AI recruiting company ENGAGE Talent has raised a $3.5 million funding round led by High Alpha Capital and Grand Ventures. The Charleston, SC-based startup plans to invest heavily in product acceleration and customer acquisition.
Existing investors, new investor Engage fund, and Silicon Valley Bank also participated in the fundraise, which included a mix of equity and debt-based capital. ENGAGE has also been previously backed by Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed fund and others.
Founded in 2015, ENGAGE is the result of decades of research on job turnover and candidate behavior. The AI platform analyzes more than a billion data points each month to map and predict when passive candidates will be ready to change jobs.
Some of the factors it considers are things like the candidate’s professional background, the current job market, and specific company events.
Recruiters can then be ready to actively engage those candidates. The startup counts enterprises like Allstate, Dell, and Transamerica amongst its customers, and claims to generate anywhere from a 200-700 percent increase in candidate engagement.
CEO Joseph Hanna says the platform has also added new features that aim to improve employee retention for clients. It analyzes current employees, applying a similar algorithm to the recruiting feature, and assigns a retention risk score.
“Our AI can identify, down to the individual level, who might have a higher turnover risk,” says Hanna. That risk can also be applied to specific key functions, office locations, and roles.
Hanna claims the feature does not violate privacy because they don’t take public information, such as an employees’ social media accounts or digital sentiment, into account. “Once we give that information to a company, what they do with it is up to them,” he says.
The bulk of this funding will go towards continuing to refine their AI product, as well as building out their enterprise customer base. That push was the impetus for ENGAGE to join the Atlanta-based Engage fund venture platform, a corporate-backed startup program that connects portfolio companies with partners like Home Depot, UPS, Invesco and several more.
As they expand their client roster, Hanna foresees exploring additional uses for their unique data set and algorithm. “We are a data intelligence company that just happens to be in the labor market,” he tells Hypepotamus.
For example, financial services professionals can use ENGAGE to identify employee retention trends within a company and whether their performance in the markets might be affected. New use cases may continue to arise as the startup scales.
ENGAGE has offices in Charleston, SC; Atlanta; and India. They currently employ 30 and are hiring in development and sales.
