We built BrightHire because hiring is still broken and it’s too important not to fix.
People are the most important ingredient for the success of every organization and careers are a source of meaning and economic freedom.
Yet despite profound changes to the way we work, hiring is still left to notes, fuzzy memory, and gut feelings. It’s subject to bias, prone to mistakes, and ripe with inefficiency.
We’ve been working to change this. Over the last 18 months our customers— including eight valued at over $1 billion — have used BrightHire to conduct over 20,000 interviews and use real substance to make more confident, fast, and fair hiring decisions.
Their success propelled us to another exciting milestone: a $12.5 million Series A.
This round was led by Index Ventures with participation from Next Play Ventures (led by LinkedIn Chairman and former CEO Jeff Weiner), and alongside existing investors including Flybridge Capital and Ground Up Ventures, future-of-work visionaries Laszlo Bock and Rosanna Durruthy, and world-class business builders like Nick Mehta, Gokul Rajaram, Erica Aliota, Dan Yates, Zane Lackey, Tom Monahan, and others.
This funding will dramatically accelerate investments in our team (we’re hiring!) and our transformative interview intelligence platform.
We will continue to prioritize making BrightHire delightful and seamless, investing in new integrations to always meet users where they already work. We’re further investing to bring modern collaboration to hiring, so recruiters, hiring teams and talent leaders can work better and faster, together. And we are doubling down on how we power better and more equitable hiring with best practices and insights gleaned from analyzing thousands of interviews and hiring processes.
Along those lines, the funding arrived at an important inflection point.
We started BrightHire with a commitment to making hiring more fair, and today there is a real sense of urgency around diversity and inclusion.
The intelligence we gather from capturing, transcribing, and analyzing interviews offers a unique opportunity to drive equity into hiring. Across our interviews we’ve already uncovered powerful insights about the pervasiveness of unconscious bias.
One example: just as our advisor Adam Grant described how men tend to “mansplain” in meetings, our data shows that “manlogues”, “mansplaining”, and “manterrupting” are also hallmarks of how men run interviews.
Specifically, as compared to how men interview men and how women interview candidates of both genders, when we isolate how men interview women, we find they:
- Own 13% more of the total talk time in these interviews
- Speak 30% more words overall
- Have conversations that are 9% less interactive
- Run on with 6% longer monologues
Uncovering these kinds of patterns across interviews is an important step toward ensuring every candidate gets a fair shot at opportunity. And we’re grateful every day for the opportunity to help forward-thinking clients like Angi, Salesloft, Better Mortgage, Scale.ai, and Chainalysis use data to build a truly equitable hiring process.
We’re early in this journey and excited for the road ahead. And we think Shardul Shah, who joins our board from the Index team, summarized well the opportunity ahead of us: “Hiring is the most important activity for every growing business. BrightHire makes it simple to transform the way it’s done and is creating a new standard for hiring.”
People are the most important ingredient for the future of every organization and the hiring process is how teams are built. By transforming hiring, we are building the most important platform for the future of every organization.
We are deeply thankful for the support of our team, clients, candidates, investors and the broader community.
And if you’re excited about what we’re building, we’d love to hear from you.
