Koru

Koru, a Seattle-based company founded in 2013 by Kristen Hamilton and Josh Jarrett, specialized in predictive hiring for the enterprise market. The company's business model was centered around a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that used machine learning and AI to help companies predict the performance and culture fit of job applicants before hiring them. This was designed to move hiring practices beyond traditional metrics like GPA and college reputation.

The founders brought extensive relevant experience to the venture. Kristen Hamilton is a serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded and took public the e-commerce company Onvia, and also served as COO at World Learning. Josh Jarrett's background includes leading higher education innovation for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and consulting with McKinsey & Company, focusing on the intersection of education and employment.

Koru's core product was a platform that assessed candidates on seven key "soft skills" it identified as crucial for performance: grit, rigor, impact, teamwork, curiosity, ownership, and polish. This framework, called the Koru7 Impact Skills, was used to create a predictive "fingerprint" for specific roles within a client's organization. The platform provided recruiters with a dashboard that ranked candidates based on these data-driven profiles, aiming to reduce bias and improve hiring efficiency for clients which included Fortune 500 companies like Citi, Barclays, and Zillow.

The company initially launched as a "bootcamp" to help college graduates land jobs, charging fees to both graduates and employers. However, in 2016, it pivoted to focus on the more scalable enterprise SaaS model for predictive hiring. Koru raised a total of approximately $15.6 million from investors including First Round Capital, Maveron, Battery Ventures, and Andreessen Horowitz. In an unusual exit in late 2018/early 2019, Koru was split and sold to two separate companies: its predictive hiring technology business was acquired by the London-based talent assessment firm Capp & Co (now Cappfinity), and its original bootcamp business was acquired by the Entangled Group.

Keywords: predictive hiring, talent assessment, HR technology, recruitment software, soft skills assessment, machine learning recruitment, employee performance prediction, Koru7 Impact Skills, grit in hiring, data-driven hiring, culture fit analytics, SaaS HR, Kristen Hamilton, Josh Jarrett, Cappfinity acquisition, talent analytics, workforce analytics, hiring bias reduction, candidate screening, pre-hire assessment