There are plenty of old-school software platforms for hiring and talent management like Taleo, which is owned by Oracle.
But a new startup called Lever, backed with $10 million from Matrix Partners, thinks that it might be time for a change.
They’ve built a full suite of human resources software that’s meant to help companies source, schedule, interview and manage their pipeline of job candidates. In their private beta, they’ve racked up customers including Box, Coursera, Foursquare, GitHub, Lyft, Quora, Reddit, and Slack. It’s a SAAS-based business model where they charge fees based on usage, although founder and CEO Sarah Nahm didn’t disclose rates yet.
“The market is really fragmented. On the one hand, there are applicant tracking systems and products like Jobvite, Jobscore, Taleo, and there’s SuccessFactors. Then there’s this whole other market of agencies,” Nahm said. “It’s an old market.”
Lever’s product includes Chrome extensions and e-mail syncing for sourcing, if a company wants to mark or remember candidates. You can e-mail, archive, and tag candidates in bulk. Agency recruiters can also send candidates into the system, and then there are little features like scheduled or delayed responses if a recruiter needs to say no to a candidate. For interviewers, there are simple feedback forms and scheduling systems. Then for overall HR managers, Lever produces reports on whether a company is meeting its goals.
“We’re really trying to be that system that ties together the entire process. There are a lot of great products that are optimized for or crucial parts of the hiring process, like HackerRank, but there’s not really anything that can pull it all together,” Nahm said. “The hunger for these modern tools was so intense that it was actually pretty crazy.”
Nahm was previously a product marketing manager at Google and she, Nate Smith and Randal Truong started the company back in 2012. They argue that “hyper-growth is the new norm” for many companies, which need to double in size every year while maintaining a high bar for quality and retaining a strong company culture. With so many companies vying for talent in the Bay Area, it’s incredibly competitive so companies have to move fast.
With the round, Matrix general partner Dana Stalder, who has served on the board of other enterprise companies like recent IPO Zendesk, will join the board. Other investors include SV Angel, Redpoint, Index Ventures, Y Combinator, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Khosla general partners Keith Rabois and Ben Ling, Homebrew’s Hunter Walk and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman.