Amsterdam-based employment startup TestGorilla secures $70m Series A to help companies eliminate hiring bias

Amsterdam-based employment startup TestGorilla announced it has secured $70 million Series A to help companies eliminate hiring bias. The round was co-led by Balderton and Atomico, and brings the company’s total funding to $80m following previous investment from Notion, Partech, and CapitalT.

Founded by serial entrepreneur Wouter Durville and former Bain & Company partner Otto Verhage, TestGorilla makes the recruitment process more fair, efficient, and data-driven by enabling organisations to use skills assessments as soon as candidates apply for open roles.

TestGorilla has attracted more than 5,000 customers, less than two years since its launch in summer 2020. These include Sony, PepsiCo, Bain & Co, Oracle, Revolut, H&M and the UK’s National Health Service. G2, the world’s largest software marketplace, recently named TestGorilla in its prestigious list of the top five fastest-growing software products for 2022.

Wouter Durville, Co-founder, TestGorilla: ''Too often, the recruitment process requires hiring managers to spend hours screening unreliable, incomplete, subjective CVs. By replacing resumes with more than 220 scientifically validated tests, our platform helps to eliminate hiring bias, creating a level playing field where every candidate can compete on equal terms.''

TestGorilla is leading the way in skills-based hiring – an increasingly popular way to recruit that gives every candidate an equal chance to prove their abilities and motivation. Adopting skills-based hiring helps businesses recruit top talent and more diverse candidates, faster, easier and with less risk of bias. Studies show that job success is most strongly correlated with multi-measure assessments, whereas CVs and work experience are the weakest links.

The TestGorilla platform caters to this by offering organisations hundreds of pre-employment tests that enable them to tailor their candidate search to their exact requirements. Areas covered by the assessments range from quantitative skills to cognitive ability, enabling prospective employees to compete on merit rather than background.

James Wise, Partner, Balderton: ''Our portfolio companies hire tens of thousands of people a year and all of them have been looking for ways to remove any bias in their processes while giving candidates the best hiring experience. It’s clear that traditional hiring practices have failed on both these fronts, and that this has only been exacerbated by Covid-19 and the rise of remote hiring.''

TestGorilla’s platform enables companies to save valuable time and avoid expensive mis-hires by remotely assessing all the factors that contribute to job success, such as specific role-related skills, language proficiency, cognitive abilities, soft skills, motivation, personality and culture add.

Laurens-Jan Olsthoorn, Partner, Bain & Company: ''Using TestGorilla as a screening tool has helped us to reduce the bottom 30% of applicants and replace these with better-qualified candidates, improving the success rate of our subsequent rounds. We have seen a strong correlation between candidates’ performance in TestGorilla assessments and in the interview process, so we trust TestGorilla to make a great first cut from a large number of applicants.''

The ongoing development of TestGorilla’s proprietary technology will include the platform’s integration with further Applicant Tracking Systems, enabling employers to use the product seamlessly from within their existing ATS, and the introduction of new features to satisfy the requirements of mid-sized businesses. The platform’s test library continues to expand, with the existing 220-plus tests due to be joined by a further 100 by the end of 2022. The company also expects to hire 100 new employees in the coming year.

www.testgorilla.com
www.balderton.com