Glenn Diersen founded Summit Human Capital in 2018 and now also runs CereHive.
Glenn Diersen is back in startup mode.
The founder of Richmond-based recruiting firm Summit Human Capital has launched a new company, CereHive.
Born out of his experiences in the staffing industry and running Summit the last seven years, Diersen said the artificial intelligence-powered software venture aims to help companies of all sorts in streamlining their hiring process and eliminating what he calls “mis-hiring.”
He said CereHive is built to use AI to sift through piles of job applications and suggest the top 10% that match a company’s parameters.
“It’s meant to help any company, industry agnostic, regardless of size, to optimize their recruitment,” Diersen said. “Every company has a recruitment problem. Imagine instead of looking at 250 (applicants) you’re looking at just 25 with 90% more efficiency.”
Diersen said the idea for CereHive began in early 2023 when Summit, now a nearly 300-person firm headquartered at 1635 W. Broad St., was approached by a team of advisors to discuss how the company planned to incorporate AI into its workflow in the staffing realm.
“It just created a lot of questions: How are we going to leverage AI and how deep are we going to go?” Diersen said.
Rather than hiring a third party to help Summit implement AI into its business, Diersen chose to continue on the entrepreneurial route that began when he launched Summit in 2018.
“After that meeting I said ‘I like where we’re going but I’m thinking bigger.’ Instead of meeting the needs of Summit Human Capital, how do we meet the needs of recruitment across the entire globe?”
He set out to develop what he refers to as “talent discovery software,” for which he said CereHive has a patent pending. Diersen said he was able to tap into Summit’s IT recruiting experience to find a team of software engineers to develop CereHive’s main program.
The CereHive name is a combination of cerebellum and hive, to evoke a “a community of intelligence.”
The company formally launched in recent weeks and has team of 10 employees. Diersen is the CEO, while remaining in his role as president at Summit. He said CereHive is a standalone company and not part of Summit, although Summit is CereHive’s first client and the new company is also based out of Summit’s Broad Street HQ.
“Summit, naturally, is the first client,” Diersen said. “If CereHive can successfully satisfy the needs of Summit Human Capital users, imagine…”
Diersen said he’s now working to build CereHive’s sales team. He declined to share how much he’s invested to launch CereHive but added that he’s the sole owner and has not taken in any outside investors for the venture.
“It’s certainly a sizable investment. I do everything I can to remain a bootstrapped organization,” he said.
Diersen said the CereHive name is a combination of cerebellum and hive, to evoke a “a community of intelligence.”
CereHive offers a tiered pricing structure of $4,000, $6,000 and $8,000 per year per user. Diersen said a user is defined as anyone involved in a company’s talent acquisition process that needs access to the system.
He said CereHive does not require companies to buy new recruitment infrastructure, rather its software taps into a company’s existing hiring systems.
“Most companies have an applicant tracking software, like Bullhorn or Greenhouse or a candidate repository. We tie into any existing tech that they have. We don’t replace your tech, we enable your existing tech,” Diersen said.
In addition to prioritizing the top 10% of applicants for a given job, Diersen said CereHive is designed to comb through a company’s entire backlog of previous applicants and take them into account for that current position.
“The Fortune 1000 companies have millions of candidates that have applied at one point in time. Now you’re engaging the top 10% of an entire historical data set. It brings your historic candidate base back to life,” he said.
The software also can engage with the other 90% of applicants – the ones who weren’t prioritized on CereHive’s top 10% list – to communicate with them and not leave them without a response.
“One fear of ours is what about the other 90%,” Diersen said. “We’re still engaging them.”
Diersen, ever the exuberant frontman of now two companies, has big dreams for CereHive.
While Summit has been fast-growing – in recent year’s it’s landed on the Inc. 5000 and RVA 25, Diersen envisions CereHive becoming the bigger of the two.
“Global reach is the expectation,” he said. “There are no physical barriers to our product.”
