HireVue, a Salt Lake City-based company that provides a platform for on-demand, asynchronous online interviews, today announced a new funding round totally $22 million, including $17 million in equity and $5 million in debt-based funding. The round is led by Investor Growth Capital, and includes previous investors Granite Ventures and Peterson Ventures as well as newcomers Rose Park Advisors and Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich and Rosati, a global tech, life science and growth enterprise-focused law firm. The new funding will help HireVue to build out additional product research and development, further sales efforts and expand globally, primarily via new hires.
Asked why now was the right time to raise a significant amount of new funding, almost four times as much as the company has raised in the past, HireVue CMO Kevin Marasco explained in an interview that a combination of elements are just right in the market for HireVue to make an aggressive push.
“There are two macro trends in the market that are going on right now,” he said. “The first is that folks are having an onslaught of candidates looking to find jobs [owing to economic conditions]. A lot of our customers, on average, receive well over a hundred applicants for any given job, some of them receive over 1,000, which is great but it’s tough to get through the masses of resumes, so our clients are extremely challenged in that regard across every industry. Simultaneous to that is the emergence of mobile, video and social technology. It’s kind of like the perfect storm.”
What HireView provides is a way for companies looking to hire to streamline the candidate screening process, saving time normally involved in in-person or telephone screening, and making in-person Q&A an asynchronous process that allows multiple people involved in the hiring chain to check out candidate answers. To use HireVue, potential employers send questions to candidates via email, and then candidates record answers that employers can rate, watch and pass around among HR and other staff. The service also provides question guides, suggestions and feedback/reporting tools, the idea being that interviewers can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their use of the platform even more over time.
Already, HireVue has good traction with some big name companies, including Walmart, Nike, Starbucks, eBay, Nestle and more. The company had raised just $6 million to date since its founding in 2004, and acquired CodeEval, a talent identification platform for developers and programmers, at the beginning of August. That acquisition may signal the beginning of more things ahead for HireVue in terms of branching out into new areas in the HR market. The pairing of technical skills evaluation with HireVue’s core business of video screening is one that Marasco says has been particularly resonant with its customers (and the company plans to integrate the two experiences even more tightly in the future), but additional opportunistic acquires could result in even more capabilities being added to the HireVue platform as a result of this funding, should they make sense.
“For us it’s all about our customers and understanding what their challenges are and what will help them out and aligning that with where we’re going,” he said. “Should some acquisition opportunities look interesting, we’ll take a look at it, but the primary use [of the funding] will be organic growth.”
HireVue is a fairly established player in this space, though the advent of mobile tech and better video capabilities means that others have started to take an interest, including UK-based enRecruit, which launched in May. But by adapting to employer needs in an economy that prizes technical expertise, HireVue has set itself up as a distinct option, and looks well-positioned to continue its growth as economic volatility has HR departments eager to adopt new tools that make sense of an influx of applicants.