On a mission to make hiring bias a thing of the past, Dutch startup TestGorilla has just secured over €66 million for its pioneering platform that is revolutionizing recruitment processes.
Hiring and getting hired are both complicated processes. For HR teams, the process can be time-consuming and is too often reliant on inefficient systems. For the candidate, the process can be unfair and often discriminatory. On a mission to disrupt the status quo with a pioneering platform, TestGorilla has just secured over €66 million in fresh funding.
The investment was co-led by the London-based venture capital firms Atomico and Balderton Capital. It joins previous funding from Notion, Partech, and CapitalT. Luca Eisenstecken from Atomico and James Wise from Balderton Capital will join the board as part of this investment round.
Founded in 2020 by serial entrepreneur Wouter Durville and former Bain & Company partner Otto Verhage, TestGorilla makes the recruitment process more fair, efficient, and data-driven. It enables organizations to use skills assessments as soon as candidates apply for open roles – meaning recruiters can narrow down candidates based on their capabilities, not a subjective opinion or antiquated CV. It also makes the process much faster – removing the need to read hundreds of application forms. TestGorilla featured on our list of Dutch startups to watch this year, catching our eye for its revolutionary recruitment tech.
TestGorilla’s co-founder Wouter Durville, explained: “Too often, the recruitment process requires hiring managers to spend hours screening unreliable, incomplete, subjective CVs. By replacing resumes with more than 220 scientifically validated tests, our platform helps to eliminate hiring bias, creating a level playing field where every candidate can compete on equal terms.”
Hiring and recruitment are going through a major shake-up at the minute. Europe’s economy has changed massively over the past few years, new roles have opened up and skills shortages have left big gaps. It’s left the job market more competitive than ever and something needs to be done to ensure that quality candidates aren’t left by the wayside. Tech is helping to ensure that people find and are hired in the roles they deserve and to ensure that companies arent wasting their time with inefficient processes and poor hiring choices.
TestGorilla is leading the way in skills-based hiring – an increasingly popular way to recruit that gives every candidate an equal chance to prove their abilities and motivation. Adopting skills-based hiring helps businesses recruit top talent and more diverse candidates, faster, easier and with less risk of bias. Studies show that job success is most strongly correlated with multi-measure assessments, whereas CVs and work experience are the weakest links.
The TestGorilla platform caters to this by offering organizations hundreds of pre-employment tests that enable them to tailor their candidate search to their exact requirements. Areas covered by the assessments range from quantitative skills to cognitive ability, enabling prospective employees to compete on merit rather than background. It gives insights into areas such as specific role-related skills, language proficiency, cognitive abilities, soft skills, personality, motivation and culture add – all contributing to greater success for both candidates and companies.
Atomico’s partner Luca Eisenstecken added: “Finding the right people is increasingly challenging for even the world’s best brands, and the pandemic has opened employer eyes to huge untapped pools of global talent. TestGorilla is seeing incredible growth with its automated, data-driven approach to solving this problem. And they’re doing this while delivering a fairer hiring process based on skills rather than resumes, eliminating the biases that prejudice decision making.”
In just a short time since its launch, TestGorilla has been growing at an incredible space. It’s attracted more than 5,000 customers with household names such as Sony, PepsiCo, Bain & Company, Oracle, Revolut, H&M and the UK’s National Health Service trusting the platform. In addition, G2, the world’s largest software marketplace, recently named TestGorilla in its prestigious list of the top five fastest-growing software products for 2022.
Laurens-Jan Olsthoorn, a partner at Bain & Company, a client of TestGorilla, has commented that: “Using TestGorilla as a screening tool has helped us to replace the bottom 30% of applicants with better-qualified candidates, improving the success rate of our subsequent rounds. We have seen a strong correlation between candidates’ performance in TestGorilla assessments and in the interview process, so we trust TestGorilla to make a great first cut from a large number of candidates. I would happily recommend TestGorilla to my industry peers.”
TestGorilla’s remote team serves recruiters, HR professionals, hiring managers, and hiring teams in more than 100 countries. Now, with this fresh funding, the plan is to keep scaling and growing this revolutionary approach to recruitment.
The ongoing development of TestGorilla’s proprietary technology will include the platform’s integration with further Applicant Tracking Systems, enabling employers to use the product seamlessly from within their existing ATS, and the introduction of new features to satisfy the requirements of mid-sized businesses. The platform’s test library continues to expand, with the existing 220-plus tests due to be joined by a further 100 by the end of 2022. The company also expects to hire 100 new employees in the coming year.
James Wise, partner at Balderton Capital, also said: “We’ve already seen TestGorilla become wildly popular within our portfolio as a more effective and fair way to identify people with the right skills for the role, and we’re excited to support the team on their mission to end the era of CV-based candidate screening.”
