Sense Raises $50M for AI-Powered Recruitment

Conversational AI for job recruitment startup Sense has raised $50 million in a Series D funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Sense offers companies a platform to find, vet, and recruit potential hires through customizable chatbots.

Sense Hiring

Sense applies AI technology to help companies find the best potential people to join their teams. The company has more than 600 clients using the platform to create personalized chatbots that can interact with potential hires and find out more about them and where they might be best placed to work for them. The chatbots can ask about interests, training, and background through simple questions, understanding natural language and using the answers to slot people into different categories based on how they respond. Over the last year, Sense has doubled its revenue and team size. Sense claims its customers get through 263% more candidates on average compared to manual sorting, reducing the time spent to recruit by as much as 81%. The new money is aimed at ramping up its services and pushing deeper into healthcare, logistics, retail, and other industries. The latest funding comes just six months after Sense’s $16 million Series C round. Sense has raised around $90 million, all told.

“Sense’s founding mission to equip companies to engage with best-fit talent both quickly and effectively is more important than ever. Our work with hundreds of companies in the past year alone has enabled them to build great teams and compete for talent amid the pandemic,” Sense CEO Anil Dharni said. “Our latest funding is not only validation of the need for personalized talent engagement in today’s candidate-centric world but is also an accelerant for our platform globally as we help reshape the future of work.”

Enterprising Recruitment

AI for recruitment is a logical extension of the enterprise AI used for customer service and internal communications. At a time when companies are particularly keen to find new employees, an AI service that can vet potential hires and provide a curated shortlist for interviews by humans is a handy tool. Sense isn’t unique, as startups likeLeadspicker or Paradox and its Olivia recruitment chatbot have been raking in cash for similar reasons, but its simple setup may make it very popular with smaller companies, in particular.

“Today’s market continues to put exponential pressures on hiring teams. With resignation rates increasing, a record number of job openings, and candidates in the driver’s seat, organizations are in dire need for new ways to speed, scale, and personalize the hiring process,” Dharni said. “And that’s exactly what we’re on a mission to do – help organizations achieve success in hiring fast, at scale, without sacrificing a personalized experience.”

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