Unify Jobs, a hiring technology startup in Cleveland, has raised $4.5 million in seed money.
The funding round was led by North Coast Ventures, the angel investor network in Cleveland, with participation from JumpStart Inc., the venture developer and venture capital organization in Cleveland, and "several other well-established Cleveland-based investors," Unify Jobs said in a statement.
Unify Jobs is a spinoff of Unify Labs, the Cleveland-based nonprofit organization primarily funded by serial entrepreneurs Stephen McHale, Charlie Lougheed and Jim Hickey in 2017.
Unify Jobs has created the FlashHired skills-based hiring technology, which aims to eliminate bias that may exist in resume technology while masking job seeker identities until both the seeker and potential employer have expressed interest. This system enables hiring based on whether a job seeker can do and would like to do a job, the company said.
Founded in 2021 and led by longtime Cleveland tech entrepreneur McHale, Unify Jobs launched on a limited basis on March 31 and expects to do a full market launch later this summer.
"It's clear there is another dynamic going in the labor market beyond the Great Resignation," CEO McHale said, referring to the elevated rate at which U.S. workers have quit their jobs starting in the spring of 2021 as the Covid-19 pandemic began to ease.
"Our analysis and success in getting people hired has unearthed what we believe to be the Great Realignment," McHale said in his company's statement.
For instance, none of the job seekers who landed bank teller jobs at a Unify Jobs hiring event had banking experience, and most of the seekers were not looking for teller jobs, said Brian Heath, the startup's chief product and analytics officer, in its statement.
"Our match and fit technology not only showed seekers roles they had not considered but gave them the confidence to apply and be successful," Heath said.
McHale and Lougheed are co-founders of Everstream, the analytics business acquired in 2005 by Concurrent Computer, and Explorys, the health data company that IBM acquired in 2015.
Lougheed has since started Axuall, the workforce intelligence company and medical professionals' data network in Cleveland.
Hickey has started a handful of marketing companies. His Arras Keathley company was acquired by Cleveland marketing and communications company Adcom Group in 2018, according to a statement.
Hickey is an executive vice president for Adcom, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The description of Everstream in this story has been corrected.
