TrueAbility, a technology recruiting startup in San Antonio, has landed $750,000 in seed stage funding.
Rackspace Co-Founder Pat Condon and Graham Weston, Co-Founder and Chairman of Rackspace led the funding round.
TrueAbility, based at Geekdom, launched last year with its flagship product AbilityScreen, a cloud-based assessment service used by companies to evaluate the technical skills of job candidates. On Oct. 13th, the startup launched its invitation-only private beta testing of its product. In the first quarter of this year, TrueAbility plans to launch an open beta testing of its products in which a variety of companies can start screening companies. The product allows “hiring managers and recruiters to measure a job candidate’s abilities on a variety of technologies, platforms, vendor certifications and industry standards that their company uses today or plans to use,” according to a news release.
Currently, companies evaluate a job candidate’s abilities through interviews and other tests. But TrueAbility’s product puts the job candidate in a situation similar to what they would encounter in the workplace to demonstrate their expertise. And since the product resides in the cloud, recruiters can test job candidates anywhere in the world.
TrueAbility’s AbilityScreen can test a “candidate’s ability to think critically and leverage resouces, and how well he or she will adapte to learning new things on the fly,” according to the release.
“The demand for qualified technical expertise in the enterprise has changed, but the way we screen and hire these candidates has not,” Graham Weston said in a news release. “TrueAbility can evolve this space much to the benefit of companies everywhere.”
Qualified technical talent worldwide is in demand and employers spend billions of dollars to find them and hire them every year.
This funding will allow TrueAbility to hire additional employees, said Luke Owen, the company’s CEO.
“The big things we are focusing on is hiring additional developers and engineers,” Owen said. That will allow the company to expand the technologies it can test for using its AbilityScreen product.
TrueAbility will also focus on developing a solid sales model to sell into the enterprise and small business marketplaces, Owen said.
TrueAbility’s team is made up of Owen, Frederick “Suizo” Mendler, Marcus Robertson and Dusty Jones. Last summer, TrueAbility won the San Antonio Startup Weekend competition. The company was recently selected to participate in TechStars Cloud, which kicked off today in San Antonio. The team will spend the next three months working on its product, building its team and will showcase its progress at TechStars Cloud Demo Day in April.