In the U.S., it costs an average of $4,000 and 52 days for a company to fill an open position, according to a recent Glassdoor report, and one San Francisco–based start-up wants to help speed that process by digging through a company's old resumes.
Software company Restless Bandit created an algorithm that searches for the best-matched candidate within a company's existing pool of applicants. The company has raised $10 million from GGV Capital and Toba Capital.
"We're creating a new category called talent rediscovery," said Restless Bandit CEO Steve Goodman. "We're the first ones to really help companies identify and surface applicants that they already have in their talent universe that may be good for jobs that are currently open."
Goodman sold his previous job search start-up, Bright, to LinkedIn for about $120 million in 2014.
Goodman and a team he assembled from Google, LinkedIn and Bright spent more than two years developing a platform that employs big data, machine-learning and artificial intelligence to help companies leverage pools of past applicants. The company said it aggregated more than 120 million job descriptions and 30 million resumes to train its algorithms. The software also sifts through publicly available data online to refresh outdated resumes.
Qualified candidates who've applied to a company previously are 14 times more likely to respond to a recruiter than those that are cold-contacted via LinkedIn or email, Goodman said.
Restless Bandit just launched with more than 15 customers including Four Season Hotels, Gannett, ComScore, Ihop, Applebee's and Rosewood Hotels. The company charges an average of $25,000 per year, depending on the size of the company and the applicant pool.
The typical customer is a company with more than 1,000 employees, and which has been around long enough to build up a large database of resumes.
Glenn Solomon, managing partner at GGV Capital, said the one area where the technology falls short is when a company is looking for a rare, very specific skill set in a candidate. When there isn't a deep pool of candidates to choose from because the job is so specific, the technology is not much use to a customer.
Goodman says there are no direct competitors, but Restless Bandit is part of a growing trend of recruiting's move to machine learning. For example, IBM Watson and start-up HiringSolved are also using artificial intelligence to help HR departments find the perfect candidate.
