Moonhub founder and CEO Nancy Xu had an epiphany while studying for her PhD in computer science at Stanford University. She says that 90% of the best candidates for any job are identified by recruiters because the tools recruiters use are too fixated on a set of keywords to find the best candidates. I don’t think so.
She goes beyond common kinds of attribution to find candidates that might otherwise be missed, using an AI-driven approach that does it in a cheaper and faster way than current methods. I have tried to change this.
Today her company, Moonhub, announced a $4.4 million seed.
“We are building Moonhub and want to embrace AI for the fastest growing companies. And what we are doing is helping companies find the best talent for every opportunity and Having a core platform that allows us to work with in-house experts to actually recruit people and engage them in those opportunities,” said Xu.
According to her, the traditional way to recruit is to look in someone’s LinkedIn profile for a set of five or 10 keywords, and if those words aren’t there, you could be a perfectly viable candidate. Some would have gone unnoticed. “For example, not finding someone who is passionate about working for a company in the healthcare sector reflects a lot of what we call ‘unstructured signals’ in personal profiles. because it is not possible to identify the ”
The AI platform her company has built finds billions of individual data points from the public web and then builds an AI layer on top to analyze all that information, she says. “So we know we see you for who you are, as opposed to her five keywords that actually show up on your profile.”
For now, you’ll have to use a handful of internal recruiters who run the platform, but later this year, anyone can use the platform to recruit employees using natural language queries similar to ChatGPT. We plan to build an external facing search tool to help us find it.
“Later this year, we will be launching a core search platform that can be thought of as an interface that hiring managers, recruiters, and even ordinary people who want to find potential candidates can use. We can find thousands of people who can express themselves in the language and fit the role,” says Xu.
The early-stage company currently has dozens of customers using the platform to find candidates. She currently has 15 employees and is growing. Xu believes her platform will help her and other companies find more diverse candidates.
“The fundamental thesis we have as a company in working with clients and in hiring internally is that talent is universal, opportunity is not. It’s also reflected in our own hiring process: some people have worked at great companies and great universities, but others don’t have that pedigree, but are incredibly talented. 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 a number of high-profile angels.
