HiringBranch is accelerating AI innovation in the skills-based economy, giving candidates fairer access to opportunities with a new generation of assessments and fewer interviews.
MONTRÉAL – HiringBranch, a leading AI-powered soft skills assessment platform, announced today that it has raised CAD 5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Crédit Mutuel Equity, with participation from Export Development Canada and Anges Québec.
The funds will fuel market penetration of the company’s innovative Soft Skill AITM, using strategic integration partnerships and sales initiatives to North and Latin America, Asia, and the UK. This new trajectory comes on the heels of 330% customer growth in the past two years.
HiringBranch is transforming the way enterprises and contact centers hire with its tailored conversational voice and chat assessment experience. This approach allows candidates to preview the job before getting the job while AI scores role-critical soft skills for the recruiter.
“We want to unlock the power of soft skills in the workforce by measuring what used to be immeasurable,” said HiringBranch Co-Founder and CEO Stephane Rivard. “Our native AI technology provides unparalleled accuracy in soft skills evaluation, enabling organizations to leverage skills data for hiring, talent mobility, and strategic decision-making. This isn’t a multiple-choice or personality test—it’s a precise measure of a candidate’s real abilities to do a job well, creating a fairer path to opportunity.”
The company recently announced a study demonstrating its proprietary dataset measures soft skills at 98% accuracy while the next best public LLM’s accuracy sits at 64%.
André Couillard, President at Procom and angel investor says, “For companies that hire in high volume, HiringBranch revolutionizes the recruitment process by replacing the interview stage. Companies see themselves speeding up the process, dramatically reducing costs and selecting candidates who perform better and stay on the job longer.”
By automating soft skills measurement, HiringBranch’s platform reduces the need for traditional interviews in high-volume hiring, which are often time-consuming and can introduce bias. Compared to human-based assessments, HiringBranch’s AI has shown greater fairness and has proven to select candidates who perform better on the job compared to those hired with traditional methods.
“We have seen firsthand HiringBranch using AI for good, eliminating bias, and alleviating hiring managers of manual processes, like interviews, to work on higher value tasks. This is the true value of AI when executed responsibly,” says Nina Ni, Associate at Crédit Mutuel Equity. “Our goal is to help HiringBranch continue improving the assessment market, enabling enterprises to make better hiring decisions in the process,” says Ludovic André, Managing Director at Crédit Mutuel Equity Canada.
“We are uniquely positioned to be a catalyst in the skills-first talent movement with our award-winning Soft Skills AITM. The future of hiring starts with skills measurement and we plan to be at the forefront of this paradigm shift as we scale,” said Rivard.
The organization is committed to operating fairly while fostering diversity and inclusion for all its customers globally through unwavering and unbiased technology.
Learn more at hiringbranch.com
