Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

Urgent Career, a start-up that hopes to use a better way to assess salespeople, today announced that it has secured a round of Series A funding from iNovia Capital, a Montreal-based manager of seed and early stage venture capital funds.

Urgent Career’s goal is to revolutionize the process of finding, screening and assessing sales talent in order to fill the void of top-performing sales professionals at companies throughout the world. The company is doing this by building a sales recruiting operation and building technology that uses algorithms to measure transcribed human conversations to predict which salespeople are most likely to succeed in a given position.

The undisclosed amount of funding will be used to advance Urgent Career’s ALPE, or Algorithmic Linguistic Profiling Engine technology, which serves as the driving agent behind the company’s assessments.

“Not only as an investor, but also as a business, we appreciate the importance of having great sales talent,” iNovia Partner John Elton said. “Unfortunately, all too often, resources are wasted on ineffective hiring and staffing practices.

“We back exceptional entrepreneurs who are building game changing technologies,” he continued. “Urgent Career’s founder, Jeff Stewart, has started over a half-dozen companies, which combined employ over 600 people. We’re excited to be involved as an investor and also as a customer via our portfolio companies.”

Urgent Career’s main technology uses algorithms to digitally analyze transcribed human speech in order to create a candidate profile measuring 32 dimensions of sales compatibility. By deconstructing the language candidates use to describe themselves, Urgent Career can quantify elements crucial to employee hiring and management that are often difficult to measure, including sales style, experience, workflow preferences and behavior.

“We are thrilled to have iNovia as a capital partner so that we can continue to revolutionize the way sales talent is assessed, screened and managed,” Stewart said. “Their investment not only will allow us to accelerate the development of our technology but also underscores both the strength of our vision, our business, and the staying power of our offerings. We look forward to the continued collaboration with the iNovia team.”

So far, Urgent Career has been successful in developing a process-driven screening and sourcing system for sales professionals and has continued to place salespeople with more than 100 venture-backed clients, many of which are on the Inc. 500 and Deloitte fast 500 lists.

A study conducted over a nine-month period, which compared 18 account executives that the company placed with 30 sourced by a client, found that Urgent Career candidates are outperforming. The study found that by the ninth month, Urgent Career’s candidates were closing 202 percent more revenue on average than their counterparts.

Urgent Career has added several new features since we first wrote about the company last year, including implementing an enterprise-class call recording and capture system.

The company also has shifted the focus of its business model. As Urgent Career continues to build its technology, it plans to build a 100-person sales recruiting operation throughout the country. The company’s assessment technology will be rolled out in three stages: internally, sold to corporate departments and then licensed to third parties.

The company itself also has grown, as it now employs 15 workers, including four full-time recruiters, or “career matchmakers,” one full-time salesperson, three domestic analysts and six analysts in the Philippines. Urgent Career plans to add at least two more recruiters by the end of the year.

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