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Allec Gomes on Unsplash
Human resources technology startup Clovers this week announced it has raised $15 million in seed funding to bring conversational intelligence to interviewing and hiring.
The company, with headquarters in Nashville and Los Angeles, has only been around since December 2020, and is led by veteran technology executives, including Adam Miller, founder and former CEO of corporate learning giant Cornerstone OnDemand, and Jason Nazar, co-founder and CEO of Comparably.
The seed funding found was led by venture firms Greycroft and Alpha Edison with participation from Crosslink Capital, Acadian Ventures, Fika Ventures and Act One Ventures. Clovers said the new funding will be used for product development, talent acquisition and marketing.
Often used in customer service and call centers, conversational intelligence, or conversational AI, uses machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to analyze conversation in real time to offer insight and support. Using AI, Clovers will offer questions for interviewers during the interview, post-interview candidate insights, and post-mortem interviewer coaching.
The company said many employers have neglected to properly fund and train those involved in the interview process in recent years, especially as remote interviews have become a fixture of the hiring process. An April 2020 Gartner analysis showed that 86% of organizations are incorporating new virtual technology into their approach to interviewing. According to Clovers, that statistic, combined with the fact that a bad hire can cost an employer up to 30% of that employee’s first year earnings, and a survey from job site Monster.com estimating 95% of workers are thinking about switching jobs, underscores the need for better interviewing tools.
Clovers’ “interview intelligence platform” will address this shift in hiring over the last 18 months, said CEO Doug Leonard in a press statement.
“The modern workplace and its hiring processes are transforming, driven by technology advancements, the impact of COVID-19 and employee desire for a hybrid remote-office model,” he said. “This is causing companies to rethink recruiting, looking for inclusive, equitable and insightful interviews.”
Nate Redmond, managing partner at Alpha Edison, said Clovers will help employers benefit from the ability to reach new and diverse talent pools in the rapidly changing workplace. “Conversational and artificial intelligence create a tremendous opportunity to enable fair and equitable interviewing across nearly every industry,” he said in a press statement.
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