Founded in 2018, Zortify has been leveraging AI to support recruiters in making sustainable hires, since well before the recent AI hype. Co-founder and CEO Dr Florian Feltes talks about why employers and candidates appreciate their AI-Act compliant personality tests.
Few things are more frustrating than spending months sifting through CVs, paying for a candidate to relocate to Luxembourg, only to find they are not a fit for the role. These kinds of hiring failures aren’t random, says Dr Florian Feltes, “they are avoidable.”
“We repeatedly saw companies invest enormous amounts of time and effort into recruiting, through multiple rounds of interviews and ending up with people leaving. But they never analysed why they made the wrong hire.”
Along with organisational psychologist Dr Marcus Heidbrink, Feltes set out to build a solution centred around the behavioural patterns of candidates to identify the blind spots of recruiters.
The two were clear they didn’t want to focus purely on traditional traits-based testing, which “put people into boxes they couldn’t get out of”. Zortify developed a research-driven multi-method approach, focused on entrepreneurial capital: different psychological resources like optimism, resilience, self efficacy, agility, mindset. “In addition, we measure so-called counterproductive behavioural tendencies, these patterns that are often invisible in interviews or assessment centres”, but which often lead to mishires. The two are assessed through structured text-based interviews and psychometric scales from self-assessments. “We combine them, compare them, and come up with a completely different picture,” Feltes explains, saying it is simplification without “oversimplifying”.
The founder, who describes himself as not a “techie guy”, grew up in Germany, close to the Luxembourg border, before completing a PhD at the University of Luxembourg in the impact of social media on leadership behaviour. Always at the intersection of technology and human behaviour, he has been on both sides of the hiring desk, even reaching a final interview stage with Google.
The seed of the business idea took shape when, during his consulting career, he saw transformations repeatedly failing because of the people. The pivotal moment came when he experimented with IBM Watson, an early AI platform for business, which evolved from a question-answering supercomputer that beat Jeopardy champions, to apply for a job. He realised that AI could mirror what humans try to do in interviews, but through pattern recognition exercises, AI could do it more consistently and objectively.
Risk Reduction For Employers & Candidates
The problem Zortify seeks to solve is a costly one for employers. But it also brings benefits to hires, particularly those who are introverts. “An interview or assessment centre will systematically favour extroverted behaviour: confident self-presentation, fast verbal responses and strong first impressions.” This, Feltes says, often leaves introverted candidates undervalued, regardless of actual performance potential. As a result, feedback from candidates who took the tests and where companies shared the results, was positive.
The team strives to have a fair and trustworthy system that is trained on diverse proprietary, consent-based data sets. “One of the big misunderstandings is that bias doesn’t come from AI. It comes from historical data and human systems,” says Feltes, citing Amazon’s scrapped internal AI hiring tool, which favoured male profiles because its systems were trained on the profiles of past hires.
While Zortify does not claim complete neutrality, it does take responsibility to make any bias that exists visible, measurable and auditable. It benchmarks against decades of psychological research and has a partnership with SnT at the University of Luxembourg on Explainable AI. It tests its models continuously for systemic problems. It means that its solution is aligned with the EU AI Act, focused on human-in-the-loop, transparency and documentation.
Currently, Zortify receives its strongest attraction in the DACH markets, especially in Germany which favours data protection and a documentation culture. Generally, Feltes has observed a shift away from using expensive assessment centres, towards scalable insights on candidates, and a growing interest from large consultancies and Big Four firms. Luxembourg, he says, provides a strong anchor.
Previously, Zortify has benefited from a mix of university-backed research funding, national innovation grants and investors. Looking to the future, it continues in its journey as a firm focused on slower, European compliance-first solutions. In 2026, the firm rolls out a new platform, with job profile uploads and candidate-job match features. Feltes says the long-term vision is to help employers make hiring decisions as defensible and transparent as financial ones.
This article was published in the latest Silicon Luxembourg magazine.
