HireAra has raised a £450,000 seed round for its AI-powered candidate presentation platform for recruitment agencies.
The platform helps recruiters to make their brand and their candidates stand out to hiring clients, increasing the speed at which these candidates are placed in new roles.
The round was joined by the founders of UK recruitment tech companies Mercury, SourceWhale, One Up Sales and Candidate.ID, alongside five customers and private crowdfunding.
In a typical week, recruiters spend several hours fine-tuning candidate CVs, sometimes using a technical CV template to improve the visual presentation of their application, and preparing to pitch the candidate to hiring managers. This is repetitive, time-consuming administrative work that eats into shrinking agency margins and extends the time it takes to establish candidates in their new roles.
To allow recruiters to spend more time building relationships with candidates and clients, HireAra’s founding team built a candidate presentation platform that integrates seamlessly into existing workflows. Using the platform, recruiters can upload a candidate CV’s and any supplementary information to generate beautiful branded content about the candidate in seconds.
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The injection of seed funding will enable HireAra to triple its sales team and bring two new content products to market in 2024. It is the first raise, 20 months after the startup was spun out of intelligent automation company DigiBlu in April 2022.
“For recruitment agencies, their candidates are their product. So, it’s essential that they present the candidate and their brand in the best light possible,” said Thomas Vose, HireAra co-founder and CEO.
“There’s no room for human error in candidate presentation, as, according to CFA Institute research, a CV with two or more typos will be instantly rejected by over 97% of hiring managers.
“We’ve built a B2B SaaS platform, powered by AI, which makes candidate presentation quick and easy. HireAra unlocks capacity and resource in recruitment teams, and recruiters using HireAra are placing candidates with unprecedented speed.
“It’s an honour that so many of the veteran founders that we look up to have decided to invest in HireAra. There’s no greater show of belief in our product and roadmap than to become an angel investor, and we’re looking forward to taking the next steps on that roadmap with their support.”
Adam Gordon, founder of Candidate.ID and Poetry, a HireAra investor, said: “The rise of generative AI is sending shockwaves through the recruitment sector. Agencies that are embracing the potential of this technology to raise standards and improve efficiency are widening their lead on their competitors.
“I’ve invested in HireAra because I can see that their technology is a logical adoption for every agency – big and small – and that it has the potential to save thousands of hours for agency staff at a time when managing profit margins is more important than ever.
“HireAra’s founding team is ambitious, creative, and incredibly dedicated to delivering the best product possible to their customers.”