Humanize More cash has been raised to drive the growth of its human resources software, which can help companies screen job applicants, schedule interviews, automate initial communications, conduct background checks, and more.
The company received $4.3 million in a round of financing led by Zeal Capital Partners. Angel investors including Spark Growth Ventures, Basecamp Fund, Moneta Ventures, and Payscale founder Joe Giordano and Aditi Consulting founder Pradeep Singh participated. The total funding to date is US$5.3 million.
Humanly’s revenue has increased sixfold in the past year.The CEO and co-founder said that companies that are rethinking their talent recruitment strategy are riding the waves amid a pandemic-driven shift to remote work and a growing focus on diversity. Prem Kumar, A former Microsoft and Tinypulse employee who helped found this startup in August 2018, Andrew Gardner with Brian Lepic.
Humanly’s technology is designed to reduce the time required to find talent and provide a better experience for potential new employees. The software uses progressive analysis, similar to a marketing tool, as a way to quickly understand the intent and background of candidates. For companies that receive thousands of applications every week, Humanly provides them with a way to expand their network and screen people on a large scale.
Once the company interacts with the candidate, Humanly will automatically repeat the conversation at the “top of the funnel” before manually intervening to complete the recruitment process.
“We are replacing the time spent by recruitment coordinators on hundreds of such phone screens, and the time to do so is much faster,” Kumar said. “Then we are helping humanity become better in the next step.”
This technology can help eliminate prejudice by hiding information such as the candidate’s name, gender, and working years. It also analyzes how the company interacts with different candidates. For example, the company recently helped a client determine that junior male candidates’ speech time increased by 7 minutes compared to junior female candidates.
“Let’s make these conversations fairer,” Kumar said.
Kumar said the company focuses on building artificial intelligence from an ethical perspective. He said that Humanly’s 10-member team is about 50% diverse in terms of gender and ethnicity, “this helps us build products that represent our customers.”
Humanly graduated from Y Combinator in 2019. Its clients include Microsoft, Seattle Storm, Moss Adams, etc.
Other startups in the Seattle area use technology to improve the talent recruitment process, including technical interview platform Karat and Textio, which helps companies write better recruitment information.