Restless Bandit raises $10 million to find the best job applicants from old resumes

No one likes hearing that they didn’t get the job they applied for. But it’s also frustrating when the recruiter explains that your resume will be placed on file, and you know you will never hear from them again. Restless Bandit is a company aimed at using artificial intelligence to help businesses surface the best old resumes when new positions open up. Started by former LinkedIn employees, it has raised $10 million in venture funding in a round led by GGV Capital and Toba Capital.

With its “talent rediscovery platform,” Restless Bandit helps HR professionals parse through the enormous piles of submitted resumes and filters out the ones that meet their specific criteria. Typically, “your resume goes into a black hole, and you never hear back from a company,” explained company founder and chief executive Steve Goodman. “Companies are sitting on a repository. You could go onto LinkedIn for passive candidates— those with no relationship to the company, or find active candidates — those found on job boards, or talent rediscovery.”

The offering integrates with a company’s cloud-based applicant tracking system (ATS) so that when a new position is made available, before recruiters send out the “help wanted” advertisements, Restless Bandit will automatically scan resumes that are already on file. The system automatically updates the resumes, using more than 20 different sources of data — such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, resume repositories, GitHub, StackOverflow, and marketing forums. LinkedIn isn’t included in this list, as, technically, Goodman’s company is a competitor.

Restless Bandit then compiles resumes that meet the criteria specified by the recruiter, excluding name, address, age, race, gender, and other factors that could contribute to unconscious bias.

The idea is that those who have already shown some interest in a company by actively applying for a job are likely to be strong candidates. Restless Bandit will weed through all the resumes and prioritize the candidates who applied most recently, as there’s a greater likelihood they may be willing to come in for an interview.

Goodman stated that there are several ways customers can interact with Restless Bandit. You can have a high level of interaction, meaning constantly logging in and ingesting resumes and job descriptions, while monitoring exactly what searches are being done. If that’s too much of a commitment, the service can provide you with a weekly digest of the best candidates for any available job positions. And there’s also the “set it and forget it” offering, which allows you to specify the minimum threshold for searching and have Restless Bandit automatically send applicants a templated email — think of it like an email marketing system.

It’s important to note that as much machine learning and A.I. is being used, Restless Bandit doesn’t promise that it’ll provide a perfect list of applicants. However, by automating the filtering process, the company believes it is increasing the likelihood of filling the position faster, more cheaply, and with a higher quality hire.

Prior to launching Restless Bandit, Goodman was the CEO of Bright.com, a technology algorithm company that matched resumes to jobs. The company was acquired by LinkedIn in 2014 for $130 million and now powers the professional social networking company’s Talent Business offering. Goodman regaled VentureBeat with tales of how Bright used data science to aggregate millions of resumes and job descriptions to see what correlations could be determined — could you surface the top 10 percent based on an algorithm?

At the time, customers inquired whether the same filtering technology could be applied for existing resumes. This was the impetus for the creation of Restless Bandit.

At launch, the company has signed up 15 customers, including Gannett, IHOP, Applebee’s, comScore, Rosewood Hotels, Four Seasons Hotels, Cabot Corporation, and Aimco. It’s targeting organizations that typically have more than 1,000 employees and deal with between 50,000 and tens of millions of resumes. Restless Bandit charges based on the number of resumes being processed and positions to be filled. Goodman shared that the average customer pays between $25,000 and $50,000 annually.

With its latest infusion of cash, Restless Bandit said it’ll build out its team and focus on data science technology for its platform. The service is available in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia, but only in English.