TalentBin Raises $2M From Lightbank To Be The Data-Focused Recruiting Platform For Technical Talent

TalentBin, a startup that uses data to help recruiters discover hard-to-find technical talent, has raised $2 million in new funding led by Lightbank led the round, with participation from NEA, Foundation Capital, First Round Capital Charles River Ventures, and Funders Club. Lightbank partner Paul Lee will join TalentBin’s board. The startup had previously raised $1.2 million in funding.

TalentBin evolved from Unvarnished, and Honestly last year, and pivoted into providing recruiters a way to find engineers and developers that went deeper than using LinkedIn. TalentBin takes into account activity across sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Meetup, Quora, Github, Sourceforge, and Bitbucket, then uses that data to create a searchable profile for recruiters. TalentBin’s algorithm then analyzes each person’s activity on these sites to provide recruiters with information on skills and interests that rarely appears on LinkedIn profiles, giving them access to people whose resumes wouldn’t normally reach their job board.

Peter Kazanjy, co-founder of TalentBin, explains that finding talent these days goes beyond just LinkedIn or anything that is easily searchable on the web. Some of the most talented developers and engineers are not necessarily found via LinkedIn, he says. And it goes beyond just technical talent, he adds, saying that there needs to be more data from disparate sources like Twitter, Facebook and others when it comes to recruiting.

In the past two years, the company has aggregated more than 500 million profiles of potential candidates to date, adding upwards of 10,000 profiles each week to better service its 200+ corporate clients, including leading companies like Facebook, Amazon and UPS.

In the past year, TalentBin had added a number of “non-social” sources, such as inventorship and patent records in the U.S. Patent Database, open source software email list-serves and athorship records in the PubMed life science publication’s database

Lee says that with 63 companies in the firm’s portfolio, it’s clear that there is an acute need for technical talent at the startup and big-company level. But he says that the best developers aren’t necessarily looking for jobs, and combined with that trend, TalentBin gives startups access to those people.

Kasanjy says that in particular, Lightbank made sense as their lead investor in the round because the startup is going to be working on scaling a sales team to sell the service to recruiters and companies. With Groupon, Belly and others in the portfolio, “Lightbank has a history of operational excellence when it comes to scaling successful sales teams.”

TalentBin, which faces competition from LinkedIn itself as well as Gild among others, is definitely onto something by looking to other sources to pull in data to make recruiting more efficient, and successful. And the fact that it has companies like Facebook and Amazon using the software is a good sign.