HR platform Reejig raises $6 million Series A funding round

Reejig has announced its $6 million Series A capital raise which it says will be used to kickstart global expansion. Launched in 2019, Reejig is designed to help HR departments in large organisations improve their hiring, retaining and reskilling of staff.

Skip Capital led the round with participation from Airtree Ventures and existing Reejig investor Right Click Capital, with the funding following its initial seed funding of $2.2 million in 2020.

The company works with several large Australian and New Zealand organisations, including Woolworths, KPMG, Transport for NSW, MYOB and UTS, and is currently broadening its client base in the US and globally, a Reejig spokesperson said.

Siobhan Savage, CEO and co-founder of Reejig said that organisations should be held accountable for when they waste the potential of their people.

“It’s no longer acceptable for organisations to be letting pockets of people go, while simultaneously hiring hundreds in other areas of their business. It all comes down to knowing your people’s skills and potential, and Reejig provides these organisations with the intelligence to find, move and upskill their people at scale.”

The platform uses AI to provide visibility of skills within the workforce and marketplace, allowing for data-driven decisions to be made. The company claims to have built the world's first independently audited ethical AI working in partnership with Professor Fang Chen and the University of Technology Sydney. 

Algorithmic bias

The use of AI in recruitment has a mixed record. Amazon famously scrapped a secret AI-based recruitment tool after it was discovered the algorithm was biased against women candidates. 

As Reuters reported in 2018, "The team had been building computer programs since 2014 to review job applicants’ resumes with the aim of mechanising the search for top talent. By 2015, the company realised its new system was not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way."

Reuters revealed that Amazon’s computer models were trained to vet applicants by observing patterns in resumes submitted to the company over a 10-year period. The fact that most of those applicants were men reflected — and reinforced the male dominance across the tech industry.

Visibility

Reejig investor and Skip Capital founder, Kim Jackson said, “Without any visibility on employees’ skills and abilities, it’s incredibly hard for leaders to get the full potential out of their teams and employees also end up feeling overlooked, instead of empowered." 

"The need for effective workforce management has never been more important,” he said.