India and East Africa-focused staffing and recruitment startup Shortlist has raised USD 2 Mn in Series A from a group of investors led by Blue Haven Initiative. Participating in the round was Compass Venture Capital, Zephyr Acorn and several others.

The round will help the firm build its vision as per how Indian and African companies will build their teams, “grounded in the belief that potential and motivation matter than a CV”. The company will henceforth be able to establish that both companies and potential job candidates deserve better than the status quo.

The fundraising is sequent to the startup’s USD 1 Mn seed which it raised in September 2017 from a round led by University Ventures. The USD 2 Mn raise also brings Shortlist’s total amount raised to USD 3 Mn.

In a post by Paul Brellof, CEO of Shortlist, the firm is building a scalable way to collect signals that really matter, like demonstrated skills, interests, aspirations, work style preferences, and motivation — and use them to match the right job seeker with the right company at the right time.”

“These days, most of the sound bites about HR tech champion artificial intelligence and machine learning as the chief protagonists of the revolution. No doubt, a variety of companies are changing the lives of hiring managers by pulling information from CVs more efficiently, scraping keyword data from social networks like LinkedIn, and applying natural language processing to job descriptions.

“While impressive, this approach runs the risk of a classic “garbage in, garbage out” conundrum: job descriptions are often thoughtless cut-and-paste efforts, CVs are just retrospectives and miss potential, and LinkedIn keywords are self-reported and unvalidated — do we really think crunching all these is the best way for companies to find that perfect fit?”

The Mumbai-headquartered recruitment startup was founded by Paul Breloff alongside Matt Shnuck in 2016 and currently boasts of more than 300 clients and 400,000 job seekers. Paul leads us into believing these are yet the early days for Shortlist, as there is so much the startup intends to build to know candidates better and use the data to find them their dream jobs.

“We believe in a future where every team is comprised of the best-fit professionals, the job application process is human, transparent, and fair, and professional potential is unlocked across Africa and India — and beyond! We’re so grateful to have a group of dedicated investors who believe in this future too, and are joining the adventure”, Paul says.