Jeremey Schiff has used machine learning to develop software applications for nearly two decades, but it was his experience as a hiring manager at OpenTable that led him to build an AI-powered recruiting platform.
Schiff studied electrical engineering, computer science and applied machine learning at U.C. Berkeley, and while working towards a Ph.D. in robotics, he co-founded a free web-based photo editing tool in 2006 called FotoFlexer that people could use at other online sites like MySpace, Facebook and Photobucket.
A Business Journals article from 2010 describes FotoFlexer as "a boon to small-business people working on tight budgets," but that same year, Schiff had jumped to another Bay Area company called Ness Computing where he oversaw machine learning and product strategy for its personalized restaurant recommendations engine.
By 2014, he was the head of data science at OpenTable after the San Francisco-based restaurant reservations site acquired Ness Computing.
"I used to say, in the OpenTable days, there's no best restaurant," Schiff said. Rather, it just depends on what you're looking for, and "the same thing is true about candidates … If you find the right role for them, it's a very different sort of value proposition."
So, he left OpenTable in 2016 and founded RecruitBot in San Francisco the following year.
RecruitBot aims to become a one-stop-shop for recruiters and hiring managers.
"The old way of doing it is like, do the work, throw it out, just throw more bodies at it and do it again. And that's just not a smart or efficient way of doing things," Schiff said.
The company uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to create what Schiff described as a "flywheel" instead of the more traditional "funnel" metaphor that's often used in human resources and recruiting.
RecruitBot works by narrowing down search results to potential job candidates that are more likely to be a good fit and then creates a feedback loop to continuously improve those search results over time. It also offers tools for creating personalized and automated email campaigns that can make outreach more efficient and, hopefully, generate better response rates.
All of these services are underpinned by a database that has profiles on more than 600 million job candidates across various industries in both the private and public sectors, Schiff said.
The company gleans data from two types of sources: public online information from sites like LinkedIn, and private data which it buys from third-parties.
Its customers can be businesses located anywhere in the world, and the potential job candidates in its database are primarily located in English-speaking countries including the U.S., Canada and Western Europe.
The U.S. market for recruiting is expected to exceed $218 billion this year, according to Statista. That's relatively flat compared to 2022 but up from $119 billion in 2020, when the market dropped after several consecutive years of growth.
RecruitBot has raised just over $11 million, including an $8.2 million seed round led by Slow Ventures that RecruitBot announced on Tuesday. Its other investors include OCA Ventures, Freestyle Capital and Parade Ventures.
The company wouldn't confirm how many employees it has itself, but Schiff told me it was fewer than 50.
"We are outexecuting companies that are 10-times our size because we have the right people," Schiff said.
The company is developing a lot of its foundational machine learning model internally and then builds its system on "one of the largest cloud providers," Schiff said, which allows them to scale up quickly and efficiently.
Major cloud storage providers have been courting startups, as well.
Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft have all launched accelerators or other types of programs and partnerships that aim to get their cloud computing services in front of emerging AI-focused startups. Some AI startups have been using Oracle's cloud services, as well, according to The Information.
Even venture capital firms are starting to offer AI startups access to computing servers, according to The Information, as a way to become more competitive in deal making.
Other Bay Area startups that have developed hiring and recruiting software include Menlo Park-based Moonhub, as well as several San Francisco-based companies such as InstaWork, Simplify and Heroes Jobs which was acquired earlier this year.
