Innovation in recruitment tech is growing at a fast pace at the moment and Screenloop is a startup pushing the momentum forward. The startup just secured €6.6 million for its hiring intelligence platform that builds a better team by removing bias. 

Poor hiring choices. Labour shortages. Recruitment bias. Talent mismatches. Poor hiring experiences. These are all phrases and themes that have dominated the recruitment space in Europe recently. For candidates as much as companies, the hiring process has become tiresome, stressful, and, ineffective. It’s a phenomenon that is resulting in a talent shortage, costly hiring decisions and inefficient use of time. 

Shaking up hiring processes

Founded in 2021 by Anton Boner, Jay Radia, João Leal, Nuno Saldanha and Rodrigo Santos, Screenloop is aiming to flip the hiring game upside down – with the aim of enabling companies to hire high-quality talent and candidates to have an enhanced experience. The London-based startup has just picked up €6.6 million in fresh funding and is growing fast.

This newly announced seed round was led by Stride VC with participation from Ludlow Ventures, All Iron Ventures, Passion Capital and angel investor Paul Forster, founder of job-seeking platform Indeed. It comes after a capital raise of €2.2 million at the end of 2021. 

The founders behind Screenloop came together with the mission to enhance hiring processes based on their own individual experiences. As many successful founders will note, building a startup from a place of passion is crucial, and the team certainly have it. The founding team experienced shared frustrations and poor hiring experiences whilst working as senior operators at fast-growth tech businesses. This, combined with the knowledge that a reported 95% of businesses have admitted to making bad hiring decisions, inspired a move to make a change. 

Anton Boner, Co-Founder and Commercial Director, said: “Our team is united in the belief that hiring is inefficient, outdated and unfair to candidates around the world. We have all been hiring managers and candidates, and we know the hiring process is broken. It’s difficult to track and measure, meaning there’s a lack of insight into what to improve and what to prioritise. Companies struggle to replicate their top performers and the cost of a failed hire is over $180,0001.”

How it works 

Screenloop’s end-to-end hiring intelligence platform uses data and artificial intelligence (AI) to identify gaps in the recruitment process, leverage candidate feedback, and provide real-time coaching for interviewers to conduct better interviews and remove unconscious bias from decision-making. Currently, the product includes four key solutions, let’s take a look.

‘Pulse’ enables automated candidate feedback on the organisation’s recruitment processes and uses it to identify and provide tailored recommendations for improvement using AI – enabling businesses to hit their hiring goals faster. 

‘Interview training’ provides modern shadowing and real-time coaching through AI to enable interviewers to ask better questions as well as remove subjectiveness and unconscious bias in decision making. 

‘Interview Intelligence’ allows businesses to collaborate quicker and therefore make decisions more rapidly. It reportedly allowed one customer to hire the top candidates in their process faster with a decrease of 26% in time to offer.

‘Success’ is Screenloop’s tech-enabled take on the highly manual referencing process which is outdated and inefficient. Success allows companies to understand more about the soft skills of their new hires and completes the reference process in less than 24 hours. The technology allows new hires to contribute faster in their new position and reduces the likelihood of failed probations. 

Anton Boner explained further: “Screenloop reduces the likelihood of companies making a bad hire whilst also helping remove unconscious bias from the recruitment process. We want to ensure candidates have an amazing interview experience with every company and are treated fairly. We also want to empower companies with data, insights and actions to be able to make the best hiring decisions all the time.”

Jay Radia, Co-Founder and Chair of Screenloop, added: “We have built a platform that can help all businesses to achieve their hiring goals faster by creating a world-class candidate experience. 80% of employee turnover is due to bad hiring decisions4  which we help businesses avoid through our platform. By focusing on experience, companies can attract, hire and retain the best candidates around and build a more diverse team at the same time.”

Milestones and Plans 

So far, the recruitment innovators have onboarded customers representing fast-growth tech companies such as TrueLayer, Beamery, Reachdesk and GorillaLogic. The company also reports that it has been able to reduce the average time to hire by three days – an amazing feat in this increasingly challenging sector. 

Looking forward, this latest funding will be used for continued product investment plus research and development, with the goal of delivering a powerful end-to-end hiring intelligence platform. Screenloop will also continue its expansion into the US and new markets. The Screenloop team is growing with key hires being made across sales, marketing and engineering.

Gabbi Cahane, Partner at Stride VC, said: “From the moment we met the team, we could see they had a unique combination of  vision, experience and technical chops to pull off such an ambitious project.  In the war for talent, when candidates’ expectations are growing ever higher, it’s fundamental that companies can provide them with an experience that is empowering, engaging and effective. Whether they’re hiring to grow or to fill the gaps, they need a recruitment process that’s fit for purpose, and that’s exactly where Sceenloop becomes indispensable.”