Jobandtalent Gets $25M To Steer Its Linguistic Analysis Recruitment Platform Toward The U.S.

Recruitment startup Jobandtalent, which uses linguistic analysis to alert candidates to jobs they might otherwise have missed, has topped up its Series A funding round with another $25 million — bringing the total to $39 million. The Spanish headquartered startup added today that it’s continuing discussions on closing a “massive” Series B round with some new investors in the coming months.

The expansion to its Series A is led by existing investor Pelayo Cortina Koplowitz, with Qualitas Equity Partners, Kibo Ventures, Fundación José Manuel Entrecanales, and business angel Nicolás Luca de Tena, also continuing to participate in the round. The unemployment rate in Spain remains cripplingly high so it’s fitting for Spanish investors to be putting money into a startup that uses algorithmic matching to remove some of the friction from the job application process.

Jobandtalent uses a linguistics algorithm to identify patterns within the structure and phrasing of  job adverts and CVs — converting them into data points to match candidates to suitable jobs. This allows for job seekers to do less active seeking themselves, with the platform pinging them when it thinks it’s found a suitable vacancy. The platform is now signing up more than 450,000 new registered users per month, it said today.

Co-founder Juan Urdiales tells TechCrunch it’s topping up the Series A at this point to help accelerate growth to strengthen its hand for its next round of funding. “We are currently working on our Series B, and in this case we think that we will be bringing in some new international investors,” he adds.

At this stage Jobandtalent is processing 1.7 million job applications per month, and has 3.7 million monthly active users. More than 6,000 companies advertised vacancies on its platform in the past month. It also tracks candidate job interviews, and says the platform is now delivering a rate of 4,000 per day.

In terms of assessing the performance and accuracy of its matching algorithm, Urdiales said it’s now looking at “more operative metrics that can make you understand if the suggestions are generating the desired output” — such as average applications per job posting per candidate. He claims this is 3x to 5x better results than “the leading job boards”. When it comes to recruitment startups (of which there are myriad) Urdiales names Jobspotting, Jobr and Switch as its main competitors.

Jobandtalent’s primary markets at this point are Spain, the U.K. and Mexico. A U.S. launch planned for early this year was postponed pending greater funding resources, with the Series A expansion now set to go towards growing market share in in Colombia, Chile — and to putting a “first step” into the U.S.

“We did a very small prelaunch test, and we realised that we didn’t have enough money to do a relevant marketplace testing, so we decided to postpone it,” says Urdiales on the U.S. launch. “Now we have enough funding to do it properly, so we are going to do some tests in specific locations to understand the marketplace dynamics and then scale it rapidly from there.”

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