Startup Europe. Grown up reporting
Startup Life/Hiring & Workforce/News/
By Miriam Partington in Berlin
Startup Life
By Amy Lewin 5 October 2022
Startup Life/Hiring & Workforce/News/
By Miriam Partington in Berlin
London-based hiring intelligence platform Screenloop — which offers candidate sourcing, interview analysis and reference automation — has raised $7m in seed funding led by Stride VC.
The speed at which many startups need to hire staff as they scale can often lead to “bad hires” — employees that don’t pass their probation and/or leave the business because they don’t live up to expectations. These mistakes are pricey: just one failed hire can cost over $180k.
A big issue is the lack of available data throughout the hiring process, especially when it comes to intangibles — soft skills that interviewers struggle to identify, says Screenloop cofounder Anton Boner.
“CVs only tell so much about a candidate, and with the majority of interviewers in organisations having little or no training, there is a skill gap to identify who is most suitable for a role,” says Boner. The entrepreneur previously worked as a country manager for Stack Overflow, a question and answer website for programmers worth $1.8bn.
Screenloop provides post-interview data analytics and candidate feedback to help companies pinpoint areas of improvement in their hiring process.
One of Screenloop’s customers reported that using the software reduced the amount of candidates leaving the recruitment process — for taking another offer or withdrawing because of a compensation mismatch, for example — by 60%.
One client saw an average of 1,800 candidates dropping out of their process over 30 days prior to using Screenloop. That average has since reduced to 456.
It provides real-time coaching for interviewers to help them ask better interview questions — weeding out the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate — and educate them on unconscious biases that may be impacting their decisions.
Its “interview intelligence” product also provides interview recordings, transcriptions and real-time prompts to help recruiters hire faster and at scale, while maintaining quality.
Screenloop operates in Europe, the UK and the US. Its customers include open banking platform TrueLayer, talent lifecycle management platform Beamery and software development company GorillaLogic.
Screenloop raised $2.5m in December 2021.
A lot of companies have cropped up in recent years to help startups in the talent acquisition and recruitment sphere — especially as the war for talent rages on. There are many niches to this market, including recruitment platforms, interview platforms and platforms to remove unconscious bias in the hiring process. TestGorilla, whose test-based assessment platform recently raised a $70m Series A.
Screenloop says it has built an all-in-one “platform offering” but there are point solutions that it competes with including:
Screenloop will use the funding to invest more in its various products, with the aim of delivering a platform that covers the hiring process end-to-end. It will also continue its expansion into the US and new markets — and will continue to hire across sales, marketing and engineering.
Traditional recruitment processes can be lengthy and inefficient, with many hiring managers not receiving adequate training to make well-informed decisions. Screenloop’s platform aims to educate recruiters while minimising unconscious bias: two things vital to create high-performing and inclusive teams.
Screenloop has many competitors, but they’re mostly single-point solutions. The company may have an advantage with a platform that tackles many problems at once. Recruiters may also enjoy having a single platform to use rather than logging into many different tools.
Miriam Partington is Sifted’s DACH correspondent. She also covers future of work, coauthors Sifted’s Startup Life newsletter and tweets from @mparts_
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