Fetcher.ai, a recruit­ment plat­form that com­bines AI with human teams, today announced it has raised $6.5 mil­lion in a round led by G20 Ven­tures. The com­pa­ny, whose lat­est fund­ing round brings its total to $12 mil­lion, says the funds will be used to expand the size of its work­force.

In 2020, tal­ent short­ages in the U.S. rose to his­toric lev­els, with 69% of employ­ers report­ing hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ty fill­ing jobs, accord­ing to a Man­Pow­er­Group sur­vey. This isn’t eas­i­ly reme­died. A report by the Soci­ety for Human Resource Man­age­ment found that fill­ing an open posi­tion costs employ­ers an aver­age of $4,129 and takes rough­ly 42 days.

Fetch­er was found­ed in 2014 as a con­sumer-cen­tric mes­sag­ing app called Cal­iber, which focused on pro­fes­sion­al net­work­ing. After a cou­ple of years run­ning Cal­iber, Fetcher’s cofounders uncov­ered an oppor­tu­ni­ty to auto­mate the func­tion­al­i­ty they had built into their free con­sumer app to cre­ate a paid soft­ware-as-a-ser­vice prod­uct that helped com­pa­nies fill roles.

Fetcher’s AI-pow­ered plat­form pro­vides enter­pris­es with an inter­nal team that trains and mon­i­tors data to deliv­er a pipeline of can­di­dates. After a recruiter uploads a job descrip­tion and pro­vides some ini­tial feed­back, Fetcher’s algo­rithms look for tal­ent that might match those needs, aggre­gat­ing can­di­date infor­ma­tion from across the web.

Fetch­er offers insights into how many prospects might be need­ed to ensure a hire and auto­mates out­reach accord­ing­ly. With the plat­form, hir­ing man­agers can track met­rics, includ­ing open rates, response rates, and inter­view book­ing rates. They’re also able to sync their cal­en­dar to cre­ate meet­ings, add sched­ul­ing links to email tem­plates, con­fig­ure avail­abil­i­ty, and block out times based on a pre­ferred sched­ule.

“Fetch­er … pro­vides the abil­i­ty to turn on ‘auto­mat­ed sourc­ing,’ allow­ing for the plat­form to run with­out a recruiter’s inter­ven­tion. Once the recruiter has trained the AI suc­cess­ful­ly upfront, auto­mat­ed sourc­ing sim­ply runs in the back­ground, push­ing qual­i­fied prospects through an auto­mat­ed email out­reach series each day,” a spokesper­son told Ven­ture­Beat via email. “[This] tech­nol­o­gy allows recruit­ing teams to focus more on recruit­ment mar­ket­ing and the can­di­date expe­ri­ence — two pieces of the recruit­ing fun­nel that have become ever more impor­tant in a com­pet­i­tive job mar­ket and with the younger gen­er­a­tions of mil­len­ni­als and Gen Z.”

As the pan­dem­ic con­tin­ues, com­pa­nies are increas­ing­ly adopt­ing alter­na­tives to in-per­son job inter­views and tal­ent recruit­ment. Recruiters Page­Group and Robert Wal­ters last year moved some job inter­views and inter­ac­tions online, fol­low­ing on the heels of tech giants Ama­zon, Face­book, Google, and Intel. In spite of fears that these tools might exhib­it bias­es against cer­tain groups of can­di­dates, at least a few busi­ness­es have begun pilot­ing can­di­date screen­ings that osten­si­bly help recruiters become more effi­cient, cut down on recruit­ment costs, and boost over­all can­di­date sat­is­fac­tion.

Fetcher’s com­peti­tors include Plum, which asks job can­di­dates to fill out prob­lem-solv­ing and per­son­al­i­ty tests that award points for “tal­ents” like adap­ta­tion, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, inclu­sion, and inno­va­tion. Anoth­er rival, Ver­voe, offers AI tools that test would-be employ­ees’ on-the-job skills with a mix of gen­er­al assess­ments, cod­ing chal­lenges, and per­son­al­i­ty quizzes. There’s also Head­start, which recent­ly raised $7 mil­lion for AI that can mit­i­gate recruit­ment bias;  Xor, a start­up devel­op­ing an AI chat­bot plat­form for recruiters and job seek­ers; and Phe­nom Peo­ple, a human resources plat­form that taps AI to help com­pa­nies attract new tal­ent.

Fetch­er claims its AI tech­nolo­gies work to decrease uncon­scious bias while increas­ing the size and scope of diverse tal­ent pools. Since May 2020, the New York-based start­up has part­nered with over 150 com­pa­nies, includ­ing Pele­ton, Behr, and Vel­cro, and seen rev­enues increase 10 times, with annu­al recur­ring rev­enue more than dou­bling in the last nine months alone.

“Fetch­er pro­vides diver­si­ty met­rics, con­ver­sion met­rics, and more all with­in the plat­form. This allows teams to bench­mark each role ver­sus the full com­pa­ny, bench­mark each recruiter against oth­er team mem­bers, and bench­mark the com­pa­ny’s met­rics against the indus­try stan­dards,” a spokesper­son told Ven­ture­Beat via email. “All of these real-time met­rics ensure that recruiters are meet­ing their goals, and if they are not, gives them a clear path as to what levers might need to change in order to get there. Over­all, Fetch­er pro­vides pre­dic­tive mod­el­ing for pipeline build­ing so that com­pa­nies can always be ahead of the game when hir­ing in that depart­ment becomes a top pri­or­i­ty.”

Along­side G20 Ven­tures, KFund and return­ing investors Slow and Accom­plice par­tic­i­pat­ed in Fetcher’s round announced today. Fetch­er has 80 employ­ees.