Ideal Candidate Raises $2.5 Million to Bring Science to Sales Hiring

Every company is looking to improve its time spent on hiring and quality of candidates.

Ideal Candidate aims to help companies achieve both, with a claim to reduce the time to hire by over 30% while lowering recruiting costs and turnover.

The sales recruitment platform has just raised $2.5 million to continue the development of its intelligent, data-backed hiring service as well as to expand its existing presence in Toronto, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Ideal Candidate arose from the founders looking to scratch their own itch. When hiring salespeople for their first company (which was sold in 2014), the founders discovered that there was no metric-driven method of choosing salespeople that would yield predictable performance results, and intuition didn’t cut it.

“Hiring salespeople was the biggest obstacle at our last startup,” explains co­founder and CEO, Somen Mondal. “Relying on your ‘gut feel’ was ineffective and expensive. Before we even exited our last startup, we knew we wanted to optimize the recruiting process by creating a new way to make data-­backed hiring decisions.”

Mondal and cofounder Shaun Ricci went on to build a platform to do just that. Their SAAS platform uses data and a patent-pending algorithm that continuously learns to identify sales people that will best perform in a role at a particular company with a particular culture. The service provides a pool of candidates tailored specifically to a given company’s sales department, backed up by pertinent metrics.

After subscribing to Ideal Candidate, existing sales people and top performers at a company are assessed to determine what already works there. This includes psychometric, cultural fit, education, and experience assessments. Mondal explains that the software uses data to profile the makeup of top performing sales people at any given company.

“We figure out the DNA of a successful person within a company within that role. Then we build pools of candidates,” says Mondal. The inputs by which those candidates are graded are weighted in accordance with their prominence in the profiles of existing top performers.

Job seekers enter Ideal Candidate’s talent pool by completing a targeted assessment to determine both their unique selling styles and company culture fit.

Candidates are matched only with those companies that employ top performers similar to themselves. Employers then use this data and the system to effectively recruit carbon copies of their top performers, increasing the likelihood of a successful hire.

Job seekers are motivated to perform the assessments to increase the chance of being interviewed at a company at which they would be likely to thrive.

“The companies that are hiring are going to get people who are statistical matches to top performers, and people applying are going to be placed at companies where they’re similar to people who are doing well,” says Mondal.

A unique element of the platform is the follow-through after a hire is made. Sales leaders can continue to input data on the performance of recent hires, enabling the program to continue ‘learning’ how to tailor candidates for the specific company.

“If you hired someone and they turned out to be a star player, our system learns that and makes decisions for your best hire based on that. It’s a continuous process of improvement,” says Mondal.

“Our customers have drastically reduced their need to phone screen people and interact with every resume,” says Mondal. “Now they’re just interacting with people they know would be a good fit for their company.”