About Wakura
Wakura AI is a next-generation healthcare recruitment platform designed to revolutionize how clinicians are screened, matched, and onboarded. Founded in 2024, the company leverages AI to augment offshore recruiting teams and ensure higher-quality candidate submissions across the healthcare staffing industry. With a mission to eliminate the inefficiencies of conventional workflows, Wakura brings intelligent automation to one of the most operationally complex verticals in talent acquisition.
Our Role
Preux joined Wakura as a co-founding partner, providing both CXO leadership and hands-on delivery support. Initially engaged to lead UX strategy and product direction, Preux’s role expanded over time to include:
- Leading strategic workshops and product discovery
- Architecting the full UX of the platform from early-stage wireframes through live demos
- Presenting demos to investors and potential clients
- Running design partner engagements
- Supplying additional UX/UI design and expert development and code review resources to accelerate the MVP build
Preux worked closely with Wakura’s CTO to shape a scalable, AI-integrated platform and later conducted reviews and oversight of development milestones.
The Challenge
Healthcare staffing firms face three major pain points:
- Recruiters struggle to assess soft skills and true clinician commitment in short, unscheduled calls
- Submission quality suffers due to shallow screening and inconsistent documentation
- Recruiting managers are overwhelmed with rework, screening repeat calls, and salvaging failed placements
Our task was to help Wakura build a solution that would:
- Raise the quality of clinician interviews
- Automate intelligent questioning and follow-ups
- Generate structured summaries, scoring, and submission recommendations
Our Approach
Strategic Discovery & UX Leadership
Preux led a phased approach to product definition and UX design. Through a mix of interviews, industry immersion, and whiteboard workshops, we co-developed the vision for Wakura’s core module: the AI Interview Companion.
MVP Build Collaboration
The MVP was delivered through a hybrid model. Wakura’s CTO and in-house team led engineering, while Preux provided ongoing UX refinement, feature validation, and injected senior engineering resources where needed to support critical development. Code reviews and architecture consultations ensured quality and cohesion.
Design Partner & Investor Engagement
Preux built and delivered demo flows tailored to design partners in the healthcare staffing industry. We synthesized complex AI behaviors into clear, intuitive UX and supported live sessions with strategic narration, storyboards, and objection handling.
Key Features Delivered (MVP)
- AI Interview Companion: Real-time analysis of recruiter-clinician interviews, including transcript monitoring, soft skill scoring, follow-up prompts, and submission readiness.
- Dynamic Questioning: Role-specific questions and probing follow-ups based on AI understanding of the conversation
- Candidate Fit Scoring: Automated, multi-dimensional scoring of each candidate based on commitment, clinical experience, and communication
- Summarized Intelligence: Interview summaries, recruiter scorecards, and submission recommendations
- System Integration: Live integration with platforms like Dialpad and JobDiva, ensuring real-time analysis without disrupting workflows
Artificial Intelligence at the Core
Wakura’s value lies in its intelligent orchestration of recruiter workflows, powered by advanced AI.
Wakura uses Anthropic Claude 3.5 (Sonnet and Haiku) through AWS Bedrock, chosen for their:
- Strong natural language understanding in healthcare contexts
- High performance in conversation summarisation and prompt stability
- Contained model size options (e.g. Haiku) for real-time inference
The models are embedded in a proprietary orchestration layer that:
- Splits tasks across AI agents
- Tracks context persistently across multi-turn conversations
- Selects the best model for each action
Core AI Capabilities
- Real-Time Conversation Analysis: Live transcription, terminology detection, and red-flag alerts for vague or concerning answers
- Adaptive Prompting: AI guides recruiters with targeted follow-ups in real-time, suggesting clarification questions based on gaps in the interview
- Scoring & Summary: Post-call summaries with soft skill evaluations, scoring, and structured decision support
- Clinician Sentiment Mapping: The system evaluates tone, enthusiasm, and alignment to assess likelihood of assignment completion
Future Vision: From Assistant to Proactive Partner
Wakura’s long-term goal isn’t just reactive support — it’s proactive co-piloting. While voice interaction was deferred post-MVP, the next evolution will enable recruiters to:
- Speak directly to Wakura (“Wakura, show me all low-commitment candidates from today.”)
- Receive unsolicited alerts and actions from Wakura (“I’ve scored today’s interviews — one candidate is worth escalating. Would you like to proceed?”)
In this paradigm, Wakura reaches out to the recruiter — not the other way around. It surfaces actions, requests approval, and continuously learns. This is not just task support — it’s behavioural elevation through intelligent anticipation.
Results & Milestones
- 50% improvement in recruiter productivity (2–4 hours saved per day per recruiter)
- Improved interview quality through structured conversation flow and intelligent probing
- $100K+ annual value per recruiter (est.) from improved submissions, reduced fallout, and faster fills
- MVP fully built and launched within 6 months
- Currently in beta with active demo campaigns and investor engagement
Reflection
Wakura represents the next evolution in our healthcare portfolio — an AI-native, recruiter-centric product with real-world impact. As with CryoFuture and SnapCare, Preux didn’t just support development; we helped define the vision, assemble the team, and bring a working product to life.
What sets Wakura apart is its intelligent integration of live conversation analysis and recruiter enablement — a challenge requiring not just code, but precision UX and deep industry empathy. This project is not only an AI case study — it’s a glimpse into the future of human–AI collaboration in regulated, mission-critical environments.
