InternMatch has raised a $4 million Series A funding round led by ARTIS Ventures and Subtraction Capital, as well as follow-on investors including Kapor Capital and 500 Startups. The company will use the money to expand its engineering and marketing teams and build data-based technology to help match companies with the right applicants. InternMatch, which launched in 2009, has now raised a total of just over $6 million in funding.
InternMatch has also added Paul Willard, the former CMO of enterprise software developer Atlassian, to its board. In addition to Atlassian, Willard also helped scale up Coupons.com.
“It’s a really exciting development for us because he is one of the most widely regarded online marketing experts and typically works with a lot of growth stage companies, taking them from tens of millions to hundreds of millions in revenue,” says InternMatch co-founder Nathan Parcells. The site currently has over 5 million page views and 150,000 applications per month.
As its name suggests, InternMatch began as a platform matching up college students with internships. As InternMatch’s initial user base grows older, however, many are using the site to find their first jobs after graduating.
Companies have the ability to build hubs with extensive information about their work culture and benefits, which helps differentiate InternMatch from competing job-search sites like CareerBuilder, Monster, Dice and Indeed. This feature has proven attractive to organizations like Yahoo!, which lists its entry-level positions on InternMatch.
“A big part of it is helping companies define their culture. It’s part of the process that is really painful and broken. The flipside is that students are applying everywhere. Employers have 400 candidates for one role,” says Parcells.
“What we’re finding from employers is that they will resort back to networking and referrals because they can’t manage all those candidates. We’re now expanding to entry-level jobs, which is a huge market, but we’re also building technology to target candidates by understanding who their ideal fit is.”
InternMatch will use some of its Series A funding to develop products that take advantage of the data accumulated by the site, says Parcells. One of the company’s goals is to help students do a better job of deciding which positions to apply for instead of sending out a flood of applications. This in turn increases the quality of applicants companies see.
“We have knowledge of what kinds of students are applying where and we’re investing now in using that information and that data to delegate students to where they should be, places that they haven’t heard of,” says Parcells. “This demographic is so new to the job search process that there is a tremendous amount of value we can provide to students and employers about where else there might be a good fit.”
While InternMatch expands its audience to graduates, it will also continue to develop new products for its core user base of college students. According to InternMatch’s research, just 3.8% of students found their last internship at a traditional career fair. Instead, more than 42% launched their internship hunts on Google. InternMatch seeks to create a more targeted search experience as students start their internships at younger ages. The company’s research found that more than half of students began their first internships in their sophomore year of college or earlier.
“There is an increasing awareness of the importance of internships,” says Parcells. “It’s now the number one way students are getting offers for full-time jobs.”