Snowflake Startup Spotlight: TestGorilla

As AI tools become more powerful and more commonly used, traditional recruitment processes now pose a problem for candidates and companies alike. How can recruiters find the best candidates when they have to sift through thousands of potentially AI-written CVs? And how can candidates showcase their aptitude and skills to employers, rather than being judged solely on their background? 

We spoke with Raul Poblador, Head of Data & AI at TestGorilla, to learn how the company aims to solve both problems by combining the latest recruitment research, data and AI technologies at scale.

Explain TestGorilla in a single sentence

TestGorilla is the global talent discovery platform that helps employers source and hire based on proven skills. With a pool of more than 2 million skills-tested candidates, 350+ science-backed assessments, and AI-powered sourcing and evaluation, we give organizations a faster, fairer and smarter way to hire. 

What inspires you as a data leader?

I’m inspired by the idea of making the world a fairer place. We do this at TestGorilla by leveling the hiring playing field, ensuring candidates get a fair chance through skills based hiring rather than being filtered based on attributes that have nothing to do with how they’ll perform in a role. 

After all, if there are hundreds — or now more like thousands — of applicants for a single job, how can HR and recruitment managers fairly assess everyone manually? We can help with this by providing assessments and candidate insights backed by scientific, academically supported analyses of skills and psychometric profiles.

What problem does TestGorilla solve? How did you identify that issue?

You hear it all the time: “recruitment is broken.” It’s a common complaint from candidates and HR managers alike. And as AI tools improve, the challenge grows because you have CVs and personal statements being written by LLMs at an unprecedented scale. 

This is a real challenge for recruiters and HR managers, and it’s not fair for candidates. We solve this by making sure candidates can showcase their true value through validated metrics and companies can connect with qualified, quality talent.

What’s the coolest thing TestGorilla is doing with data today?

To say we track a lot of candidate data would be an understatement. We gather millions of multifaceted metrics from a wide array of skills-based assessments. That means utilizing a combination of frontier methodologies, such as innovative AI video interviews combined with text, based on frameworks developed by our Talent & Assessment Science team and then verifying them against the latest research. Collecting all that data and surfacing it insightfully for hiring managers is a gigantic task.

How does Snowflake fit into your data stack?

Snowflake collects all our data in a single location. We take data from our ranking, recommendation and scoring systems, our SQL production database, HubSpot, and finance and accounting tools, and feed it all into our BI solution to power self-serve dashboards and reporting. These insights also power the AI and machine learning tools that underpin our candidate ranking and assessment systems.

Is there a particular feature or capability that enables you to push the envelope in your field of work?

Snowflake’s read speeds are, in my experience, an order of magnitude faster than any other platform I’ve seen. We’ve seen up to 10x speed improvement for certain embedded analytics workloads, and our developers have more leeway to execute larger queries quickly — allowing them to experiment and develop new features faster.

As a founder and innovator, what is your take on the rapidly changing AI landscape? How will it change what TestGorilla is able to do?

The development of AI will continue creating risks and opportunities in recruitment. While you have challenges like fake CVs and bot account networks flooding recruiting sites, you also have AI tools that can be really useful.

We’ve been working hard over the past few years, releasing AI features and more recently an AI-fluency framework to assess and hire without the guesswork. From anti-cheating systems  and scientifically validated tests to personalized candidate search results, we’ll continue using AI to give businesses a trusted way to evaluate the right talent at scale and in a more multi-layered and fairer way.

What’s the most valuable piece of advice you’ve ever received about running a startup?

Focus on problems, not features. Don’t ship new code for the sake of it. Really speak to customers and understand the core challenge you’re trying to solve before taking action.

What’s one thing you learned the hard way?

We learned to slow down and think carefully about everything we do and why we do it. Whether it’s shipping product features quickly, or moving people too fast through a hiring funnel, sometimes working quickly with a flawed system just gets you bad results faster.

Finally, when you think about the future of your industry, where do you see TestGorilla?

The future of recruitment will be focused on skills-based hiring decisions grounded in good data rather than intuition. We’ve seen how well this works using our assessments and data for our own recruitment processes.

AI will be fundamental in reaching this future thanks to its ability to find the signal within the noise and identify the best candidates. TestGorilla will be at the center of this on both sides: it will help create a fairer recruiting landscape for candidates, while also connecting companies with the best talent.

Learn more about TestGorilla, including its current employment opportunities, at testgorilla.com. If you’re a startup building on Snowflake, check out the Snowflake for Startups Program to learn how we can support your goals.