TestGorilla secures $70m Series A funding to help companies eliminate hiring bias

Jun 14, 2022

We’re delighted to announce that TestGorilla has secured $70m in Series A funding, co-led by the London-based venture capital firms Atomico and Balderton Capital. The funding brings the company’s total investment to $80m following previous investment from Notion, Partech, and CapitalT. Luca Eisenstecken from Atomico and James Wise from Balderton Capital will join the board as part of this investment round.

TestGorilla has attracted more than 5,300 customers, less than two years since its launch in summer 2020. These include Sony, PepsiCo, Bain & Company, Revolut, Oracle, H&M and the UK’s National Health Service. G2, the world’s largest software marketplace, recently named TestGorilla in its prestigious list of the top five fastest-growing software products for 2022.

Founded by serial entrepreneur Wouter Durville and former Bain & Company partner Otto Verhage, TestGorilla makes the recruitment process more fair, efficient, and data-driven by enabling organizations to use skills assessments as soon as candidates apply for open roles.

Replacing old-fashioned approaches like the CV

“Too often, the recruitment process requires hiring managers to spend hours screening unreliable, incomplete, subjective CVs,” Durville says. “By replacing resumes with more than 220 scientifically validated tests, our platform helps to eliminate hiring bias, creating a level playing field where every candidate can compete on equal terms.”

TestGorilla is leading the way in skills-based hiring – an increasingly popular way to recruit that gives every candidate an equal chance to prove their abilities and motivation. Adopting skills-based hiring helps businesses recruit top talent and more diverse candidates, faster, easier and with less risk of bias. Studies show that job success is most strongly correlated with multi-measure assessments, whereas CVs and work experience are the weakest links.

Otto Verhage (left) and Wouter Durville are celebrating after investors backed their vision

Our platform caters to this by offering organizations hundreds of pre-employment tests that enable them to tailor their candidate search to their exact requirements. Areas covered by the assessments range from quantitative skills to cognitive ability, enabling prospective employees to compete on merit rather than background.

The ability to assess applicants objectively, by comparing their ranked results before deciding which candidates to invite for an interview, helps remove the unconscious bias that can creep in when recruiters have dozens of CVs to screen (they spend, on average, six seconds reading each one). This results in a more diverse workforce – TestGorilla’s own team is a case in point – and studies also show that diverse teams perform better.

Strong success for customers including Bain & Company

“Using TestGorilla as a screening tool has helped us to reduce the bottom 30% of applicants and replace these with better-qualified candidates, improving the success rate of our subsequent rounds,” says Laurens-Jan Olsthoorn, a partner at Bain & Company. “We have seen a strong correlation between candidates’ performance in TestGorilla assessments and in the interview process, so we trust TestGorilla to make a great first cut from a large number of applicants. I would happily recommend TestGorilla to my industry peers.”

“Finding the right people is increasingly challenging for even the world’s best brands, and the pandemic has opened employer eyes to huge untapped pools of global talent,” says Atomico’s partner Luca Eisenstecken. “TestGorilla is seeing incredible growth with its automated, data-driven approach to solving this problem. And they’re doing this while delivering a fairer hiring process based on skills rather than resumes, eliminating the biases that prejudice decision-making."

“Our portfolio companies hire tens of thousands of people a year and all of them have been looking for ways to remove any bias in their processes while giving candidates the best hiring experience. It’s clear that traditional hiring practices have failed on both these fronts, and that this has only been exacerbated by Covid-19 and the rise of remote hiring,” says James Wise, partner at Balderton Capital.

“We've already seen TestGorilla become wildly popular within our portfolio as a more effective and fair way to identify people with the right skills for the role, and we're excited to support the team on their mission to end the era of CV-based candidate screening,” Wise says.

Using the funding to expand its test library and its team

The TestGorilla platform enables companies to save valuable time and avoid expensive mis-hires by remotely assessing all the factors that contribute to job success, such as specific role-related skills, language proficiency, cognitive abilities, soft skills, motivation, personality and culture add.

The ongoing development of our proprietary technology will include the platform’s integration with further Applicant Tracking Systems, enabling employers to use the product seamlessly from within their existing ATS, and the introduction of new features to satisfy the requirements of mid-sized businesses.

Our test library continues to expand, with the existing 220-plus tests due to be joined by a further 100 by the end of 2022. We also expect to hire 100 new employees in the coming year.