Findem raises $30 million to use AI to recruit talent

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Hiring the right talent has rarely been easy, but amid the “big layoff” – the record number of people leaving their jobs during the pandemic – it has become even more challenging. Separate polls from Jobadder and Officevibe 2021 found that 72.8% of recruiters struggle to find relevant candidates, and top candidates are available on average only about ten days before being hired.

According to a Recruiter Nation survey, 64% of recruiters expect their budget to increase over the next six to 12 months, but money rarely equates to success. The roadblocks often lie in identifying the most suitable candidate for a particular position, whether at management, board level or below. Robert Half reports in a 2019 survey that more than three in four people would apply for a job even if they are not qualified.

Some recruiting software vendors are leveraging the benefits of AI, which they claim can index and search candidate pools more efficiently than an HR professional alone. One such vendor, Findem, says its AI can analyze more than 100,000 public sources to find candidates suitable for a position, looking for people based on their characteristics.

To expand its product, Findem — whose clients include teams from more than 100 organizations, including Google and RingCentral — has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by Four Rivers and Quarry Capital Management with participation from Wing Venture Capital, the company announced. its total increased to $37.3 million. CEO Hari Kolam says the new capital will also be used to support product development progress, including the launch in the first quarter of a new self-service model that will allow customers to post their jobs on job boards.

Recruitment based on AI

San Francisco, California-based Findem was founded in 2019 by Kolam and Raghu Venkat. Kolam previously founded Instart, a web app delivery platform, prior to stints at Sun Microsystems and IBM. Venkat was a member of the technical staff of data management company Aster and worked at Google as a software engineer.

“Every company is hiring right now and it’s hard work to build a high-quality and diverse talent pipeline. Virtually every company we come across struggles with it, and many pay premiums to try,” Kolam told VentureBeat via email. “Talent acquisition teams spend a lot of their money on staffing agencies because great talent is so hard to hire these days, but the problem is, they can get a 20% to 30% discount on a new hire’s salary.In addition, staffing agencies are trying to scale up by hiring more recruiters, but there is a shortage right now.When you have a largely Using a manual approach when searching for talent, which is common in staffing agencies, is time consuming, costly and involves quality issues, there is also a threshold that you cannot realistically exceed.”

Findem says it combines AI with “contextual logic” to emphasize a candidate’s relevance to a particular position. With Findem, HR teams can search by attributes, including whether an individual has seen a startup to a successful exit, built diverse teams, or is a long-term employee.

In addition to public sources, Findem can search internal employees and existing profiles in an applicant tracking system. In total, Findem, which also provides tools to automate candidate engagement, analyze talent pools and measure diversity, has resources from more than 750 million profiles, CEO Kolam said.

“Our job is to infer what a successful hire really means for a company, and there’s a lot involved in the data mix… We train models from multiple sources to understand factors such as which employees are successful and why, and what success means. for a specific company,” Kolam continues. “The platform has built-in contextual logic to help companies recognize when what they’re looking for in terms of candidates is what you’re looking for. It takes your search intent and finds people who match that intent by scraping, indexing, and connecting the dots between multiple data sources. It also filters results so hiring teams don’t have to.”

Potential for Bias

Employers using AI-powered hiring technology run the risk of introducing bias into the hiring process. Even the best AI-based systems can struggle to evaluate soft skills such as teamwork and problem solving. Due to bias and other technical flaws, sourcing AI may not notify people of a vacancy — determining who has access to the hiring process.

For example, Amazon was forced to scrap an AI recruitment tool that showed a preference for male candidates. An analysis of job site recommendations in 2021 found that 40% of job seekers had received recommendations based on their identity rather than their qualifications and that 30% received job alerts below their current skill level, regardless of industry.

†[P]personalized job boards like ZipRecruiter are designed to automatically learn recruiters’ preferences and use those predictions to recruit similar applicants,” writes Miranda Bogen of Harvard Business Review in a 2019 article. dealing with men, it may very well find proxies for those traits (like being called Jared or playing high school lacrosse) and replicate that pattern.”

In recognition of the growing problem, New York City recently passed a law prohibiting companies from using AI or algorithm-based tools to make hiring decisions about New York City residents without first checking those tools for bias.

Findem claims to have made efforts to reduce bias in its recruiting algorithms. Kolam: “Our platform makes the talent funnel diverse without having to identify gender or ethnicity on an individual level. It is a probabilistic approach and we rely on multiple data sets to achieve this. By making the funnel diverse, we prevent the introduction of human bias. Diversity decisions are relieved of the recruiter, but they are still able to deliver high-quality and diverse talent pipelines.”

Expanding segment

Sixty-five Findem employees benefit from a rapidly growing recruitment software market. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global recruitment software market will grow from $1.75 billion in 2017 to $3.09 in 2025.

Automation adoption is also on the rise, driven by increasing workloads and sourcing challenges. (According to Forbes and the U.S. Department of Labor, recruiters spend nearly a third of their workweek searching for candidates for a single position, and the average cost of a bad hire is about 30% of the employee’s freshman income.) Even before the pandemic , recruiters showed interest in recruiting pipeline automation technologies. Sixty percent of companies that responded to a 2019 Mercer survey said they planned to increase the use of workplace automation, including in recruiting.

Findem’s competitors include HireEz, Celential.ai, Sense, Fetcher.ai, Xor, and AllyO, all of which use AI to identify candidates who may be a good match for available positions. Findem moves expertly among the competition, saying it has experienced a 500% increase in customer growth and an eightfold increase in sales in the past year.

“We plan to use this new capital primarily for product development, including the launch of a new self-service model this quarter where users can post their jobs to job boards and access a new and highly targeted candidate pipeline. Expansion is also a top priority and we want to grow into new international markets,” added Kolam.

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This post Findem raises $30 million to use AI to recruit talent

was original published at “https://venturebeat.com/2022/03/08/findem-secures-30m-to-leverage-ai-for-talent-recruitment/”