Job interviews may soon be performed with the help of artificial intelligence if Mya Systems Inc. has its way.

The San Francisco-based startup entered the spotlight today by announcing that it has raised $11.4 million in a round led by Salesforce.com Inc. and Box Inc. investor Emergence Capital. The funds will help fuel the development of new features for Mya, its namesake chatbot, which is designed to automate the repetitive chores that typically consume the bulk of recruiters’ time.

When candidates click a job posting from a company that uses the software, they’re greeted by a chat window where they’re asked questions about their qualifications in a natural-language format. Mya covers key subjects such as what kind of roles an applicant has held, how much experience they’ve acquired and where they worked. Its machine learning algorithms generate pointers between answers, including requests to reaffirm certain important details, so to make the most out of the conversation.

Mya wraps up each session by helping candidates pick a time for an interview. In the background, the bot syncs the filtered data from the conversation to the company’s backend infrastructure, where they can be viewed by the HR team before the scheduled call or in-person meeting. Mya Systems claims that the bot is capable of cutting recruiting overhead by half while doubling a firm’s hiring volume.

The startup is mainly targeting large organizations that recruit upwards of thousands of new employees a year. A retailer, for instance, could employ Mya to help its human resources team more easily deal with the influx of temporary workers who are brought aboard before the holiday season.

Mya claims that its pitch has already won over several Fortune 500 companies along with three of the world’s largest recruiting agencies. In a statement, co-founder and Chief Executive Eyal Grayevsky divulged that the bot is on track to process 2 million candidates by the end of the year.

Image: Mya