Carlyle Group Takes Majority Stake in HireVue
September 13, 2019 – Investors are pouring money into recruiting solutions businesses, especially those with an AI component. The latest: South Jordan, UT-based HireVue, which develops and provides AI-driven assessment and video interviewing solutions, has announced that global investment firm Carlyle Group has signed an agreement to invest in HireVue as its majority investor. Existing shareholders, including TCV, Granite Ventures and Sequoia, together with HireVue management, will remain minority investors.
Equity capital for the investment will come from Carlyle Partners VII, an $18.5 billion fund. The Carlyle team leading the transaction focuses on investments in global technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) companies. TMT is a core area of focus for Carlyle, representing more than $30 billion of invested equity since inception. Goldman Sachs acted as exclusive financial advisor to HireVue.
Over its 15-year history, HireVue has helped to transform the way companies discover, hire and develop the most diverse set of top talent. Its customers generate strong returns on their investment by reducing the time it takes to hire a candidate by 90 percent on average, said HireVue. They also regularly achieve world-class candidate net promoter scores of more than 70, all while increasing the number of prospective candidates, hiring objectivity and the diversity of hires. HireVue pioneered the video interviewing industry and remains the leader today, delivering a million interviews and over 150,000 pre-hire assessments every 90 days.
“We are delighted to partner with Carlyle to accelerate HireVue’s technology innovation and propel our growth globally,” said Kevin Parker, chairman and CEO at HireVue. “Carlyle’s culture of ‘performance through collaboration’ makes it our ideal partner as we expand to new markets and enhance our support of enterprise partners around the world.”
“HireVue is the recognized video interviewing and talent assessments leader,” said Patrick McCarter, managing director and co-head of TMT at the Carlyle Group. “Innovative global enterprises are driving more efficient and effective hiring through HireVue, accessing a broader, more diverse talent pool and significantly reducing bias.”
“We look forward to partnering with Kevin and the entire HireVue team to further accelerate the business and create even greater value for HireVue’s global employees, customers and partners,” said Tyler Parker, vice president at the Carlyle Group.
Equity Capital
“HireVue’s market-leading SaaS platform and suite of recruitment solutions assist global enterprises in finding, engaging, and hiring the best talent,” said Nari Ansari, general partner at TCV. “We are excited about the new partnership with Carlyle and HireVue’s next phase of growth.”
Diversified Search Closes Funding Round, Acquires Koya Leadership Partners
In an era of growing consolidation among recruiters, this latest deal brings together the 11th and 28th largest search firms in the U.S. Diversified Search, long reluctant to entertain investor offers, said the timing was right when a private equity firm came courting.
The HireVue assessment and video interviewing platform combine the power of video, AI, game and technical challenges for comprehensive hiring intelligence. Validated behavioral science is the foundation of HireVue’s pre-hire assessments, which are rigorously bias-tested according to the EEOC’s Uniform Guidelines and used to support greater diversity and efficiency in hiring. HireVue customers report lower attrition and high return on investment.
Serving Customers Worldwide
HireVue is available worldwide in more than 30 languages and has hosted over six million interviews for more than 700 customers worldwide, including more than one-third of the Fortune 100 and brands such as Vodafone, Intel, Hilton, HealthSouth, Qantas and Carnival Cruise Lines. The company, which was founded in 2004, was named among the top 10 “Most Promising Companies” in America by Forbes and is a five-time winner of “Top HR Product of the Year” by HR Executive Magazine.
Last year, HireVue expanded with the acquisition of MindX, a game-based assessments company in London. MindX’s game-based assessments are designed to speed the hiring process and quickly identify cognitive traits in job candidates. Integrating the latest advancements in psychometrics, Big Data and machine learning from MindX into the HireVue video intelligence platform is expected to provide HireVue’s customers with the capability to seamlessly incorporate game-based assessments into their candidate screening processes for more thorough evaluations and an engaging candidate experience.
“The MindX game-based assessments are a perfect complement to HireVue’s video-based pre-hire assessments solution, as they add the ability to measure fluid IQ, reasoning and problem-solving to the ability of HireVue Assessments to evaluate job-specific knowledge, communication and social intelligence,” said Mr. Parker, of HireVue. “We’re excited to deliver even more robust and validated tools to our customers worldwide so they can discover, hire and grow more of the best talent, faster in today’s competitive hiring market.”
Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief; Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor; Stephen Sawicki, Managing Editor; and Andrew W. Mitchell, Managing Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
