Congratulations Restless Bandit on Raising an $8M Series A financing. The entire team at GGV Capital is ecstatic to have participated in the round, and I’m excited to have joined the Restless Bandit board as an observer. Restless Bandit is innovating in the category of recruitment and talent management, enabling enterprises to rediscover talent by applying data science to their existing candidate profiles. Identifying and attracting strong talent remains a top priority for large companies across industries, and Restless Bandit’s completely new approach is delivering huge gains for their customers. Our enthusiasm for the company is driven by the team, their novel technology and approach, and the market.
Team. Restless Bandit’s co-founder and CEO, Steve Goodman, has been a friend of GGV for several years. Steve has had a remarkable career building companies and stewarding them to successful exits. Most recently, he built up and sold HR tech startup Bright.com to LinkedIn for $120M. We’ve admired Steve’s work and have been eager to back him for some time. When the chance emerged to participate in Restless Bandit’s Series A financing, we jumped at it. Steve has assembled a very strong team, including co-founder Anton Dam, a Stanford-trained data scientist who helped Steve build Bright.com into a winner.
Technology & Approach. In Steve’s exhaustive market research prior to founding the company, he discovered that most large companies have many thousands of resume profiles from previous job recruitment processes in their applicant tracking systems. Despite the considerable cost and time invested to attract these profiles, they invariably go untouched and decay in value over time once the job for which they were gathered is filled. What if companies could harvest value from these existing resume pools by using data science to match appropriate profiles with current job postings? And, what if similar algorithmic techniques could help keep these profiles fresh and relevant for existing searches? The Restless Bandit team has shown great progress along these dimensions to date, allowing their customers to mine for “gold” out of their existing resume pool asset, which has a substantial sunk cost. Restless Bandit customers have seen marked improvement in time to hire, attractiveness of candidates and ROI, and as a result, have routinely expanded their use of Restless Bandit once they try it.
Market. The war for talent, especially in skilled positions, has been well chronicled by McKinsey and others. Per LinkedIn’s report on 2016 Global Recruiting Trends, 62% of large companies expect to increase hiring volume in ’16 versus ’15, but only 44% of these companies expect a corresponding increase in hiring budgets. Put simply, recruitment teams need to do more with less. Restless Bandit’s high ROI solution is extremely attractive in this environment. Additionally, quality of new hires remains the single most important metric against which recruiting is measured. Restless Bandit’s data science approach to delivering targeted candidates matched specifically for job postings has delivered huge results for the many customers with whom we’ve spoken.
We’re looking forward to an exciting future for Restless Bandit and we’re glad to have a front row seat as they help bring modern data science to the world of recruitment.