A perfect CV is a splendid thing to have until you notice whom it leaves out. Sultan Saidov studied at Oxford, received support from Deloitte and went to Goldman Sachs. The familiar recruitment machinery had plenty to like about him. Yet the experience that helped set his direction came from people the machinery was failing: bright graduates struggling to find their first opportunity during the financial crisis.
In his final year at university, he offered career and interview advice to young people from less privileged backgrounds. After joining Goldman, he started a side project to help people who had missed out on City jobs get discovered elsewhere. Conversations with employers pulled him further into recruiting. A favour was becoming a rather inconvenient second occupation.
That distinction matters to his story. Saidov arrived at the problem with access to institutions whose names carry considerable weight. He was interested in what happened to people whose abilities travelled without such obliging luggage. The question would eventually support an enterprise software business: how does an employer recognise someone worth knowing before the right application arrives?
The family behind the question
There was a family reason to ask. Saidov and his brother Abakar grew up with the experience of migration from Dagestan to Britain. Their parents were scientists who had to rebuild their working lives. The children gained access to education and networks while seeing how poorly a change of country could translate a parent's professional worth.
Abakar has described the problem as the “passport lottery”. It is a useful phrase because a passport has such splendid administrative confidence. It certifies where someone belongs, while saying remarkably little about what they might contribute. The brothers' ambition for Beamery grew from that mismatch between a person's ability and the opportunities available to them.
Sultan's own qualifications could have made the conventional route comfortable. Instead, his background supplied a question he kept returning to. Education and previous employment offer information; they also offer shortcuts. When a shortcut becomes the entire decision, the person who has taken an unfamiliar route can disappear from view. The family history makes his interest in potential less abstract. It also introduces an uncomfortable measure of success: whether a system can recognise someone whose history looks unfamiliar to the people reading it.
Before talent software, there were faxes
His early experiments were more practical than grand. There were computers, electronics, websites and games. During a gap year, he devised a food-ordering service using a website, text messages, faxes to local outlets and drivers to deliver orders. The fax machine deserves its small appearance here. Even the future occasionally needs paper to come out of a slot.
Investors did not take to the delivery idea. Later, in developing the recruiting business, Saidov faced a different difficulty: convincing a large employer to trust something new. A consumer can try an unfamiliar service over lunch. An enterprise buying recruiting infrastructure brings existing systems, established processes and people who must actually use the thing.
Beamery began in a London garage in 2013, with Sultan, Abakar and Michael Paterson as co-founders. Its early premise borrowed a familiar commercial habit. Companies keep track of prospective customers, maintain relationships and learn when an approach might be welcome. Prospective employees could receive the same attention. Recruiting did not have to begin with a vacancy and end with an overflowing inbox.
A billion dollars, and a reluctant pause
Recognition came in forms that fit neatly into a founder biography. Forbes included Sultan and Paterson in its 2018 European technology 30 Under 30 selection. In December 2022, Beamery announced a $50 million Series D led by Teachers' Ventures Growth, part of Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan. The financing valued the company above $1 billion.
The number offered an easy headline. Saidov's response offered a more interesting glimpse of the person. Writing about the milestone, he said he found it difficult to pause and celebrate personal or professional wins after nine years building the company. The habit of handling the next challenge had made reflection awkward.
He framed the occasion around recognition for the team. His description of founder life was full of compartments: put one thing away, deal with the next priority, keep going. There is something quietly revealing about reaching a valuation associated with a mythical creature and using the occasion to describe your filing system.
That admission gives the business chronology some texture. Public milestones arrive as tidy announcements. The people working toward them live through a succession of unfinished problems. For Saidov, the celebration seemed to require a deliberate interruption of the working day. Even success had to make an appointment.
The founder who keeps asking other people
Another part of Saidov's public working life happens behind a microphone. As host of The Talent Blueprint, he talks with people responsible for hiring and developing employees inside large organisations. The conversations turn an expansive mission into recognisable operating problems: who gets hired, who gets taught and who gets overlooked inside the building.
With National Grid's Darren Peiris, the discussion covered skills-first hiring, learning agility and the decision to build, borrow or buy talent. Those verbs carry different consequences for a person hoping to progress. An employer can search outside for a finished answer or invest in someone already there who could learn.
Hilti's Elle Lebourg brought a coaching perspective, discussing curiosity, potential and how hiring teams can become more useful advisers. Wells Fargo's Art Lokerson explored the connections between recruitment, development, promotions and other forms of work. Taken together, the conversations show how much of Saidov's subject lies between departmental boundaries.
They also keep the discussion close to people doing the work. A recruiting platform can describe a future in which everyone moves smoothly toward their next opportunity. The guests have to deal with managers, existing job structures and the practical business of changing habits. Listening to those complications is part of the job.
The recommendation needs an explanation
Software changes the scale of the original question. If a system helps decide whose potential becomes visible, the reasoning behind its recommendations matters. A machine can repeat a narrow view of talent with admirable speed. Speed alone offers little consolation to the person excluded.
Saidov has argued for explainable recommendations and governance around their use. Beamery worked with Parity AI on auditing for bias. Its explanation layers were designed to show how factors such as skills, seniority, proficiency and industry relevance affected a recommendation. The useful question becomes whether a person using the system can understand why it proposed a match.
In April 2023, he contributed to the World Economic Forum's responsible generative AI summit at the Presidio in San Francisco. The resulting recommendations covered responsible development, collaboration and social progress. The setting put a recruiting software founder in a broader conversation about how systems should be built and held accountable.
By August 2025, Beamery had announced ISO 42001 certification for its AI management system. Certification concerns the processes used to manage AI; the work of judging a particular recommendation still belongs with the people making the decision. For a founder whose starting point was overlooked ability, accountability has to extend beyond a persuasive demonstration.
“For us, the goal is very much to give people transparency and insight”
Sultan Saidov · Elevate Your AIQ
In a September 2024 conversation with Imagine AI, he discussed automation, job matching, career development and the possibility of new kinds of work. The conversation also addressed worker displacement and the role of upskilling. It is a more demanding subject than finding the next candidate: an employer may be changing the work itself while people are trying to qualify for it.
That makes the original careers-advice project a useful point of comparison. Helping someone prepare for a known interview assumes a reasonably legible destination. Helping someone navigate changing roles requires an employer to explain what is changing, what can be learned and where a move might lead. The quality of the information matters to both sides of that conversation.
The job title changes. The question survives.
On 28 April 2025, Beamery announced Sultan as CEO and Abakar as executive chairman. The appointment put the co-founder associated with product innovation in charge of the business. Sultan described AI as an opportunity to reconsider how companies grow and compete, with skills intelligence central to that ambition.
Later in 2025, Beamery welcomed Has Dosanjh as CEO. The company said both Saidov brothers would continue to support it as board members. The sequence is worth keeping straight: Sultan's April appointment belongs to his career, while the later leadership change belongs to the story too.
His public LinkedIn profile now identifies a stealth venture and says, simply, “Working on something new”. It is an economical line for someone whose career has involved explaining the limitations of a conventional professional summary. The profile also places him in London. The next project has not yet acquired a public description there.
What connects the chapters is a question about how ability gets noticed. The graduate helping others prepare for interviews, the co-founder building a recruiting business and the interviewer asking employers about development are approaching it from different positions. A CV can record each of those positions. Understanding what a person might do next requires a longer conversation. Saidov has spent much of his career trying to make room for it.