Recruiter spoke exclusively to Melica Moshiri, founder of AI recruitment firm SkillTorch, following her departure from the BBC reality programme. 

In the latest episode, Our Melica was found to be lukewarm rather than hot and spicy in the task of creating an innovative hot sauce and promoting it to leading industry figures in the culinary field.

However, she took comfort from the fact that Lord Sugar couldn’t even bring himself to choose a winning team, as neither team’s hot sauces nor the adverts tempted the public guinea pigs, the experts – or The Lord himself. “Both teams were rubbish!” he declared and sent them all off to console (criticise) each other over a cuppa at the delightful Bridge Caff.

In the boardroom, The Lord’s ire didn’t lessen at all: “Not one of you is shining through,” he growled, and said the hot sauces and the adverts were the “biggest load of garbage I’ve seen”.

Our Melica found herself in the firing line, after she was accused of being ‘disruptive’ by her erstwhile teammates, and ended up being fired by Lord Sugar, and taking herself and her suitcase downstairs to the Black Cab and back home.

How did she feel about leaving the process? “I take everything that Lord Sugar says very seriously; I have a lot of respect for him. I think he’s an incredible business leader,” she told Recruiter. “But I think what he also likes is that I did take accountability of being disruptive. I also do believe being disruptive is not a bad thing in business.

“I think what he may have wanted to see is maybe some of my disruption [being] a bit more strategic – I don’t know. But I admitted to it, I put my hands up.” She added: “What you didn’t see in this episode is that he actually did say to me in the boardroom, ‘I’m going with my gut instinct, I might be making a big mistake, Melica, you’re fired’. I left feeling good because he said that.” [Ed – In the episode you don’t hear Lord Sugar saying ‘I might be making a big mistake’.]

So why didn’t we see more of Melica on the presenting team, pitching to potential clients? Surely that would be a good fit with her recruitment skills? She told Recruiter that despite asking to pitch in the last three episodes, she was sidelined by the Team Leaders. And the episode before, she was completely shut down by Dean, which was spotted by Lord Sugar.

“He’s [Lord Sugar’s] obviously been in the industry for a long time, and if he’s saying that, if he can see that I’m being sidelined, then he can see it. So in this task, he probably saw that yet again,” she said.

And as for the future, what does Melica see happening with her AI recruitment business SkillTorch?

“I’m going to carry on with what I’ve been doing,” she said. “[At SkillTorch] we specialise in all things emerging technologies.” And having lived in the US for four-and-a-half-years, the majority of her business has been US-based, she told Recruiter. “I think the order values in the US are significant compared to the rest of the world. So I’m going to be leveraging that work even more. 

“And what I would love to do, I would definitely be open to all opportunities – whether that’s investment within SkillTorch, whether that’s something else. I’m using this time to just be open to saying ‘yes’, and open to listening to everything, because you just don’t know what’s around the corner. 

“I think if I was to get investment for SkillTorch, I would be using that to scale by hiring more staff and by reaching out to more markets to FinTech or cyber security. But as you probably know, with the advancements in AI, you don’t need to be hiring 20 staff to make seven figures. You can easily have three or four people and still make the same amount of money.”

So although Our Melica won’t be gracing the screens on Thursday evenings any more, she may have been fired but we’ll probably see her doing the hiring in the near future. And by the way, did you know she has an A in drama? (Just ask Tom Allan on The Apprentice: You're Fired!)

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