Screenloop: hiring intelligence, the inception of a new recruiting era without bias
Why All Iron Ventures is partnering with UK and Portugal-based Screenloop, which is helping managers hire better and faster
By Tomás Güida, on behalf of the All Iron Ventures team
Can we save hiring? Terrible experiences define the job market’s status quo, and bad hires pose critical threats to any business –the cost of a failed hire is over $180,000 according to the Recruitment & Employment Confederation. Yet, our new portfolio company, Screenloop, implements A.I. to amend the long tenure of biassed and flawed processes that reigned over the past decades.
A new era of data yet humanistic, based hiring process has begun, and Screenloop is leading it. Let’s talk about it.
Hiring is broken for every party involved
The hiring process is full of fractures. We can see the cracking from the outside and even feel, sometimes from personal experiences, the rupturing and falling into pieces happening on the inside. The first thought that comes to mind is demolishing and rebuilding it from scratch. We’ve all dreamt of it, let’s be honest. Hiring processes have been built on the accumulation of decades of subjective and biased assumptions (conscious or unconscious) that, one after another, brought us here.
Accustomed to bad hires and their life-threatening consequences for companies, “job market” is becoming one of the most frightening words in modern English.
But what is a bad hire? Well, potential company killers. It is both the propellant and fuel to never-ending vicious cycles of inefficiency and sub-standard productivity that bring companies down. Team leaders, hiring managers, and HR teams become judgment targets for every bad hire. Trust breaks. Then deadlines are missed, products aren’t shipped within the necessary standards, client experiences fall over a pit, and investors start losing conviction. To avoid entering these cycles, time is of the essence.
You find yourself with a toxic culture leading to low employee retention among top performers, misaligned incentives across the company, and crumbling team morale. In time, companies accumulate non-tangible losses on unforced errors until it’s too late. Bull or bear market, it doesn’t matter. A bad hire is costly for everyone at any time.
Meanwhile, candidates fall victim. Every single flaw across the hiring process directly impacts candidate experiences. Power dynamics are tested, and reality doesn’t differ much from a nightmare. Candidates endure unclear and time-wasting processes, buying into misleading and distorted expectations or simply being ghosted across several processes. Most of the time, conclusions are reached through bias lacking objectivity, being taken advantage of by the asymmetry of information.
As a candidate, how can one be confident of the decision being made after getting used to such experiences? Hiring is built on the back of bad candidate experiences. This needs to change, and the candidate’s input is required to do so. Demolishing it is not an option, but we believe hiring can be saved. Enter: Screenloop.
Ensuring objective and high-quality hires at scale
Sounds utopic, we know, but it’s not. It is as simple as that Screenloop’s hiring intelligence platform reduces the likelihood of making a bad hire. How? By eliminating the black box that nurtures flawed processes and bias and allowing companies to measure what matters.
Screenloop’s platform helps HR managers access unattainable data, benchmark across the organization, and find actionable insights on improving the quality of talent, interviews, and hiring processes overall. Every business needs tools to consistently make the right decision at scale and avoid bad hires.
Whether hiring to scale, going through a restructuring, or filling the gaps, it doesn’t matter. The expectations of top talent are growing higher than ever. Power dynamics shifted. It’s critical to create a candidate experience that is empowering, empathetic, and as seamless as possible. First impressions matter a lot.
Companies need a recruitment process that’s fit for purpose. This is where Screenloop becomes indispensable. How can you create a top-notch candidate experience without listening to them? You must enable immediate and automated feedback on the organization’s recruitment processes. Screenloop allows you to access rich information that you weren’t leveraging before, at scale. Moreover, its A.I. identifies and provides tailored recommendations for improvement, setting businesses to hit their hiring goals faster.
Yet, the vision extends far beyond it. How many times have we heard about client-first experiences? That “client is king”. And how come we don’t think the same way about candidates? Screenloop enables this approach by removing unconscious bias from the recruitment process. As a result, candidate experiences become a driver to attracting top talent.
Therefore, the job market slowly becomes less of a nightmare, and a compounding effect fueled by its competitive nature gets into motion. As more companies adopt hiring intelligence platforms, candidates have phenomenal interview experiences, bias is limited, and fairness emerges.
An immediate significant impact on clients
Product-market fit starts with the founder-market fit. Screenloop was born from its founding team’s shared frustrations and hiring experiences while working as senior operators at fast-growth tech scale-ups such as Stack Overflow, Talkdesk, or Revolut. The kind of experience we at All Iron Ventures admire deeply.
Their vision was molded for years. Over the past decade, they faced the problem they aim to solve daily: competing to attract the best talent, performing thousands of interviews, building diverse multidisciplinary teams, and tormenting themselves with bad hires (and its consequences). Add to this their complementary backgrounds in leading sales in the HR industry, combined with extensive experience building complex technical infrastructures and AI models. You have the ingredients for success! Screenloop isn’t born out of a brainstorming session. It was crafted out of their skin in the game.
Screenloop was founded in 2021 in London and Lisbon, and in a few months, the first iteration of the platform was live. Momentum followed, and their vision attracted impressive talent. This team was moving fast, and they went to market in January 2022. Once live, the market sent a message: demand was there. Since their launch in January, they’ve managed to onboard dozens of clients, such as Beamery, GoCardless, TrueLayer, and TravelPerk.
Screenloop has impacted organizations extraordinarily from day one.
- One of its customers reduced candidate drop-off by 60% by leveraging Screenloop’s insights to improve its processes.
- Another client had an average of 1,800 candidates dropping out of their funnels. After embedding Screenloop across their processes, they rapidly saw this number decrease to under 500.
The probability of losing top talent was reduced. Hiring goals were achieved faster. We spoke with a few HR managers that have implemented the platform — they were not going back.
Why All Iron Ventures is partnering with Screenloop
We knew it from the beginning. It was evident to us that Screenloop aimed to solve a real problem, and at this point, we hope you’ve grasped how powerful Screenloop’s mission is.
If you have experienced the frenetic chaos of growing into hundreds of employees in a short period, you rapidly appreciate the value of what Screenloop is trying to build. Its founders did, too; they suffered it and grew frustrated, and as they couldn’t find a solution, they decided to create it.
I remember having the first call with them out of our Bilbao office; we clicked instantly, and everything became evident. The alignment with their vision was as clear as it could be. These founders consistently had to make the right decision to build stellar teams, and nobody goes through it without getting the scars of frustration. We relate to that. The week after that first call, we flew to London, knowing this was a team we wanted to back.
In a matter of months, this team and its products had an impact we do not see often. Not just because how this small team had acquired dozens of impressive clients across several countries such as the UK, USA, and Spain; or because they had created outstanding partnerships across the HR software stack (Greenhouse, Lever, etc.), but, specifically, because of how clients spoke about them. Each one of them had strong praise for Screenloop tools. They discovered a better way to run their hiring and a perfect data-based partner.
At this point, we were sure there was something special about it. Confirmation came when (as we always do with the HR space) we explored the opportunity with a few unicorn portfolio founders from the HR industry. We won’t extend much on their thoughts on Screenloop, but just say they also jump on the round immediately.
Adding to this, the market timing has never been better. At All Iron Ventures, we believe we are undergoing a shift in the power dynamics of the job market. Remote work changed everything; companies, and their primary asset, people) aren’t defined by location anymore. Candidates’ location never mattered less than today. As an organization, you are now competing with even more entities for the same talent. And as a candidate, your scope of potential roles has been widened significantly.
Companies must go the extra mile to demonstrate how much they care about their people. And this starts with the candidate’s experience, as it is a reflection of what awaits them after. Other phenomena, such as the so-called Great Resignation, have shown that the top talent has realized how much power and control they actually have.
Personally, I’m very excited to partner with Screenloop on this mission. I went to study at a public university back home in Argentina, managed to break into a startup by hustling my way into the ecosystem, and then failed for years before finding my opportunity to join venture capital. I didn’t have the credentials: I hadn’t been to the elite universities or part of a European rocketship startup. I had a non-existent network in the region.
A cold email to a manager brave enough to overcome biases was my only window into my dream role. I had to rely on determination, a lot of luck, and goodwill from the other party to break into the industry that paved the way to join All Iron Ventures. Over the past years, I’ve spoken with hundreds of candidates suffering the same unfair experiences I went through across all industries and roles. If Screenloop succeeds, it should be able to balance the scales by creating a better experience and a more equitable landscape for candidates from all backgrounds.
Looking ahead
Three months ago, we joined prominent funds such as Stride, Passion, and Ludlow Ventures, together with inspiring founders such as Paul Forster (Indeed) and Tom Blomfield (Monzo), to partner with Jay, Anton, Nuno, Rodrigo, and João on their $7m financing round (led by Stride). We welcome them to the All Iron Ventures portfolio, valuing the privilege of joining them on their mission and looking forward to helping them through their journey for the years to come.
🧡 Thanks for reading! If you have enjoyed this story, spread the word! You can follow us at All Iron Ventures on Linkedin and Twitter.
💸 If you are fundraising and want to share your project with us, please use this form or reach out to Tomás at tomas.guida@alliron.com.
