Key Takeaways
Zhipu AI is one of China’s earliest LLM-focused companies, founded in 2019 and spun out of Tsinghua’s KEG. It is the maker of the GLM foundation model series, serves 12,000+ enterprise customers and 45M+ developers, and its January 2026 Hong Kong IPO (02513.HK) pushed its valuation past US$100 billion, with roughly 80% of staff in R&D.
- The challenge: Rapid growth outpaced manual, back-and-forth hiring. As an AI foundation model company, Zhipu also needed full internal control over highly sensitive talent data, a gap its previous Feishu-based recruiting module could not close.
- The solution: Moka delivered a deep Feishu integration that keeps the entire recruiting workflow — requisitions, scheduling, evaluations, offers — inside Feishu, plus AI screening that scores every incoming candidate against the role’s ideal profile.
- Data security: Historical data was migrated into Moka’s ATS, and role-based access controls put all talent data fully under Zhipu’s own control.
- The results: AI screening shortened the hiring cycle, helping Zhipu build its technical team faster. The switch was decisive: full rollout across every open role in month one, with zero disruption.
- The bigger picture: DeepSeek and Moonshot AI (Kimi) also build their teams on Moka, part of a wider shift among AI companies toward smarter, technology-driven hiring.
Background
Founded in 2019, Beijing Zhipu Huazhang Technology (Zhipu AI) emerged from the Knowledge Engineering Group (KEG) at Tsinghua University’s Department of Computer Science. It became one of the earliest independent companies in China built entirely around large language models.
Everything starts with GLM, Zhipu’s proprietary foundation model series. Powered by GLM, Zhipu delivers AI solutions through MaaS APIs and private deployments, enabling applications across finance, government, education, and other industries. Today, it serves 12,000+ enterprise customers and 45+ million developers.
Revenue has doubled three years running, and its January 2026 Hong Kong IPO (02513.HK) pushed its valuation past US$100 billion.
Behind that curve sits an unusual organizational profile: roughly 80% of Zhipu’s employees work in R&D. But rapid expansion also creates a hiring challenge: building a team fast enough to support the company’s ambitious growth.
That’s when Moka AI stepped in, helping Zhipu streamline hiring and modernize its recruitment process.
Challenge
Traditional hiring was slowing growth
The talent market was white-hot. The race for AI talent was heating up, with demand for engineering and algorithm talent rising fast.
But traditional methods could not keep up: collecting resumes by hand and looping back and forth with hiring teams made every stage slow, and when feedback lagged, strong candidates slipped away. The old way of hiring had become a bottleneck for team growth and business expansion.
Data security left no room for compromise
For an AI foundation model company, its core talent data is highly sensitive. This includes AI engineer profiles, compensation expectations, interview feedback, and evaluation records. Keeping this information secure and fully under internal control was non-negotiable.
Previously, Zhipu managed recruitment through Feishu’s built-in recruiting module, where hiring data was stored within the Feishu platform.
As hiring scaled, this setup raised growing concerns over data governance. To move forward, Zhipu required a dedicated recruiting system — one that ensured data security while giving the company full control over it.
Solution
Seamless hiring, built into Feishu
As Feishu was already Zhipu’s daily collaboration hub, Moka delivered a hiring solution built around a deep Feishu integration — bringing the entire recruiting workflow into Feishu itself.
The team can manage every hiring action from one place: requisition approvals, candidate notifications, calendar sync, interview scheduling, evaluation submissions, and offer approvals, all without leaving Feishu.
Interview scheduling shows how much smoother this makes things. Recruiters can see every interviewer’s real-time availability in Feishu and book slots directly, or open those slots up for candidates to schedule themselves through a link — cutting out the back-and-forth that once stalled the process.
Therefore, their hiring teams were fully productive from day one, and hiring never missed a beat during the transition.
Accelerating hiring with AI screening
Beyond workflow integration, Moka uses AI to speed up Zhipu’s pre-screening — the stage that used to slow hiring down.
AI resume parsing turns each candidate’s raw materials into a structured profile, tagged by talent category, skills, experience, and education. This gives recruiters a faster way to filter and review candidates.
AI screening does the heavy lifting. Every resume is automatically screened by Moka AI the moment it enters the system. It evaluates each candidate against Zhipu’s ideal candidate profile for the role and flags the strongest fits with a match tag. Qualified candidates surface right away, so recruiters can focus on the talent that matters.
A secure foundation for talent data
When Zhipu moved onto Moka, its historical recruiting data was migrated in first. From there, every new hiring action and record flows into Moka’s ATS as recruiters work inside Feishu. Past and present now sit in one system Zhipu controls, closing the data-security gap.
Powered by role-based access controls, Moka enables Zhipu to define precisely who can access different tiers of recruiting data, providing a secure, reliable foundation for their fast-growing hiring operations.
What’s Different Now
A Faster, Unified Hiring Workflow
With Moka, Zhipu now manages campus, experienced, and referral hiring through a single entry point, instead of juggling them separately. Moka’s AI capabilities accelerated their first-pass screening process. Recruiters reached the interview stage faster, shortening the overall hiring cycle and helping Zhipu secure top technical talent sooner.
As a result, Moka empowered Zhipu to build a stronger talent pipeline and scale its team with greater speed and confidence.
“At Zhipu, technology is our foundation. With more than 80% of our people in R&D, we have very high standards for the tools we use. Moka’s recruiting system met those standards in two important ways: the ability to efficiently screen AI talent, and the seamless Feishu integration that allows our interviewers and HR team to work within a workflow they already know. For a technical team like ours, that makes a huge difference.”
— Mr. Zhang, HRD, Zhipu AI
Secure Data Control, Seamlessly Achieved
Adopting Moka gave Zhipu’s recruiting operation a complete upgrade. The deep Feishu integration meant teams switched over with zero disruption — no interruption to daily work, and no pause in hiring.
Most importantly, Zhipu’s talent data is now securely managed within Moka and remains fully under the company’s control. The team can now focus on building its workforce with greater confidence.
“Moving from Feishu’s recruiting module to Moka, our biggest concern was data security — as an AI company, talent data is one of our core assets. Moka put that data fully under our own control and closed the security gap for good. The switch was also far smoother than we expected: within the first month, we’d rolled it out across all roles we were hiring for. It’s been one of the best decisions we’ve made on our HR digitalization journey.”
— Ms. Li, Head of Recruiting, Zhipu AI
Looking Ahead
⛳️ Zhipu’s approach reflects a broader shift among AI companies: as they build the technology reshaping other industries, they are also bringing AI into the way they build their own teams.
For technology-intensive companies, recruiting is not just an administrative function. It is a critical capability for finding the people who build the products, models, and innovations that drive the business forward. Moka continues to help Zhipu enhance this capability, evolving alongside the changing talent needs.
This extends beyond Zhipu. DeepSeek and Moonshot AI (Kimi) also use Moka to build their teams — part of a wider turn toward smarter, more technology-driven hiring across the AI industry.
The AI era is reshaping what work looks like — and how the best teams are built. That’s the future Moka is exploring alongside the companies shaping it.
