Moon hub founder and CEO Nancy Xu was studying for her doctorate in computer science at Stanford when she had an epiphany about hiring. She believes that 90% of candidates who are a good fit for a job are not identified by recruiters because the tools they use are too fixated on a set of keywords to find the best people.
She wanted to change this using an AI-driven approach that looks beyond typical trait types to find candidates that might otherwise be missed, and does so in a cheaper, faster way than current methods.
Today her company, Moonhub, announced seed funding of $4.4 million.
“We are building Moonhub and at its core, we want to recruit AI for high-growth companies. And what we do is we have a core platform that allows companies to find the best talent for any opportunity, and work with in-house experts to actually hire and engage people in those opportunities,” Xu said.
She says the traditional way of recruiting is to search for a set of five or ten keywords in someone’s LinkedIn profile, and if those words aren’t there, a person who could be a perfect fit is being overlooked . “For example, you don’t find people who are passionate about working in the healthcare business because you can’t identify so many of what we call ‘unstructured signals’ in someone’s profile.”
She says the AI platform her company built finds billions of individuals’ data points from the public web and builds an AI layer on top to analyze all that information. “So we know we’re seeing you for who you are versus the five keywords that actually show up on your profile.”
For now, that means using a handful of internal recruiters who operate the platform, but later this year they’ll be building an externally-facing search tool that will allow anyone to use the platform to find employees, using natural language searches similar to ChatGPT.
“Later this year we will launch the core search platform which you can think of as an interface that allows you as a hiring manager, as a recruiter, even as a layman looking for candidates for a job opening to express in natural language what you are looking for, and then thousands of people who are well qualified for that role,” Xu said.
Today, the company has dozens of early-stage clients already using the platform to find candidates. She currently has 15 employees and is growing. Xu believes her platform can help her and other companies find more diverse candidates.
“The fundamental tenet we have as a company in the way we work with our clients, and also internally in our own recruiting, is that we truly believe that talent is universal and opportunity is not. And that plays out in our own recruitment process. While we have people who have worked at great companies and great universities, we also have people who don’t have that pedigree but are incredibly talented themselves. And we are very proud to have a very diverse team,” she said.
The $4.4 million seed round was led by Khosla Ventures and GV with participation from AIX Ventures, Day One Ventures and a host of high profile angels.