With the economy in turmoil, recruitment is slowing. Layoffs.fyi, a busy tech startup layoff tracker, shows that 60 companies have laid off more than 16,000 workers in the past month or so. It is not limited to technology. According to a recent Gartner survey, one in three HR executives all of them Industry said their firms responded to a volatile market by reducing hiring.
But hiring did not stop completely. Instead, HR departments are being asked to do more with fewer people, completing strategic work such as scheduling interviews, gathering feedback and moving processes forward. On behalf of the expanded recruiting and hiring team, Lydia Hahn makes the case that software can help — Hahn is the co-founder and CEO of ModernLoop, a platform built around a scheduling engine for remote interviews.
“After the shift to remote work, recruiting teams found themselves in a new interview schedule,” Hahn told TechCrunch in an email interview. “[Now,] Although headcount is declining, key hires are still a priority and engineering recruitment is as tough as ever… [But] It’s clear to me that people can achieve more significant results when products are seamlessly integrated and technology reduces steps to accomplish something.
Han co-founded ModernLoop in 2020 with Christopher Trillo, now ModernLoop’s CTO. After stints at Salesforce and Meta, and working as a product manager at Slack, Han helped scale Slack integrations and work with Google Calendar. At Meta, Trillo spearheaded Facebook’s philanthropy feature, which allows people and charities to launch fundraising campaigns.
Han says she was inspired to start ModernLoop after joining Brakes, where her sister worked as a tech recruiter.
“As a woman who has been with her for the past six years, I have seen that while she is an incredibly strategic and intelligent recruiter, most of her days are spent doing manual and repetitive tasks,” Hahn said. “I wanted to take my previous experience building productivity hacks into the tools we rely on every day and apply them to one of the most process-driven parts of business: recruiting.”
Image Credits: Modern loop
To that end, ModernLoop offers tools designed to help HR teams handle interviews “efficiently” across multiple time zones. The service’s scheduling algorithm tries to find the best time, sifting through calendar events to determine which other tasks are scheduled, as opposed to interviews with candidates. Smart Loop can also identify and tag calendar events that can be moved, Hahn says, such as internal one-on-one meetings and meetings with external participants.
In addition, ModernLoop sends email invitations directly to interviews with links to LinkedIn interviewer profiles, calendar events, and video meetings. The platform monitors the acceptance of interview calendar events between candidates and interviewers, monitors the HR team’s interview load and recommends training modules that may be useful.
“While there are many great tools focused on candidate tracking, many of those we integrate with are lacking when it comes to the recruiting operations elements,” Hahn said, citing startups like GoodTime, Distill and OnboardIQ. “Our biggest competitor is the manual systems that recruiters have created for themselves through Google Sheets and Excel. These systems are time-consuming and slow down the entire recruiting process… to help companies keep Modern Loop as a business and still have the strategic support and new hires needed to run their business because the product can boost recruiting and Down, instantly.
ModernLoop says it works with “dozens” of clients, including VSCO, Chainalysis, Ramp and Han’s former employer, Brakes. Han didn’t disclose financials, but ModernLoop’s annual recurring revenue is growing 500% year over year.
The growth seems to have won over investors — Asel led a $9 million Series A round in ModernLoop, bringing the startup’s total to $12.3 million. Specifically, Slack CEO Stuart Butterfield and Zoom CEO Eric Yun participated with Web Investment and Quiet Capital.
A modern lop may benefit from continued advances in artificial intelligence technology. Investors remain bullish on the sector as the “Great Retirement” begins to slow. In the year In 2021, venture investors poured more than $12.3 billion into HR technology startups, which is about 3.6 times the amount invested in 2020, according to Pitchbook data.
When reached for comment, Amit Kumar, partner at Acel, said in a statement: “Talent professionals at fast-growing companies are increasingly relying on Modern Loop as the backbone of their interviewing and recruiting efforts. Their platform helps talent teams remain agile and agile even as their objectives change, which is more important than ever in today’s complex hiring environment.
Hahn said the proceeds will be used to expand San Francisco-based Modern Loop from 12 to 25 by the end of the year, focusing on go-to-market hires in areas such as sales and marketing.
