How Preauth Moved from Gut-Feeling Hiring to Building Data-Driven Teams

Background: 📈 Growing Without an HR Department—Mission Impossible?

Preauth is a fintech startup focused on financial inclusion. Under the leadership of Luis Chau, CEO and co-founder, they launched solutions like Preauth (guarantee management) and Revalúa (debt renegotiation via WhatsApp), helping financial institutions build trust with clients and empowering people to improve their financial health.

In the middle of a rapid expansion, the company needed to build teams in key areas: sales, customer success, tech, and partnerships. The challenge? They didn’t have an HR department or standardized recruitment processes. Every hire was different—and mostly driven by intuition. As Luis himself put it:
“We were inventing the recruitment process as we went.”

The Challenge: 🔍 Building Diverse Teams from Scratch, Fast—and with AI

Revalúa’s growth as a business unit demanded multiple hires across complex roles: SDRs, AEs, back-end developers, UX designers, and more. The team faced several challenges:

• No replicable processes or recruitment tools
• Too much time spent on manual tasks like resume screening
• Decisions based more on gut instinct than on real data
• Poor filtering led to missed opportunities and weak hires
• No system to learn from past mistakes or improve processes
• They urgently needed to scale without losing speed or control

The Solution: 🤖 Structuring Their Recruitment with Kuali’s AI

Kuali helped Preauth professionalize their recruitment without losing flexibility. Luis found a platform that allowed him to:

• Automate candidate outreach, evaluation, and prioritization using AI
• Customize filters and scoring for each stage of the process
• Receive shortlists of top candidates aligned with his criteria
• Save hours of manual screening while keeping full control and visibility

Most importantly, Kuali adapted to their startup’s needs—not the other way around. The Kuali team customized the implementation to match Preauth’s reality, helping them structure their process without unnecessary complexity.

Key Results 🎯: Better Hires, Faster—and with Zero Guesswork

Kuali delivered clear, measurable results:

• 3x more applicants per role
• 100% retention: every hire made with Kuali stayed for more than 3 months
• 20+ hours saved per hire thanks to automated filtering and evaluations
• Less bias: decisions were no longer driven by instinct or urgency
• Greater confidence: for the first time, Luis felt he was hiring on solid ground
• They even hired more people than planned after seeing the quality of the candidates

💬 In the Founder’s Words: Luis Chau

“We went from building teams however we could to having a real talent growth strategy. Kuali transformed us.”
— Luis Chau, CEO & Co-Founder

Final Takeaway: 📊 From Instinct to Strategy—How to Scale Without an HR Department

Preauth’s story proves that even a startup with no HR department can scale its team effectively with the right tools. Kuali didn’t just solve an operational problem—it helped transform the way Preauth makes talent decisions.

What started as a temporary need became a permanent shift in mindset:
hiring better, faster, and with a long-term strategy.

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