Sep 18th 2013, 12:00, by Leena Rao
Bright, a startup that is betting that data science and machine learning algorithms will be central to hiring and finding jobs, is announcing $14 million in Series B funding from Toba Capital and Passport Capital. The startup previously raised $6 million in funding in 2011.
Similar to CareerBuilder, Monster and others, Bright serves as a platform that job seekers can search for jobs that match their interests. But Bright aims to take this one step further my extracting more than just keywords to match job finders with recruiters. As CEO Steve Goodman explains, there is an inefficiency in the labor market where in jobs that are in the range of $30,000 to $80,000 in salary; where recruiters are overwhelmed by applications. He says many job seekers are eliminating a “spray and play’ strategy on sites like Monster to as many jobs in generalized sectors like sales.
Bright’s algorithm, which Goodman says has taken over a year to hone, ranks people by a Bright Score. This assessment is unique to the match that a job applicant has to a particular job; and both the recruiter and applicant see the score. For recruiters, the score helps them weed out the top contenders for the position. Bright has also taken into account historical hiring patterns into matching applicants. For example, Goodman says Coca Cola tends to want to hire certain employees from Pepsi, especially in certain areas.
So Bright’s alogrithm takes into account location, past experience, and more to match Pepsi applicants with Coca Cola recruiters, and these applicants will receive higher bright scores than others. The algorithm also takes into account synonyms. So if someone lists Java on their resume, Bright’s technology will assume they are also strong in Apache.
Quietly, Bright has been able to become the fourth largest job destination on the web. The company has clients like Amazon, Samsung and Wells Fargo. To date, Bright.com has listed over 30 million jobs and continues to add over 20,000 new job seekers every day,
There are other job sites that are also taking a data centric approach to matching jobs such as TalentBin, Identified and of course, LinkedIn. But Bright prides itself on targeting a different type of professional, in a different salary range from some of the competitors mentioned above.
The new funding will go to bulking up the startup’s data science team. Additionally, Bright plans to add to their current team of 51 people by putting their own technology to work hiring across their sales, marketing, and engineering departments.
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