CandidateX is over the moon to announce that it has secured substantial government funding through Innovate UK's SmartGrant competition.
Attracting many thousands of applications every year, Innovate UK’s Smart Grants program is highly competitive, and we are delighted to have been successful with our bid. It's an achievement we can all feel hugely proud of, and is the result of many months of hard work.
Innovate UK invests up to £100 million every year in game-changing, world leading ideas that have a fast commercialisation potential and economic return for the UK economy, with only the most novel and innovative business concepts gaining access to grant funding to accelerate their development.
Press Release
CandidateX awarded Innovate UK Smart Grant funding to solve Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) challenges within hiring processes, underpinned by cutting-edge technology
Diverse Talent Acquisition innovators CandidateX has secured innovation funding from Innovate UK, the UK government’s flagship grant programme to address the candidate experience for underrepresented groups
London, 6th September 2022
CandidateX, a social impact and data-driven organisation, focused on increasing access to opportunities and inclusion for underestimated talent, today announces it has secured substantial Innovation funding from Innovate UK, the result of many months of hard work.
Innovate UK invests up to £100 million every year in game-changing, world leading ideas that have a fast commercialisation potential and economic return for the UK economy, with only the most novel and innovative business concepts gaining access to grant funding to accelerate their development.
In awarding the funding, Innovate assessors recommended CandidateX as “a well-researched and presented proposal in an innovative area which will generate substantial wider societal and economic benefits” and of “meeting the needs of jobseekers for the elimination of bias and the growing demand for DEI within talent acquisition”
CandidateX’s grant-funded project seeks to overcome key DEI challenges such as cognitive biases within hiring processes, and how organisations can gain meaningful diversity-data insights from application processes crucial for identifying organisational-perception by underrepresented demographic groups, thus creating informed inclusion-minded strategic outreach initiatives.
Without significant systemic recruitment process modifications, human bias, conscious or otherwise, will continue to disproportionately affect candidates from minority groups, with candidates in the UK with non-white sounding names sending 75% more resumes to receive the same number of call-backs as candidates with white-sounding names.
CandidateX's focus is on creating the world's first fully anonymised talent platform that eliminates cognitive biases and creates deep diversity data insights collected from candidate funnels, a product of a highly-personalised candidate-centred experience.
Its proposition solves the identified problems by knitting together technology enablement, candidate engagement and data insights to solve DEI issues at a structural and systemic level.
This funding comes hot on the heels of it’s private seed investment round in Q3 2021, and CandidateX will use the funds to further accelerate product development and launch its platform to the UK-market in early 2023.
Sunil Dial, CEO and Co-Founder of CandidateX, says: "To win funding from Innovate UK is a major boost for CandidateX, and is a remarkable achievement considering that our innovative idea was up against thousands of other competitor submissions”
“The funding will enable us to accelerate research and development, turning our platform into a truly ground-breaking product. By providing underestimated talent with access to opportunities fairly and without bias, we will have a significant impact on the UK economy.”
