Image Credits: Beamery

Given the increased scrutiny over candidate-recommending AI systems, Abakar Saidov was quick to note that Beamery shows how various factors, including skills, seniority, proficiency and industry, influence its recommendations and to what degree. Beamery is among the vendors that could be subjected to a New York City regulation — the Automated Employment Decision Tools law, set to go into effect in January — that would ban employers from using AI hiring tools unless a bias audit can show they won’t discriminate.

Abakar Saidov says that Beamery recently completed a third-party audit for bias in its AI capabilities, which involved “rigorous testing” of the platform’s machine learning models. (Abakar Saidov didn’t proactively share a copy of the report with TechCrunch; we’ve requested one.) The company also partnered with Parity AI, a startup led by AI ethicist and activist Liz O’Sullivan, to audit the platform on an ongoing basis.

“Within the Beamery … platform itself (i.e. in the application layer), a key differentiator for us is helping customers ensure their own compliance with the myriad of global personal data and privacy standards,” Abakar Saidov said. “We achieve this primarily through the preference center, which lets candidates control their consent, whether and how companies can contact them and control how AI is used against their profile.”

Beamery doesn’t exist in a vacuum, of course. Competitors in the HR tech software space include 15Five, which raised $52 million in July for its talent management solution. There’s also Gloat, a well-capitalized startup building AI-powered internal jobs marketplaces. Eightfold is among the most formidable, with an over-$2-billion valuation and backing from SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, General Catalyst and Lightspeed.

Broadly speaking, VCs have shown a willingness to put money behind HR tech startups even as other segments underperform. According to an analysis from WorkTech, the first half of this year saw the second-largest global work tech investment, surging to $9.4 billion, with $4.6 billion invested in Q2 alone.

Despite layoffs in the tech industry, job growth has remained resilient despite the economic headwinds, driving demand for HR tech — and spawning new vendors as a result.

To stay ahead, since its Series C, Beamery has doubled down on analytics capabilities, Abakar Saidov says — introducing a dashboard designed to enable companies to better understand their workforce by aggregating skills data across disparate HR systems and tools. The platform also recently rolled out a portal for candidates that provides recommendations for jobs as well as skills they might need to develop to further their careers in their chosen industry. And, as an outgrowth of its acquisition of internal HR sourcing platform Flux, Beamery launched Beamery Grow, which Abakar Saidov describes as a “talent marketplace solution” to help employees gain new skills and connections from within their organizations.

“We are prioritizing enhancements that will let customers quickly and easily leverage their talent data for things like agile workforce planning, as well as ensuring they have real-time intelligence and insights around their current and future workforce allocation, the skills that exist in their organization relative to their business outcomes and their achievement of diversity, equity and inclusion targets,” Abakar Saidov said. “The capabilities that a company will need over the next ten years are in many cases very different from today, and therefore HR tech solutions need to be able to help businesses build, buy or borrow the skills they need to build a future fit workforce.”

Beamery currently has 417 employees. When asked about hiring plans, Abakar Saidov said they’re “in development.”