Jobvite — a recruitment platform visited by more than 35 million people in the last year, which lets companies post job openings and then disseminate and monitor how those job vacancy alerts perform across other sites and recruitment services — is today announcing that it has raised another $25 million. This is a growth round of funding that CEO Dan Finnigan says will be used not to diversify into other areas of human resources — as some of its competitors have done — but to double down on its singular approach to recruitment.
“We see recruitment the way a marketing department today views marketing services,” he told TechCrunch in an interview. By that, the company means not only looking for ways of putting your ads in front of the people you want to attract to the job, but then to be able to measure how well each of those do to plan better for the future.
The idea has picked up a decent amount of traction so far: Jobvite says it counts more than 1,600 companies as paying customers, including Starbucks, Twitter, Farmers Insurance, and nine of the last 11 top tech IPOs.
This is a Series D round that takes the total raised by Jobvite to $55.5 million. Led by Catalyst Investors, this round had participation from existing investors CMEA, ATA Ventures and Trident Capital — essentially the three lead investors from Jobvite’s previous three rounds.
Jobvite is not disclosing revenues or even whether it is profitable, but Finnigan has outlined some other metrics that speak to how the company is doing.
In addition to 35 million visitors in the last year, the company has processed more than 30 million job applications since first opening for business in 2003. Among its business customers — in other words, the ones that pay Jobvite for its services — Finnigan notes that the revenue that it collects from individual customers based on its software-as-a-service framework is “significantly higher than what we spend acquiring those customers.”
He also notes that the company has “very low churn.” These are not direct calculations for profitability, of course, since they don’t take into account operational or any other costs of business. But they do explain why the company is keen to continue to grow the pool of companies it counts as clients: it means a larger recurring revenue stream for the long term.
Jobvite’s decision to focus specifically on building out its recruitment products — in contrast to competitors like ZipRecruiter, which recently raised $63 million and has ambitions to extend into areas adjacent to recruitment like employee onboarding — is partly because of what Finnigan sees as a bigger trend in the job-hunting world. Not only are there now dozens of places where a person might see and respond to a job advertisement online today, but those people are more likely to change jobs over the lifetime of their careers.
“I’m the last of the baby boomers,” he tells me, in a candid admission for a person working in a tech world that seems these days to favor those who are not very old. “My generation will on average hold between six and eight jobs. But these days a college grad will have between 15 and 20 jobs in his or her career. Employees change jobs way more than they used to, and at the same time companies are competing for a shrinking supply of skilled labor.”
This is what Jobvite is tapping into with its mix of proactive recruitment tools, which send ads not just to more predictable forums like monster.com, but also social networks and Glassdoor and LinkedIn, and then monitor how well those ads do, so that companies can either modify their approach or cut out certain channels altogether.
It also means that just as in marketing, it’s about building up data and interesting lists, so too can employers do this now. “Historically recruiting software was limited to the post-application phase. Even the name, applicant tracking software, says what it does,” he says. “We’ve innovated beyond this, in that we allow people to find applicants on social networks, and even build marketing database of prospects who aren’t yet candidates.”
The singular focus is what attracted the new investment.
“We see Jobvite as transformative and innovative, serving fast-growing companies and enterprises alike in recruiting the best employees,” said Ryan McNally, partner and co-founder of Catalyst Investors, in a statement. “We are confident that with additional capital and resources, Jobvite will continue to lead the industry in providing best-of-breed recruiting solutions.”
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