Recruitment automation startup PredictiveHire, which makes use of an AI bot to inform instantly if a candidate is true for a job utilizing simply 5 questions answered through telephone textual content, has raised $7 million in a pre-Sequence A spherical.
Sydney expertise recruiting agency Hudson is likely one of the startup’s key backers, together with a number of people together with Yarra Capital Administration chair Dion Hershan, Melbourne investor Leigh Jasper, and former Macquarie Company Advisers chair Jim Craig.
The enterprise will use the funds to ramp up its world plans – it already operates in 47 nations – with a giant give attention to the US market.
PredictiveHire’s automated interview bot, known as Phai, is now “interviewing” a candidate each 30 seconds with its 5 textual content message questions. The enterprise has tailored Google’s pure language processing (NLP) algorithm, generally known as BERT, to analyse somebody’s character utilizing synthetic intelligence based mostly on the phrases they use.
The startup has performed greater than 1.2 million candidate interviews, constructing a dataset of 500,000-plus million phrases to analyse the contextual that means of the phrases individuals select in written job interviews.

PredictiveHire CEO Barb Hyman
CEO Barb Hyman mentioned firms are utilizing PredictiveHire to rent at velocity, with out bias, whereas giving candidates a pleasant and interesting course of. All of the job candidates obtain suggestions, whether or not profitable or no. .
“In 2022, the worldwide expertise scarcity throughout all industries is resulting in a novel state of affairs: companies are below rising stress to rent with velocity and on the identical time broaden their expertise pool to efficiently fill a task,” she mentioned.
“Conventional recruitment simply doesn’t scale this fashion. PredictiveHire solves this downside by interviewing everybody who applies for a task and has the power to know their suitability inside seconds – all based mostly on a textual content dialog.”
PredictiveHire counts native company giants Woolworths, Afterpay and Qantas amongst its buyer base.
Woolworths Group, Australia’s largest non-public employer, has greater than 1 million candidates apply for round 40,000 roles yearly.
The retailer’s head of advisory and expertise acquisitions providers, Keri Foti, mentioned an estimated 5,000 recruitment hours had been saved through the use of PredictiveHire in simply its first week of automated interviews.
“We love the software, and we knew candidates would like it as a result of it’s cell and it’s interactive. We additionally love the truth that we will measure advocacy for Woolworths on the finish of it,” she mentioned.