Searchlight Raises $17 Million Series A Round, Launches Talent Intelligence Platform to Help Companies Improve Quality of Hire With Behavioral Data and Prescriptive Analytics

Searchlight, a talent intelligence platform powered by hard data that measures the soft skills that can make or break quality of hire, announced that it has closed a Series A funding round of $17 million led by Founders Fund with participation from Accel, Shasta Ventures, Kapor Capital, Operator Collective, and prominent angel investors including current and former Heads of People and Talent at companies like Airbnb, Atlassian, Coda, Confluent, and Plaid. Lead investor, Founders Fund General Partner Keith Rabois, has also joined Searchlight’s board.

The company also announced the launch of its talent intelligence platform designed to align hiring teams to assess and retain great hires — finally giving companies the ability to measure and improve quality of hire. Searchlight connects candidates’ reference and self-assessment data to post-hire outcomes, creating a powerful hiring and retention engine that provides prescriptive insights. Using the platform, organizations can confidently hire faster, mitigate bias and retain a stronger workforce. Customers who have used the platform in beta to hire 1000s of candidates over the past year saw a 45% improvement in retention and 40% faster time-to-fill.

The challenges of the pandemic, the Great Resignation, and a talent shortage across levels and industries have caused retention rates to plummet. It’s taking longer to hire as candidates rethink their lives and work. Many talented job candidates have been overlooked or lost in the clutter of hiring platforms; 82% of executives surveyed* admit that existing screens like interviews and work samples are causing them to miss good candidates. Meanwhile, nearly half of all hires fail within 18 months* and recruiters say that Quality of Hire is their top priority in 2022.

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“The most successful companies understand that their business performance is tied to hiring quality and retention,” said Keith Rabois, General Partner at Founders Fund and Searchlight Board Member. “Searchlight is eliminating guesswork through data, leading to incredible results for their customers. I wish I had this platform as I built my teams at Square, Paypal, and Linkedin, and recommend all companies use Searchlight.”

Almost 90% of mishires happen because of a soft skills mismatch. Searchlight’s ability to predict, measure and improve soft skills alignment is driving quality of hire at companies like Udemy, Talkdesk, and Zapier. Searchlight places a specific focus on measuring competencies, culture alignment, strengths and gaps, and career interests. Searchlight’s platform connects behavioral data to employee outcomes so organizations have a holistic solution to measure and improve quality of hire.

“Searchlight’s data and actionable advice lets us customize sourcing, efficiently identify the best-matched candidates, and personalize onboarding. With Searchlight, we’ve created a hiring system in one quarter that took more than one year at my previous company, saved $3M+ in recruiting costs, and generated $3M+ in increased revenue. Searchlight creates a virtuous cycle between great employee performance and great business performance that brings in more high performers,” says Chad Herring, Chief People Officer of Snapdocs.

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“We’re taking the guesswork out of hiring so that companies can crush biases and build high-performing, diverse, and inclusive organizations,” said Kerry Wang, co-founder and CEO of Searchlight. “Our data leads to more opportunities for talent left behind by traditional hiring practices. Searchlight saves our customers tens of millions of dollars by reducing turnover, which also means a reduced number of employees who go through life setbacks when they find themselves in the wrong job. We believe that the only way to create a quality workforce is to start from a foundation of diversity and inclusion.”

Searchlight’s expanded platform includes:

• One-Click References and Self Assessments deliver a complete view of a candidate’s behavioral profile, including their competencies, culture alignment, strengths and gaps, and career interests. Hiring managers use this data to replace interviews and ramp new hires faster to long-term success. No more vague arguments about “culture fit” or “gut feelings.”
• Quality of Hire Dashboard gives people-focused leaders a standardized formula for Quality of Hire and fine-grained visibility across teams, demographics and geographies. Searchlight’s software takes what is usually a manual, years-long process and replaces it with continual pulse checks and seamless integrations to create a source-of-truth for hiring quality.
• People Science Engine connects pre-hire behavioral data to employee outcomes to surface the unique DNA of high-performers at each company and learn from what the best-performing hiring managers and recruiters do. Searchlight’s prescriptive analytics recommends better practices and target candidate profiles to improve recruiting efficiency and quality of hire.

“Searchlight has become the foundation of our talent analytics framework that finally bridges the gap between pre- and post-hire data to improve quality of hire,” said Shauna Geraghty, Talkdesk Senior Vice President of Talent. “For each hire, Searchlight gives my managers the insights to jumpstart onboarding and speed up the time to productivity. From a company standpoint, I can finally gain prescriptive hiring insights that improve outcomes for my recruiters, managers, and company’s bottom line.”

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