Brazilian start-up calling to “retire the CV” wins international future of work award

The International Longevity Centre-UK (ILC) has announced the winners of Work for tomorrow, an international competition looking for the best innovations responding to longer working lives.

During the awards ceremony at the National Innovation Centre for Ageing, the Newcastle Sheriff announced Labora Tech, a Brazilian start-up that matches workers of all ages to jobs and helps them reskill, as the winner of the international Work for tomorrow competition.

Launched by ILC – the UK’s specialist think tank on the impact of longevity – and supported by the Innovation Resource Center for Human Resources, the competition has been looking for the most promising innovations across the world adapting to longer and changing working lives.

From supporting health in the workplace to innovative programmes developing workforce skills and policies that address discrimination at work, the competition received more than 60 submissions from organisations and individuals across 17 countries.

After careful consideration, the competition’s international judging panel decided to award the prize to Labora Tech, a company based in Sao Paulo, which is seeking to revolutionise recruitment by reducing bias and supporting career changes and flexibility at work.

Labora Tech is an end-to-end HR technology that helps include workers of all ages at scale, by delivering large-scale recruitment drives for companies based on people’s soft and hard skills, matching people to jobs based on these skills, and providing the training, reskilling and mentoring environment to help people thrive in new roles.

Labora already has a community of more than 20,000 adults engaged in the platform and is seeking to expand its business in Brazil and across the world to encourage more employers to “retire the CV” and take a skills-based approach to recruitment to reduce bias and improve outcomes.

Sérgio Serapiao, Co-Founder and CEO of Labora Tech, commented:

“I am delighted and honoured to win this competition. The competition has shown the quality and power of initiatives all over the world. I am sure we can contribute a lot to codesign the future of work.”

“I truly believe Labora has developed a social technology that can reach a global scale, and make a positive impact to millions of people and thousands of companies, redefining how we work of tomorrow. This award reinforces that we are on the right track.”

Lily Parsey, Global Policy and Influencing Manager at ILC, said:

“The world of work is shifting – and quickly. As our working histories become more complex, we’re more likely to change careers and reskill, we need to think about hiring in a new way. Labora Tech takes blind recruitment one step further by really putting skills, not biases, at the heart of recruitment. It’s long overdue that we move from judging people on their CVs to valuing what someone actually brings to a job.”