News

June 28, 2022

Screenloop raises $7m to stop companies making bad hires

Stride VC leads the round as tech companies look for tech to maintain quality while hiring fast


London-based hiring intelligence platform Screenloop — which offers candidate sourcing, interview analysis and reference automation — has raised $7m in seed funding led by Stride VC. 

What problem is Screenloop solving?

The speed at which many startups need to hire staff as they scale can often lead to "bad hires" — employees that don’t pass their probation and/or leave the business because they don't live up to expectations. These mistakes are pricey: just one failed hire can cost over $180k.

A big issue is the lack of available data throughout the hiring process, especially when it comes to intangibles — soft skills that interviewers struggle to identify, says Screenloop cofounder Anton Boner.  

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“CVs only tell so much about a candidate, and with the majority of interviewers in organisations having little or no training, there is a skill gap to identify who is most suitable for a role,” says Boner. The entrepreneur previously worked as a country manager for Stack Overflow, a question and answer website for programmers worth $1.8bn.

How is it solving it?

Screenloop provides post-interview data analytics and candidate feedback to help companies pinpoint areas of improvement in their hiring process. 

One of Screenloop’s customers reported that using the software reduced the amount of candidates leaving the recruitment process — for taking another offer or withdrawing because of a compensation mismatch, for example — by 60%.

One client saw an average of 1,800 candidates dropping out of their process over 30 days prior to using Screenloop. That average has since reduced to 456. 

It provides real-time coaching for interviewers to help them ask better interview questions — weeding out the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate — and educate them on unconscious biases that may be impacting their decisions.

Its "interview intelligence" product also provides interview recordings, transcriptions and real-time prompts to help recruiters hire faster and at scale, while maintaining quality.

Screenloop operates in Europe, the UK and the US. Its customers include open banking platform TrueLayer, talent lifecycle management platform Beamery and software development company GorillaLogic. 

Who’s investing in Screenloop?

  • Stride VC (new)
  • Ludlow Ventures (new)
  • All Iron Ventures (new)
  • Passion Capital (existing) 
  • Paul Forster — founder of job marketplace Indeed (existing)
  • Blissgrowth (existing)
  • RLC Ventures (existing)
  • Tom Blomfield, founder of digital bank Monzo (existing)

Screenloop raised $2.5m in December 2021. 

The market

A lot of companies have cropped up in recent years to help startups in the talent acquisition and recruitment sphere — especially as the war for talent rages on. There are many niches to this market, including recruitment platforms, interview platforms and platforms to remove unconscious bias in the hiring process. TestGorilla, whose test-based assessment platform recently raised a $70m Series A.

Screenloop says it has built an all-in-one “platform offering” but there are point solutions that it competes with including:

  • Brighthire (interview intelligence platform); 
  • TalentHub (tech recruitment agency);
  • Starred (candidate experience platform), based in the Netherlands;
  • Metaview (interview intelligence platform), based in London. 

What’s next for the company?

Screenloop will use the funding to invest more in its various products, with the aim of delivering a platform that covers the hiring process end-to-end. It will also continue its expansion into the US and new markets — and will continue to hire across sales, marketing and engineering. 

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Sifted’s take

Traditional recruitment processes can be lengthy and inefficient, with many hiring managers not receiving adequate training to make well-informed decisions. Screenloop’s platform aims to educate recruiters while minimising unconscious bias: two things vital to create high-performing and inclusive teams. 

Screenloop has many competitors, but they're mostly single-point solutions. The company may have an advantage with a platform that tackles many problems at once. Recruiters may also enjoy having a single platform to use rather than logging into many different tools. 

Miriam Partington

Miriam Partington is a reporter at Sifted. She covers the DACH region and the future of work, and coauthors Startup Life , a weekly newsletter on what it takes to build a startup. Follow her on X and LinkedIn