London-based Beamery has closed a $5 million Series A for its candidate relationship software. The round is led by Index Ventures, with participation from existing investors Edenred Capital Partners, GP Ventures and LocalGlobe.
It’s a fast follow from the startup’s $2 million seed, raised in June last year. Beamery says the new funding will be used to double its headcount and open a new sales and marketing-focused office in the Bay Area, while keeping its core product dev and engineering team in London.
In a blog about the funding, Index’s Jan Hammer argues Beamery’s approach to recruitment gives companies a strategic advantage in hiring by enabling them to identify and develop relationships with potential future recruits before they even have a specific vacancy to offer.
“When you shift to this approach and become highly strategic in developing relationships with top candidates, you outsmart and outpace competitors,” says Hammer, citing Beamery’s claim that its users have seen the cost of hiring fall by 39 percent and time-to-hire drop by 31 percent since using its software.
The startup, which was founded back in 2014, has around 50 customers using its software at this point, including the likes of Facebook, Dropbox, VMware and Criteo. Active users number around 1,000, according to CEO Abakar Saidov.
“In short think of it like Salesforce + Marketo for recruitment. We are an API-first CRM platform that lets companies track the entire candidate lifecycle from Lead > Application > Hire. This changes how companies recruit on a strategic level. We use AI and automation to scale this process,” is Saidov’s elevator pitch for the platform.
Beamery’s software essentially offers a richer environment for tracking and connecting with potential job candidates versus a manual organizational tool such as a spreadsheet, while also plugging in the ability for users to search candidate profiles using granular filters; make approaches to potential hires via email marketing and/or event invites; and view analytics of candidate responsiveness so they can judge which potential hires might be most receptive to an approach.
The underlying premise is to turn recruitment into more of an active and ongoing brand marketing/outreach exercise, versus companies only searching for candidates at the point of direct need, and limiting their talent pool to only those who actively apply.
“Nothing is built to be a system of record for passive candidates for roles that don’t exist yet,” argues Saidov. “Therefore you are missing the bulk of the market. The more progressive companies that are recognizing that you need to go after and ‘Acquire’ the talent you want have to use spreadsheets to store this data.
“Rather than having ‘job-centric’ ATS systems, this is ‘people-centric’ CRM system. That means businesses can focus on leads rather than applicants. This means everyone is a potential candidate, a relationship that needs to be tracked and nurtured before, during and after the applications process.”
Saidov says the platform is not geared toward specific sectors or job roles but is rather aimed at “every business that is trying to be strategic” about recruitment — though the first wave of customers has, unsurprisingly, come from the early adopter tech sector, along with some “more traditional” brands, such as House of Fraser, Shop Direct and Continental Tires.
“We help tech firms map their future hiring needs and retail firms re-engage past talent that didn’t get hired,” he adds. “Finally you are seeing the full cycle of talent management, rather than just the applicant process. This allows you to be strategic about where talent is going to come from.”
On the competitors front Saidov name-checks Avature, “a more dated talent CRM,” and Smashfly, which he says is focused on job board distribution, as the main rivals, along with some (unnamed) content management systems.