June 30, 2026
Estonia's Largest HR Community Co-Founder Bets on Automated Candidate Evaluation
TALLINN — Hiring has become an expensive problem for growing companies. AI-assisted applications flood inboxes; recruiters lose hours to manual screening; a single wrong hire sets a young company back. Hired by Noon, a hiring platform that moves teams from tracking applicants to evaluating them, is built to close that gap, and today names Gelly Mikko as co-founder alongside Founder and CEO Susanna Kyllönen. Mikko co-founded Estonia's largest HR professional community, Eesti HR Selts, and built HRuudised.ee, Estonia's dedicated HR news platform. Her career has been grounded in the conviction that hiring is fundamentally human. She is joining Hired by Noon on the bet that structured automation, not resistance to it, is how the profession protects that judgment at scale.
Hiring signal is collapsing in real time. Candidates mass-apply with AI assistance; employers mass-filter with AI tools; trust breaks on both sides. Applicant tracking systems were built to store and organize, not to evaluate, and that gap has become acute. Hired by Noon makes the category distinction explicit: automation executes consistent, criteria-based assessment across every applicant before a candidate reaches a human reviewer. The team sets the requirements, thresholds, and culture criteria, and the system scores against them. Humans make the final call with full visibility into the reasoning at every stage.
Most ATS tools are databases. They store candidates. We wanted something that actually screens them against the criteria you define and tells you who to talk to. Automation runs the criteria your team sets. You make the final calls, and you can see exactly why each candidate scored the way they did.
— Susanna Kyllönen, Founder & CEO, Hired by Noon
Mikko brings eight years of hands-on HR work in Estonia. As a co-founder of Eesti HR Selts, she helped set professional standards and build community practice for the country's HR field. She founded and ran HRuudised.ee, organized HR EXPO, the sector's flagship gathering, and helped run the EHRS Summit. Her operating background includes People Operations at Comodule and Kõu Mobility and recruitment at Starship Technologies. Most recently she served as HR Manager at Pactum AI.
Kyllönen brought Mikko on as the problem grew. AI-assisted applications have pushed volumes up; the hours spent screening have climbed with them; a wrong hire at this stage is costly. What it buys hiring teams is direct: less time lost to manual review, fewer interviews that go nowhere, faster and more confident decisions. Mikko's mandate is to test whether structured automation can deliver that, and restore the trust the market has lost.
HR is supposed to be about people. But when a founder gets 300 AI-written applications, the human signal disappears completely.
— Gelly Mikko, Co-founder, Hired by Noon
Hired by Noon is currently in active pilots with a cohort of startups including Verge Motorcycles, Donut Lab, Read Peak, Spacetime, Glaze Works, and Finance Crew. Spacetime reported that the pipeline cut through the volume of low-quality LinkedIn applications they were fielding. Donut Lab went from using it for a single step to running candidates through it across their whole hiring process. Detailed results will be published once the analysis is complete.
About Hired by Noon
Hired by Noon is structured-evaluation infrastructure for startup hiring. Where applicant tracking systems organize applications, Hired by Noon evaluates candidates, scoring every applicant against criteria the team defines, advancing or flagging against thresholds the team sets, and delivering a verified shortlist with transparent reasoning at each stage. Automation executes the criteria; humans make the final decisions. Hired by Noon is based in Tallinn, Estonia, with pilots active across the Nordics, Baltics, and North America.
Media contact: ?@hiredbynoon.com
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