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The Buzz: Transforming Hiring

Staffing Industry Review

The Buzz: Transforming Hiring

Craig Johnson
| March 20, 2022

Main Article

Candidate interviews are a part and parcel of life in the staffing industry. But there’s one company aiming to make the interview process faster and more efficient while bringing consistency.

BrightHire provides a platform that enables interviews via phone, Zoom and Google Meet to be recorded and transcribed. Recruiters can be prompted to ask specific questions during interviews. BrightHire’s platform then uses artificial intelligence to flag highlights in the interviews and make the recorded interviews searchable and shareable.

The platform focuses on hiring for professional roles such as those in engineering, IT, sales or healthcare.

In addition to learning about the candidate, BrightHire lets leadership learn about the interview process and how a recruiter is performing by tracking AI-enabled elements and data points. And the recorded interviews can also be used as a training tool, for example by allowing a recruiter to see a video of a job interview conducted by one of their high-performing peers.

“I think what differentiates us is, one, a focus on the live conversations, that context is really important,” says Theodore Chestnut, BrightHire’s co-founder and chief revenue officer. “Two, is really fitting seamlessly into people’s workflows. We don’t ask them to change the way that they work; it’s really easy to make a call through BrightHire.”

Client firms can access BrightHire through its app, website or through a back-office or applicant tracking system.

“The third, we have deep roots and passion in and for this space,” Chestnut says. “Every decision that we make about our product comes from the vantage point of, ‘How do we serve recruiting teams really beautifully?’”

BrightHire raised a seed round back in 2019. Last May, it landed a $12.5 million Series A funding round led by Index Venture with participation from Next Play Ventures, which itself is led by LinkedIn Chairman and former CEO Jeff Weiner. Last October, BrightHire announced a $20.5 million Series B funding round. The Series B round was led by 01 Advisors with participation from Index Ventures and Zoom Apps Fund.

Chestnut says BrightHire has a lot of product extension plans for the future, such as using data from the hundreds of thousands of interviews on its platform to identify what makes an interview particularly successful and what makes a recruiter particularly successful.

“There are some recruiters who are more productive,” Chestnut says. “They have higher close rates. They can shorten time-to-fill for roles in ways that leave other recruiters scratching their heads, ‘what are they doing differently?’”

The questions become: What are they doing differently? How are they managing their time and conversations? What are they asking? How are they handling objections?

Finding those answers is on BrightHire’s radar.

“To start to share that intelligence back with the recruiting community is something I’m really excited about, and we’ve just started to scratch the surface there,” Chestnut says.

The Buzz

In an ecosystem driven by labor shortages, BrightHire aims to use its platform to make the hiring process faster while increasing candidate quality and decreasing bias.