Jobandtalent’s Linguistic Analysis Recruitment Platform Nabs $14M

Jobandtalent, a recruitment platform that uses linguistic analysis to help jobseekers find roles they might otherwise miss, has closed a $14 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Spain’s Qualitas Equity Partners, Kibo Ventures, FJME Ventures and business angels Pelayo Cortina Koplowitz and Nicolas Luca de Tena.

The startup raised $3.3 million last July, with investors including Kibo, Félix Ruiz (co-founder of Tuenti.com) and existing shareholder Alfonso Villanueva.

The startup said the new funding will be put towards market expansion — by spending on marketing to increase brand awareness — with further growth in Europe, Latin American and the U.S. pegged as targets.

Jobandtalent‘s premise is to automate the work of matching candidates with relevant job opportunities (and vice versa) by using a linguistics-based algorithm that parses job ads and jobseekers’ CVs to locate relevant pairings — thereby allowing the more valuable (to employers) passive candidates to be more easily folded into the mix. Or that’s the claim.

Jobandtalent says its platform is now processing more than 300,000 job applications per month from candidates, with the U.K., Spain, Mexico, Chile and the U.S. named as its strongest markets for usage.

The startup launched its platform in the U.S. in Q1 this year. “So far it has been very positive — we are offering over 1.5 million jobs at the moment, and more than 50,000 new users from the U.S. have joined the platform in the last 3 months,” it told TechCrunch.

Globally, it has 2,000 companies directly using the site, with a total of 2.5 million job postings on its platform monthly — albeit, some are from job boards that have been integrated with the platform, rather than direct from employers that have signed up to Jobandtalent.

When TechCrunch spoke to the startup last July, it pegged the accuracy of its candidate and job matching algorithm at 50 percent “totally accurate” matches. A year on it says that’s now 60 percent overall and 75 percent in “certain sectors,” such as finance and tech.

“We aim to grow to 75 percent (or over) accuracy in the matching by 2015 (in the majority of the sectors),” it told TechCrunch. “The more data points that we have (CVs, job postings, applications, etc) the more accuracy we can bring to it.

“We have just started to include the career path analysis technology, and there is still continued improvements to be made here, but it’s going well,” it added.

Over the past year it has also launched iOS and Android apps. It also hired a chief data scientist and beefed up its algorithm dev team.

On the user side, Jobandtalent introduced a ‘course and education’ section to help jobseekers locate training opportunities that could help their career develop.