.

Recruitment used to be simple, post a role, applications come in, the job is to qualify who's in front of you. That world stopped existing. Easy apply changed candidate behaviour, people began firing off applications by the dozen, with less thought and less intent each time. Meanwhile the strongest candidates were rarely even looking, they had to be found.

Sourcing stopped being a secondary skill. It became the entire job.

With a genuine interest in technology, Willem started looking for smarter ways to reach the right people. What began as better sourcing techniques gradually became a question of how to automate the process entirely, the early work that eventually led to Humans.id. The busywork had never been the valuable part of the job though.

Automating the repetitive side was never about doing less. It was about having the time to do the part that actually matters, talking to people properly, understanding whether a role was genuinely right for them.

How it started: The Lockdown Generation

Humans.id actually first started as a not-for-profit in the early days of the pandemic.

At that time Humans.id was an idea and a feeling rather than a business. It was a conversation that Willem and Fitch often returned to: "Recruitment is broken, and there has to be a better way...". Fitch, a chronic YouTube viewer, also couldn't shake the idea that video needed to play a part, he could see how incredibly powerful it was as a narrative tool.

When the pandemic hit, it turned lives upside down and aroused in many people a latent humanity that had been long since buried by the day-to-day grind of everyday life.

In that spirit, Willem and Fitch began thinking about how they might contribute during the pandemic.

By this point it had become impossible to ignore the plight of an entire generation of young people, still studying or just graduated, who were really struggling: cut off from campus and from friends, carrying a mental health weight nobody had prepared them for, and stepping into a job market that had simply stopped.

There wasn't a way to fix any of that directly. But there was a way to give people a voice. So that's what they did. They launched a not-for-profit site called The Lockdown Generation. They sat down with dozens of young graduates and let them speak on camera about rejection, about silence where feedback should have been, about grades they'd been told would matter and didn't. They interviewed HR leaders for real, practical career advice. They spoke with youth support organisations, giving them a platform to advertise the support they offered. They published job seekers' guides, practical tips for landing a role in a market that wasn't making it easy. And where they could, they made introductions to organisations and companies, and shared the stories of these young people through video.

It was both a rewarding and amazingly effective initiative, which helped a lot of young people into the workforce, some of them for the first time. Inadvertently, it had also been a great proof of concept for what then became Humans.id. Since then Willem and Fitch have continued to develop and grow Humans.id with the same commitment to build humanity into the fabric of the business and to connect the right people at the right time, in the most human and effective way they can.