Israeli startup Paradox, which developed Olivia, a digital recruiter that communicates with job applicants, has completed a $ 200 million round of funding at a value of $1.5 billion and has become a unicorn.
The C round was co-led by Stripes, Sapphire Ventures, and Thoma Bravo with participation from Workday Ventures, Indeed, Willoughby Capital, Twilio Ventures, Blue Cloud Ventures, Geodesic, Principia Growth, DLA Piper Venture Fund and current investor Brighton Park Capital.
Following the recruitment, the company will expand the development center operating in the Sarona complex in Tel Aviv. Paradox employs about 400 people as of December 2021.
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Paradox’s flagship product is Olivia, a virtual personal assistant, who joins human recruitment teams and helps them automate all recruitment processes. Starting with screening and checking the suitability of a resume for relevant jobs, automatic interview scheduling, reminders for the candidate to fill out forms and provide information, making critical information accessible to candidates and recruitment teams, and sending job offer automatically to candidates all in a convenient communication platform.
The whole process is conducted transparently while updating the candidate on the schedules and providing answers to every question of the candidate and thus it removes one of the frustration factors of candidates who forget to return to them, and shortens by more than half the duration of recruitment and success rates.
Over the past year, Olivia has conducted 30 million job interview interviews for hundreds of companies in some 50 countries and has independently scheduled 3.1 million job interviews.
Communication with the candidates is also done on nights, weekends, and holidays times when many of them submit their candidacies, and they get answers to their questions and video content relevant to the company and the job.
Communication is done in a way that is convenient for each of the parties. Olivia is managed directly from the Chrome browser via a special plugin, while the candidates receive the messages in the way they choose.
The system learns each of the conversations through artificial intelligence and draws insights from them to improve the algorithm and the work of the organization, in order to make the process fast, efficient and experiential for all parties.
Among the company’s customers are McDonald’s, General Motors, Unilever, Nestle, PepsiCo, CVS health, the American restaurant chain Wendys, Citizen Bank, US Express, and more.
According to Yam Dvir, CEO of Paradox Israel: “We see a future where people invest more time in people, and not in front of computers. HR staff and recruitment teams spend an average of 25 hours a week on repetitive technical tasks.
“The system we have developed allows human resources teams to free up valuable time from tedious tasks and invest it in people, rather than in front of computers. This is the most important and significant part of their work.”
According to Dvir, experience shows that when the recruitment process is more experiential, more suitable employees are accepted into the organization, with higher motivation who also stay longer.
Paradox was founded in late 2016 by Aaron Matos. About a year ago, the company acquired the Israeli startup Spetz, whose people have become the development center of Paradox in Israel. Spetz’s technology has been fully implemented and has become part of Olivia’s capabilities.
Paradox recorded a sharp growth during the Corona period following the global demand for manpower and the expansion of digital communications.
