A person hopes to get noticed for a job by sending in a resume. TestGorilla, a startup out of Amsterdam, has built an assessment platform that can be used to screen for a wide range of job categories, and it says its approach is more effective.
About a year after TestGorilla raised $10 million in a seed round from Notion, Partech, and CapitalT, Atomico and Balderton Capital are co-leading the funding. In two years of operations, TestGorilla has amassed 5,300 customers, including big names like H&M and Sony, that are selecting from a library of 220 assessments, covering both hard skills and coding.
Wouter Durville is the CEO who co- founded the company with Otto Verhage. Is this person knowledgeable about coding? But what about other motives? This is a first step for us. Once the group is small, the assessment and CV should be done. He said that the job interview was for a smaller group.
It has been difficult to address the gap in the market that TestGorilla is addressing. The first point of entry for people applying for work has always been on a resume. The more popular the job, the less effective the resume screening is for the recruiters. It is not possible to read between the lines, and for people to stand out, when each CV looks the same as the next.
Durville and his wife moved to Barcelona, Spain after starting a social enterprise, a handmade rug business, in the Netherlands. The company began to expand after the move. Durville and his partner were suddenly flooded with hundreds, and then thousands, of resumes for roles in customer support, finance and related roles.
He said that they were missing out on a lot of talent because they had no recruiting department. There is a better way to do this. That is how the idea came about.
The company began with building tests of its own and gradually improved its tooling. With Test Gorilla taking off, the plan is to shut down the rug company.
For example, Turing has devised screening tests, but they are focused on technical/CS/engineering jobs, but what is interesting about TestGorilla is the company takes a more broad approach for testing some skills.
TestGorilla uses both technical and operational teams to build and run the business, but it also crowdsources experts who work with the startup to build tests in their specific areas of expertise. Each time their tests are used, these experts make a cut.
TestGorilla's library will be expanded by another third by the end of 2022, and 100 more people will be hired by that time. More and deeper integrations will be built with other tools used by those who run hiring processes, such as application tracking systems, recruitment platforms and job boards.
The company argues that this provides a more practical way for companies to start to screen for people who might be better fits for roles, simply byAutomating the first stage of that process, which helps remove the potential for bias. The idea that everyone has to take the same assessments to figure out not just skills but also culture fit is compelling.
The ability for the company to provide more efficiency to hiring especially in distributed teams is one of the factors that swayed the deal for investors.
Luca Eisenstecken, Atomico's partner, said that finding the right people is increasingly challenging for even the world's best brands. TestGorilla is seeing incredible growth with its approach to solve the problem. They are doing this by giving a fair hiring process based on skills and eliminating biases that prejudice decision making.
The companies in our portfolio hire more than 10,000 people a year and they have been looking for ways to remove bias while giving candidates the best hiring experience. James Wise, partner at Balderton Capital said that traditional hiring practices have failed on both fronts and that this has only been worsened by Covid-19. TestGorilla is a more effective and fair way to identify people with the right skills for the role, and we are excited to support the team on their mission to end the era of CV-based candidate screening.
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