Nancy Xu, founder and CEO of Moonhub, had an inkling of hiring while studying for her PhD in computer science at Stanford. She believes that 90% of the most suitable candidates for any job opportunity are not identified by applicants, because the tools they use are highly tuned to a set of keywords to find the best people.
She plans to do this by using an AI-driven approach that looks beyond traditional behavioral patterns to find other candidates who might otherwise miss out, and to do so in a cheaper and faster way than current methods.
Today, her company, Moonhub, announced that it has raised $4.4 million in seed funding.
“We’re building Moonhub and at its core we want to hire AI for fast-growing companies. What we do is we have a core platform that allows companies to find the best talent for any opportunity, and we work with internal experts to recruit and engage people for these opportunities,” Xu said.
She says the traditional way of recruiting is to look for five or 10 key words in someone’s LinkedIn profile, and if those words aren’t there, a perfectly qualified candidate will be overlooked. “For example, in the healthcare space, you won’t find people who are interested in working for a company because you can’t identify a lot of what we call ‘disorganized signals’ in a person’s profile.”
She says that the AI platform that her company has built will get billions of individual data points from the public web and then build an AI layer on top of that. “So we know we can find you by who you are with the five keywords that appear on your profile.”
For now, this involves using a few in-house recruiters who run the platform, but later this year they’ll build an external face-to-face search tool so that anyone can use the platform to find employees, unlike ChatGPT, which uses natural language queries.
“At the end of this year, we’re launching a major search platform that you can think of as an interface, as a hiring manager, as a recruiter, as a regular person looking for candidates to find opportunities, being able to express what they’re looking for in natural language, and then see thousands of people who are well-qualified for that role,” Shu said. .
Today, the early-stage company has dozens of clients who use the platform to find candidates. It currently has 15 employees and is growing. Xu believes her platform will help her and other companies find more diverse candidates.
“In the way we work with our clients and internally in our own recruitment, our core concept as a company is that we truly believe that talent is universal and not an opportunity. And that plays out in our own recruitment process. While we have people who have worked at great companies and great universities, we don’t have that pedigree; “But we have incredibly talented people themselves. And we’re very proud to have such a diverse team,” she said.
The $4.4 million seed round was led by Khosla Ventures and GV with participation from AIX Ventures, Day One Ventures and notable angels.
