Everyone needs a job, but submitting resumes is a pain and they’re not discoverable, so they don’t help you get recruited. That’s why Work4 Labs has just raised $11 million to let you apply or get recruited for jobs with your Facebook profile.
Along with the Series A, led by Matrix and joined by DST’s Yuri Milner and others, Work4 Labs is making its Work For Us recruitment tools free for small businesses, including an app that scans the profiles of a company’s Facebook friends and suggests who to refer for what job opening. Now Work4 Labs will try to frame LinkedIn as a tool for elite headhunters and itself as the recruiting tool for the rest of the world.
It’s been an epic rise for Work4 Labs, growing from 10 employees and 6,000 customers to 70 employees and 17,000 customers since April 2011. Those include a lot of small businesses but also massive brands, such as SAP, General Motors, Anheuser-Busch, and UPS. In the meantime it released possibly the smartest recruiting technologies I’ve seen.
The Work4 Us careers site app for Facebook Pages asks for data permissions, then scans a viewer’s Facebook profile for education, work history, and other pertinent data. That lets it sort the open jobs at a company to highlight those that are the best matches for the viewer’s qualifications.
Work4 Labs clients can notifiy employees which of their friends are good fits for available jobs and suggest they refer them. Compare these to browsing an unsorted list of available positions or racking your brain for whom to refer, and you can see why Work4 Labs is doing something smart.
Some of the $11 million Series A will go to investing in these algorithms that match Facebook profile data to jobs. The cash from Matrix Partners, Milner, former Monster.com president Steve Pogorzelski, and Hearsay Social co-founder and CEO Clara Shih will also fund growth of its U.S. and Europe teams plus expansion into Asia. Finally, Work4 Labs plans to make some big senior hires in technology and marketing. Matrix general partner Dana Stalder will also join the startup’s board.
To be real, Work4 Labs products may not be as applicable for recruiting highly specialized employees. Businesses will still need to see a full resume or filled-out LinkedIn profile to tell if someone’s qualified for a role. But most companies spend a lot of time finding and hiring for less specialized positions — where the limited work and education info in someone’s Facebook profile is enough to indicate a company should reach out, highlight a certain job on their careers app, or ask an employee connected to them to make a referral.
Those are the same people who might not visit a company’s career website, but could stop by their Facebook Page or have a friend who already works for the brand. Work4 Labs’ technology excels at pulling these people into the application process, and with $11 million extra dollars, you can expect it to keep getting better.
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