Talvy Raises $2M Seed Round As It Aims To Replace Traditional Resumes With Short-Form Video Profiles – AfroTech
Ex-MIT and Stanford engineer KJ Hardrict is changing the interview process for job seekers.
Hardrict’s background spans engineering, venture capital, and content. He has worked at Link Ventures as a principal and served as a founding engineer and a senior engineer for various startups, according to his LinkedIn profile. Hardrict has also gained more than 115,000 YouTube subscribers.
It’s the variety of his experience that has given him a front seat to the hiring process, Hardrict acknowledged to AFROTECH™.
“As an engineer and startup operator, I saw how often incredible people were filtered out before anyone spoke to them. As an investor, I saw founders struggling to identify key talent in a sea of resumes,” he said.
Hardrict also considered his own experience in the job market and noticed that being seen, not just read about, set him up for success.
“Recruiters would watch my videos on YouTube, and within a few minutes, they understood who I was and how I thought. That made me realize something: millions of talented people never get that chance to be seen,” Hardrict explained.
Talvy
This insight led Hardrict to launch Talvy, a video-first professional profile platform that ensures people are evaluated as “people instead of PDFs,” and has raised $2 million in a seed round led by Link Ventures, according to a press release. The founding team also includes Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Yoeal Efrem (ex-Palantir), Product & Go-To-Market Lead Lisa Vo (5x founder), ML Engineer Yaateh Richardson (ex-Meta), and Chief of Staff Sebastian Esquivel (ex-Unilever).
Talvy’s natural language search will surface a list of candidate video profiles for hiring teams, and hiring teams can also invite potential candidates to submit Talvy profiles for private review.
Recruiters can scroll through Talvy, searching for talent in the same way users scroll on TikTok to hear stories from creators and explore their various lived experiences. This can help them better gauge whether someone is a culture fit for the company, which typically wouldn’t be possible until the interview or after they are hired, Hardrict told AFROTECH™.
“In a hiring market flooded with AI-generated applications, humanity matters more than ever,” Hardrict said. “Talvy lets recruiters experience candidates in seconds, the way people naturally evaluate each other in real conversation. It brings back the instinctive read you usually only get in an interview — but much earlier in the process, and at scale.”
Hardrict acknowledged that success will be measured by the platform’s adoption by both job seekers and recruiters, but more importantly, by its ability to close the talent gap by ensuring great people land in great roles.
Talvy comes at a time when there is a need for updated hiring practices and better ways to review job applications. In fact, the typical job posting receives nearly triple the applicants compared to 2017, which also means candidates have a 0.4% chance of being hired, according to Business Insider.
Hardrict himself said he has also been filtered out for the wrong reasons and has observed hiring managers who are overwhelmed by identical resumes piling up, forcing them into what he calls “elimination mode rather than discovery mode,” which can lead to poor hiring decisions.
“I’ve seen teams derailed, momentum lost, and relationships damaged because the wrong person ended up in a critical role. The majority of those situations trace back to a process that prioritized surface-level signals over actually understanding who someone is,” he admitted.
“That combination, the volume problem and the quality problem hitting simultaneously, made it clear we needed a more human layer in the hiring process,” he later added.
Talvy Spotlight
Talvy is also rolling out a program called the Talvy Spotlight, which will target “exceptional candidates” who have been vetted by Talvy, according to information shared with AFROTECH™. These individuals will be introduced to hiring managers in Talvy’s network and may even be featured on a Times Square billboard.
“We realized that identifying exceptional people wasn’t enough. We also wanted to actively champion them,” Hardict expressed.
Looking ahead, Talvy’s new infusion of venture capital will position the company to scale product development, build the infrastructure for a video-first professional profile, expand its team, and strengthen its partnership pipeline.
