Gild Announces Acquisition Of Distill

SAN FRANCISCO – April 2, 2014 – Gild, which powers the way companies find and evaluate technical talent, has acquired Distill and its products to help employers quickly and easily schedule, interview and connect with candidates. In combination with Gild’s flagship product Source, customers will now seamlessly be able to discover the software engineers who fit their needs and then screen, and interview candidates from one integrated platform.

The terms of the deal were not announced.  The Distill team and engineers were earlier acquired in an acqui-hire by Yahoo!, Inc.  Gild acquired the IP and technology, and will service existing customers as well as bring on new customers.

“We have long said the hiring process is broken,” said Sheeroy Desai, Co-founder and CEO, Gild.  “Gild Source was a giant step forward in terms of identifying the best possible developers for a position based on skill, but it’s still the first step in a complex process. The current process to schedule and conduct an initial screening interview is manual, expensive and an awful experience for the candidate and the interviewer. The acquisition of Distill will allow us to automate all of this and provide a seamless and delightful experience for both the candidate and the interviewer.”

Distill’s technology addresses two common challenges in creating a truly collaborative recruiting and hiring process – specifically, scheduling and interviewing.

• Scheduling interviews is time-consuming and expensive. Distill’s intelligent scheduling technology makes it easy to schedule interviewers with candidates by automatically searching for mutual times in online calendars.  The technology works with Gmail and Outlook.
• Distill’s collaborative video interviewing technology integrates seamlessly with the scheduling module so both the candidate and interviewer can connect online with one click. The platform allows both parties to further interact with a shared text editor, a co-browsing capability and the ability to share files. The entire experience is browser-based so users don’t have to download any software or plug-ins.

“We currently use Gild to help us identify the best developer talent in the industry,” said Austin Cooke, Vice President of Human Resources and Global Talent Acquisition for Vistaprint. “With the acquisition of Distill’s interview scheduling and video interviewing technologies, I can now envision Gild really helping their customers reduce costs, save time, enhance their candidate experience and continue to improve their quality of hires.”

“Gild’s team of technologists and scientists is focused on using proprietary technology to solve a real problem: how to discover great talent and create an intelligent, collaborative hiring environment across the hiring process, from candidates to recruiters to hiring managers,” said Luca Bonmassar, Gild’s Co-founder and Chief Product and Technology Officer.  “We feel Distill solves a real problem, and are excited to bring their advanced technology to our customers.”

Gild Source, Gild’s flagship product, is powered by proprietary technology that scours the web for information on developers, including their public code and contributions to developer forums, and then utilizes patent-pending algorithms to score the skills of the millions of developers it finds.  This lets companies move past the noise in today’s recruiting arenas and hire based on merit alone – finding developers who have proven, verified skills, regardless of SEO résumé keywords or social connections.