Introducing Datapeople: Recruiting Analytics to Make Hiring More Efficient and Fair

TapRecuit is rebranding as Datapeople to more accurately reflect what they have always been for and about: people who care about people data. In addition to the name change, Datapeople is publicly sharing $8M in funding raised and unveiling the first comprehensive recruiting analytics platform that organizes and augments companies’ recruiting data to make hiring processes more efficient and fair.

When I met Datapeople CEO Amit Bhatia in late 2018, he and his co-founders Phillip Reyland and Dr. Maryam Jahanshahi had bootstrapped the company for several years while developing their proprietary system for understanding, annotating, and organizing recruiting language and performance data. By applying data science to language analytics, they were helping a handful of early customers achieve significant improvements to their top-of-funnel recruiting efforts. In addition to realizing economic benefits from the efficiencies gained, recruiters and their organizations were also leveraging Datapeople to address the growing imperative for diversifying their candidate pools.

Datapeople was lean and profitable. I was astonished by what this data-and-mission-driven team accomplished without raising any outside money and drawn to work with founders tackling a big, challenging, and impactful opportunity: equity in hiring. While Amit and his co-founders recognized it was time to accelerate their product roadmap and grow their business with venture capital, they were resolute about partnering with investors who understood and shared their values. I was thrilled they chose to work with me and Uncork as their lead investor for their first raise.

Addressing DEI at the recruitment stage is a foundational step towards building more diverse, inclusive, and equitable organizations.

Datapeople’s work starts at the very top of the funnel: helping recruiters improve their job descriptions to attract a broader, qualified pool of inbound candidates through their Language Analytics tools. Today, Datapeople looks at tens of millions of jobs across six dimensions to understand the content and language that performs best. It helps organizations optimize and standardize their job content while providing an inclusivity meter to show if that content will be welcoming regardless of a candidate’s age, sex, race, gender, or social class. As co-founder Phillip Reyland writes, “small changes to job titles, responsibilities, and even perks have a meaningful impact on who feels welcome to apply”.

Inclusive job descriptions perform when they are welcoming to all qualified candidates. Inclusive recruiting processes perform when all qualified candidates have a fair chance at landing a job.

Datapeople’s Performance Analytics tools address this too: visibility to who makes it through the end-to-end recruiting process and if there are meaningful cracks in that process. Historically, recruiting data has been trapped in the ATS, where it’s messy, incomplete, and difficult to rely on for day-to-day decisions and for insights on how a recruiting organization is performing relative to its DE&I goals. As the first recruiting analytics platform that organizes and augments recruiting data, Datapeople helps recruiters and managers understand performance metrics from additional perspectives including gender representation, job seniority, and job type. This can shed much-needed light on when candidates drop off, disparities between hiring teams or roles, and more.

Technology alone cannot ‘fix’ any organization’s DE&I challenges, but recruiters and hiring teams with better data and insights about their open jobs and their recruitment processes are in a better position to make more thoughtful and inclusive hiring decisions. While Datapeople’s focus on improving efficiency and fairness in hiring processes remains consistent from its bootstrapped beginnings, I’m proud to share that today Datapeople is now serving global midmarket and enterprise customers in over 70 countries and across a wide range of industries (including media, manufacturing, government, retail, and technology). And Datapeople’s tools are producing a measurable impact: Square has seen 45% more qualified candidates and 25% more female candidates enter their recruiting process since working with Datapeople; BuzzFeed has had 100% more qualified female candidates apply for their engineering roles.

Kudos to Amit, Phillip, Maryam, and the Datapeople team for the important work you are doing to help bring efficiency and fairness to recruiting through comprehensive data and analytics. Inspired? Hiring teams interested in exploring Datapeople’s recruiting analytics platform can register for a free trial or request a demo. And candidates who want to join Datapeople’s mission can find current job openings here.

Hat tip to founder, writer, marketer, and angel investor Sunil Rajaraman who fatefully (and accurately) wrote me: “I was in NY last week and met a company started by a friend. In short — big market, amazing traction…Let me know if ok to make an intro.”

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