Hired raises $30 million to power its recruitment marketplace with data and machine learning Posted on : Jun 20 - 2018

Hired, a recruitment marketplace that connects companies with technology talent, has announced a $30 million series D round of funding from Investment Management Corporation of Ontario.

This raise takes Hired’s total funding to more than $130 million, including a $70 million series C round in late 2016.

Founded in 2012, the San Francisco-based startup differs from other recruitment platforms insofar as applicants on the Hired platform don’t apply to companies — companies apply to hire them. Users create a profile outlining their skills and experience, and companies make an offer if they like what they see. The candidate can then compare offers side by side and take their pick.

It’s a win-win situation: Employers effectively gain access to a curated candidate pool and a view of competing bids so they know if they need improve their offer. And candidates benefit from having companies competing to hire them.

Crisis

A workforce crisis is looming, according to a report from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), with a growing imbalance between supply and demand expected around the world. As such, venture capitalists (VCs) are betting big on recruitment platforms, and artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly pivotal part in helping connect companies with candidates.

Against that backdrop, Hired is today unveiling a new “intelligent job matching” tool that leverages machine learning to automatically suggest potential candidates.

“Our algorithms infer the skills a customer needs for that role, analyze the candidates with the appropriate experience, and intelligently match skills with a job opening,” said Hired CEO Mehul Patel. “This way, companies can set aside the manual effort of sifting through hundreds of applications and instead access our intelligent marketplace to find the right match.”

In testing, Hired said the time taken to hire the right candidates dropped by 33 percent.

The company also revealed a duo of new features. “Hired insights” serves customers with feedback using data that’s “benchmarked against market trends” so they can evaluate how competitive their company is in the marketplace. It’s all about telling a recruiter why they may be struggling to hire the right workers, and where their company is particularly strong. And expanded “specializations” will now let recruiters hire for more specific technical roles, including test automation, DevOps, and engineering management.

These announcements follow Hired’s rollout last year of a new subscription service that allows recruiters to hire as many people as they want each month for a set fee. Recruiters can also adopt a pay-as-you-go option, whereby Hired takes a 15 percent commission on the hire’s first year salary.

Hired said that it has seen a 300 percent year-on-year “bookings” growth, and some big-name companies already using the platform include WeWork, Dropbox, Nordstrom, Zuora, and Booking.com. Now, with machine learning and big data on offer for recruiters and another $30 million in the bank, Hired hopes to expand on the 10,000 companies that are registered on its platform.

“These advances represent a multi-phased vision for a world where the hiring experience is predictive, data-driven, and candidate-centric,” Patel added. “To date, we’ve seen a total of $57.5 billion worth of salary offers extended through Hired. This growth is a testament to the foundation we’ve set in driving the $700 billion global recruiting industry forward, and we’re not slowing down. Source