Job simulation startup Interviewed garners $2 mln seed

San Francisco-based Interviewed, which provides job simulations for candidates, has raised $2 million in seed funding. The investors included SV Angel, Red Swan and Apollo Education Ventures.

PRESS RELEASE

Interviewed came out of beta two months ago as part of Y Combinator’s Spring 2015 batch and today announced $2m in seed funding. The round was led by SV Angel, Red Swan, Apollo Education Ventures, and several prominent angels and seed funds.

The company was founded six months ago to allow hiring managers to see their candidates in action tackling real-world situations using job simulations.
Employers have been screening an enormous number of candidates using Interviewed’s platform — over 86,000 candidate assessments so far across 83 countries.

TaskUs, an outsourcing company that counts Uber, Tinder, and Hotel Tonight among its clients, was one of Interviewed’s earliest adopters. After seeing immediate increases in hiring quality, candidate satisfaction, and hiring cycle time, TaskUs offered to become a strategic investor and joined this funding round.

Hiring managers love that Interviewed replaces the voodoo art of resume and phone screens with empirical evidence of a candidate’s skills. Sales candidates, for example, will use a CRM, write cold emails, and pitch customers on the phone – all in an open-ended, highly-realistic environment. The results are scored against detailed performance benchmarks, and the hiring manager can replay simulations with one click.

Interviewed’s strategy is to plug into the existing enterprise HR stack so that managers don’t need to learn a new system. Last month, Interviewed announced a partnership with Greenhouse, a leading applicant tracking system, to enable one-click integration. Interviewed will be using the funds to build partnerships with other enterprise HR systems and to expand the scope and realism of its job simulations.