HiringBranch is accelerating AI innovation in the skills-based economy, giving candidates fairer access to opportunities with a new generation of assessments and fewer interviews.
Montreal, December 10th, 2024 - HiringBranch, the leading AI soft-skills-based hiring platform, today announced the close of a $5 million Series A funding round led by Crédit Mutuel Equity, joined by Export Development Canada, angel investors, and a $1 million debt financing from CIBC Innovation Banking.
The funds will fuel market penetration of the company’s innovative Soft Skill AITM, using strategic integration partnerships and sales to North and Latin America, Asia, and the UK. This new trajectory comes on the heels of 330% customer growth in the past two years.
HiringBranch is transforming the way contact centers and enterprises hire with its Soft Skills AITM. The company introduced a conversational voice and chat assessment experience in April 2024 allowing candidates to test drive the job before they get it while sending a score of the role-critical soft skills to a recruiter.
“We want to unlock the power of soft skills in the workforce by measuring what used to be immeasurable,” said HiringBranch Co-Founder and CEO Stephane Rivard. “Native-AI trained with our proprietary datasets enables automatic soft skills evaluation so organizations can leverage skills data for talent lifecycle management and global decision-making. This isn’t a multiple-choice or personality test. It’s an accurate read on a candidate’s real abilities to do a job well, and a fairer chance at opportunities.”
The company recently announced a study demonstrating its proprietary dataset measures soft skills at 98% accuracy while the next best public LLM’s accuracy sits at 64%.
“Accuracy is pivotal to our offering,” said Assaf Bar Moshe, PhD and Chief Research and Development Officer at HiringBranch. “It’s why companies can rely on us to know who to hire based on the right skills for the job.”
Once companies automate soft skills measurement, the interview can become moot for high-volume hiring roles. Interviews lengthen the hiring process, aren’t proven to improve employee performance, and leave room for bias, especially at scale. The HiringBranch AI is less biased than a human and has proven to select candidates who perform better on the job compared to those hired with traditional methods.
“We have seen firsthand HiringBranch using AI for good, eliminating bias, and alleviating hiring managers of manual processes, like interviews, to work on higher value tasks. This is the true value of AI when executed responsibility,” says Nina Ni, Associate at Crédit Mutuel Equity. “Our goal is to help HiringBranch continue improving the assessment market, enabling enterprises to make better hiring decisions in the process.” Says Ludovic Andre, Managing Director at Credit Mutuel Equity Canada.
"HiringBranch is a saving grace for industries like telecommunications where they hire thousands of people across multiple sites. We are uniquely positioned to be a catalyst in the skills-based hiring economy with our award-winning Soft Skills AITM. The future of hiring and hiring quality starts with skills measurement. We plan to be at the forefront of this paradigm shift as we scale,” said Rivard.
About HiringBranch
HiringBranch, creators of the world’s first Soft Skills AI®, provides tailored hiring assessments that accurately measure candidates' communication, critical thinking and soft skills with native AI. HiringBranch is the only volume-hiring solution to assess candidates beyond language, correlating employee performance and soft skills. With proven results like 90% lower hiring costs and under 1% bad hire rates, HiringBranch helps human resource teams confidently hire customer-facing talent. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Canada, HiringBranch proudly serves enterprises and contact centers including Bell Canada, Infosys, Carelon, SP Data Digital, and Fortune 50 online retailers.
The organization is committed to operating fairly while fostering diversity and inclusion for all its customers globally through unwavering and unbiased technology.
Learn more at hiringbranch.com