Workable, a startup founded in Athens, Greece, that has developed a cloud-based recruitment platform for SMEs, has today confirmed a new investment of $1.5 million led by Greylock IL, the Israel/UK-based affiliate of Greylock Partners, an early investor in LinkedIn which now counts LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman as a partner. Previously, Workable had raised some $950,000 from individuals and the Greek seed investors Openfund, with the latter also participating in this round.
Although Workable is based in Greece, co-founder Nikos Moraitakis tells me that the majority — over 60% — of its 300 customers are in the U.S., and so that is where a lot of the focus of investment will be going forward. “The U.S. is the biggest opportunity for us,” he says. “Even without trying we are getting the most customers there.”
He says that Workable had other VCs approach it, and it is intentionally keeping this round low as it prepares to raise a bigger round in the near future.
Workable’s revenues are currently growing at a rate of 30% month-on-month, with that figure largely being reflected in its customer growth, too.
While there are a large number of players already that are going after the cloud-based recruitment market — offering businesses online tools to create job listings, post them on different networks, and then manage the hiring process — what distinguishes Workable is the fact that it focuses squarely on the SME market. Moraitakis tells me that this is unlike competitors like TheResumator and Jobvite, and much of the other software already available on the market. He found that out the hard way:
“My co-founder [Spyros Magiatis, the CTO] and I used to work for Upstream [a Greek-founded mobile marketing company]. We were early employees and so we did a ton of hiring ourselves and knew that it wasn’t easy, so when we decided to start our own thing we knew what we needed,” he says. “We knew that a lot of the tools had been made for big enterprises and we wanted something that was simple for collaboration and not made for companies with 1,000 people. The fastest growing companies are the smaller ones that are growing fast and there were no tools for them.”
Indeed, among Workable’s customers today, you’ll find a lot of fast-growing startups like messaging service Intercom, social media management platform Conversocial, TransferWise and Vend. But what is interesting is that while the tech sector is an obvious one to tap for a cloud-based recruiting service, other kinds of SMEs are also biting — a good sign of its scalability longer term.
“Tech recruitment is doing well but we have other customers, including a dog spa, a dance studio, and a bakery in Michigan,” he says. “They just see this as something super simple to use; they are not tech users.” But for those that are more tech-savvy, he says they are more likely to use some of Workable’s other aspects such as a collaboration feature that helps engage a whole team in the recruitment process.
Going forward, Moraitakis says that Workable will be adding more features like video. And it will be building out its platform so that third-party recruiters may work with it better, too — a key part of the employment ecosystem that helps connect individuals with openings. The idea here will be that recruiters could potentially help candidates apply to a number of jobs across the whole of the Workable network, “making Workable into more of a full marketplace,” he says.
Along with that theme, Workable will be looking to increase the network of sites to which clients can post their job ads through Workable. Right now, it provides an option to list across a range of free sites, along with others that are paid postings, such as LinkedIn.
On that front, right now Workable promises users an advantage of posting through their system rather than directly on those sites. Not only is it time-saving, but more economical: if you buy from LinkedIn, a posting that might normally cost $300 will cost $160 through Workable, he says, because it pre-buys placements in bulk and then passes on the savings to users to entice them to sign up to the monthly paid plans.
Those Workable subscriptions currently run on a monthly basis and begin at $19 and go up to $400/month for those who want to opt for unlimited posting options.
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