SonicJobs Raises £4.2M Series A to Fix the Broken Job Application Experience
December 12, 2024
SonicJobs, the London-based job search platform, has raised £4.2 million in a Series A funding round led by Triple Point Ventures, TMT Investments, and Ufi Ventures, with participation from a group of angel investors including Richard Flint (Sky Bet), W Fund, Vivek Kumar (PropertyGuru), Paul Huntingdon (Serocor Group), Rod Leefe, Rajan Navani, and several others. The capital will be used to further integrate machine learning into the company's robotic process automation (RPA) engine, accelerate candidate growth in the UK, and launch in the United States, the world's largest recruitment market.
SonicJobs was founded in 2017 by Mikhil Raja, Francesca Boccolini, and Francesco Masia. The trio identified a fundamental flaw in how job search works on mobile: despite candidates overwhelmingly using smartphones to look for work, the experience of actually applying for a job remained broken. Clicking a job listing on a job board would typically redirect the candidate to the employer's own careers website, where they would be required to create a new account, re-enter information they had already provided, navigate a series of poorly-optimised mobile pages, and answer screening questions that bore little resemblance to the intuitive mobile experiences they were used to from Amazon, Booking.com, or any modern consumer app. Conversion rates from job listing to completed application were around 5 percent — meaning 95 percent of candidates who expressed interest in a role never completed their application.
SonicJobs solves this by using a proprietary RPA engine that reads and understands the application process on any employer's career page, then guides the candidate through the application entirely within the SonicJobs app, with the company's AI assistant, Julie, handling the process step by step. Candidates register once, upload a CV, and can then apply for any of the platform's 500,000-plus jobs with a single tap. The platform stores candidate information and answers so it never has to be repeated. SonicJobs reports that this approach drives a 26 percent application completion rate — more than five times the industry average. The platform has particular strength in blue-collar and entry-level roles in hospitality, retail, and logistics, where candidate abandonment has historically been highest.
By the time of the Series A, SonicJobs had helped over a million candidates apply for jobs and was processing over 250,000 applications per month, in part fuelled by the surge in job-seeking activity during the period of labour market disruption following COVID-19. The company had become the leading job search app in its target sectors in the UK, placing it well to replicate that position in the United States, where similar structural problems with the application experience exist at even larger scale.
The round is structured to take SonicJobs from Series A to unicorn status, according to the founders, through a combination of domestic growth and international expansion anchored by its proprietary technology advantage in automating the application journey.
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