London, UK: The recruitment tech startup HireAra has raised a £450,000 Seed round for their 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 the UK’s leading recruitment tech companies: Mercury, SourceWhale, One Up Sales, and Candidate.ID and several sets of customers.
Tailor-made tech for modernising recruitment agencies
In a typical week, recruiters spend several hours fine-tuning candidate CVs, improving 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.
Funding HireAra’s next chapter
The injection of Seed funding will enable HireAra to triple their sales team, bring two new content products to market in 2024, and accelerate their mission to modernise the recruitment industry.
This is the first raise announced by the HireAra team, just 20 months after the startup was spun out of intelligent automation company DigiBlu in April 2022. Five existing HireAra customers and several veteran recruitment tech angel investors participated in the round, with the remaining 45% of the round raised via private crowdfunding.
Thomas Vose, HireAra co-founder and CEO, said:
“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. 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.”
Investment in ‘recruitech’ evidences sector’s appetite for modernisation
The recruitment industry contributed £140bn to the UK economy in 2022, and there are over 1200 UK agencies that employ fifty or more people. However, with an ongoing decline in the number of permanent job vacancies hitting these agencies’ margins, the use of AI to drive efficiency is fast becoming the gold standard.
Several of the UK’s biggest recruitment agencies are already using HireAra to present tens of thousands of candidates each year. Market-leading specialist agency The Oyster Partnership processed over ten thousand CVs on the platform in 2023. Their CEO, Sasza Bandiera, said:
“We’re extremely brand-orientated as a business: our standards of candidate presentation and uniformity help us to maintain our market-leading position. We’re using HireAra to guarantee that these standards remain high and our candidates stand out from the competition. The speed and ease of the platform releases recruiters to spend more time on the most important part of their job: interacting and building relationships with clients and candidates”
The number of candidates presented using HireAra technology is predicted to surpass one million by the end of 2024.
Adam Gordon, founder of Candidate.ID and Poetry, and 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.”
