(Humanly Photo)

Humanly has raised more cash to fuel growth for its HR software that helps companies screen job candidates, schedule interviews, automate initial communication, run reference checks, and more.

The company landed $4.3 million in a round led by Zeal Capital Partners, with participation from Spark Growth Ventures, Basecamp Fund, Moneta Ventures, and a group of angels including Payscale founder Joe Giordano and Aditi Consulting founder Pradeep Singh. Total funding to date is $5.3 million.

Humanly has seen revenue increase six times over the past year. It is riding tailwinds from companies that are rethinking their talent acquisition strategies amid the pandemic-driven shift to remote work and increasing attention on diversity, said CEO and co-founder Prem Kumar, a former Microsoft and Tinypulse employee who helped launch the startup in August 2018 with Andrew Gardner and Bryan Leptich.

Humanly’s technology aims to reduce the time it takes to find talent and provide a better experience for potential new employees. The software uses progressive profiling, similar to a marketing tool, as a way to quickly understand a candidate’s intent and background. For companies that are getting thousands of applications per week, Humanly gives them a way to widen their net and screen people at scale.

Once a company engages with a candidate, Humanly automates repetitive conversations at the “top of funnel” before a human steps in to complete the hiring process.

“We’re replacing the time that a recruiting coordinator would spend doing hundreds of these phone screens, and doing it a much quicker period of time,” Kumar said. “And then we’re helping the human be better at the next step.”

From left: Humanly co-founders Bryan Leptich, Prem Kumar and Andrew Gardner. (Humanly Photo)

The tech can help remove bias by hiding a candidate’s name, gender, years of experience, and more. It also analyzes how companies are interacting with different candidates. For example, the company recently helped one customer identify that junior male candidates were getting seven minutes of additional speaking time compared to junior female candidates.

“Let’s make those conversations more equitable,” Kumar said.

Kumar said the company is focused on building AI from an ethical standpoint. He said the 10-person team at Humanly is about 50% diverse both with gender and ethnicity, “which helps us build products that represent our customers.”

Humanly graduated from Y Combinator in 2019. Its customers include Microsoft, the Seattle Storm, Moss Adams, and more.

Other Seattle-area startups using tech to improve the talent acquisition process include Karat, a technical interview platform, and Textio, which helps companies write better job listings.

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