Reinventing the Interview Experience: Announcing Metaview's $6 Million Seed Round

Talent is the single largest budget item for most companies today. The typical business spends nearly 70 percent of its expenses on hiring and retaining employees, and it’s the line item that’s the most poorly understood. Gathering feedback about candidates during the recruiting process is hard, and it’s largely based on guesswork and memory, which can result in unconscious bias. We know what types of questions to ask and how to answer them, but what actually goes on in interviews usually isn’t scientific. Different interviewers ask different questions and follow-ups, which results in inconsistent candidate experiences.

Now that video conferencing has become the de facto interviewing tool, we can fix that. We’re leading Metaview’s $6 million seed round because we want to help companies unlock insights about interviews that they previously couldn’t access and deliver more consistent experiences. Additional participants include Fly Ventures, Seedcamp, Village Global, and PrimeSet, plus Moving Capital and Palumni VC, the alumni funds from Uber and Palantir, respectively.

Metaview was founded in 2018 by Siadhal Magos and Shahriar Tajbakhsh, former product and engineering leads from Uber and Palantir, respectively. The pair met while working together at Osper and spent years growing and scaling teams at hyper-growth companies, so they’ve experienced more interviews than the average hiring manager. Across the hundreds of people they’ve hired, they realized that the talent acquisition process was a broken and opaque process. Interviewing was either completely unstructured or overly structured, but either way, it ultimately came down to anecdotal data, often leading to unfair outcomes. Metaview’s mission is to change that, and it’s already helping customers like Robinhood, Anduril, AngelList, and Hudl make their processes more efficient, transparent, and fair.

Data compiled by Metaview shows that:

-Women are speaking 12 percent less in interviews than men are.

-23 percent of hiring managers are asking fewer than five questions in each interview.

-Organizations spend over 1.5 working years for every 100 hires they make. For a single hire, they spend on average 35 people-hours interviewing

Metaview was then born out of the idea that interviewing should be as data-driven as all other business functions — sales, marketing, engineering, and so on. What if an organization knew that women were speaking less, or that managers were basing hiring decisions on only three questions? Metaview learns and contextualizes insights like these and turns them into personalized, actionable recommendations about how to interview more effectively.

Metaview’s platform records interviews and code, providing interviewers with personalized feedback. After individual interviews, the platform analyzes and reports trends and provides automated training materials that can coach teams and help them improve. When feedback is informed by data, it ensures a more consistent and scalable interview experience for candidates leading to a more transparent process and a faster time-to-hire.

Siadhal Magos, co-founder and CEO of Metaview, told us, “We all know that the success of a company starts and ends with its people. Our interview intelligence platform empowers organizations to create a more equitable hiring process, making the process more transparent by using data-driven technology to improve the most important moments in hiring. We’re excited to have world-class investors like Vertex US to help us realize our mission and bring our technology to even more people.”

With the funding, Metaview is tripling its team in Europe and in the U.S., heavily investing in its product and technology, and accelerating its go-to-market. Jonathan Heiliger, a Vertex US general partner, has joined Metaview’s board and is partnering with the team to help build a company that truly serves the needs of the modern workforce. Chase Roberts, Principal, will join the board as an observer.

Jonathan notes that “the pandemic has completely upended the way we work, including the way we hire and retain talent. Imagine a world that’s more data-driven and democratic for both candidates and the people doing the hiring. Transparency only helps everyone involved and ensures a fairer process. And while this is just one part of fixing the broader issues of unconscious bias, Metaview is well on its way to helping democratize the talent acquisition process.”

As the company continues to reinvent the world of work, they’re looking for best-in-class talent themselves. Visit www.metaview.ai/careers for more information on how to join their team.