Job recruiting tool TalentBin raises $2M Series A

TalentBin crawls the Web to help recruiters discover hard-to-find technical talent

(Updated to reflect comment from TalentBin)

TalentBin, which crawls the Web to compile a profile for technical workers based on implicit information, has raised $2 million in Series A funding, it was announced Tuesday. 

The round was led by Lightbank, along with participation from NEA, Foundation Capital and FundersClub. The company had previously raised $1.2 million in seed funding back in May 2010 from First Round Capital and Charles River Ventures. That brings TalentBin's total funding to $3.2 million.

The new funding will be used to ramp up the company's sales organization.

"We'll be hiring more sales staff. We've grown our customer base to 200+ corporate customers with a lean sales team, and as look to scale that to the thousands, that will require more sales professionals!" Peter Kazanjy, co-founder of TalentBin, said in an interview with VatorNews.

In addition to the funding news, it was also announced that Lightbank partner Paul Lee will be joining TalentBin's board of directors.

"Paul Lee, and the rest of Lightbank, have a history of working with inside-sales driven organizations taking a new genre of enterprise software to market, and we're really excited about how they can help us with exactly that, here at TalentBin," said Kazanjy. "This is a new space that will shortly be a must-have for technical recruiting organizations -- and we're focused on how we can get this technology into their hands as quickly as possible."

San Francisco-based TalentBin, which started off as Honestly.com, was founded in 2011. The company searches websites such as Twitter, Quora, GitHub to find implicit activities of engineers and other technical workers. By doing so, TalentBin can aggregate a fuller picture of a person that is not reflected in, say, a LinkedIn profile.

For instance, if a recruiter is looking for a Ruby on Rails developer, he may find under 4,000 candidates on LinkedIn, compared to 22,361 profiles on TalentBin. Then if a recruiter narrows his search to a "ruby on rails and sinatra" expert, he gets 103 results on LinkedIn versus 1005 profiles on TalentBin.

"The core idea behind TalentBin is that recruiting can be made more effective and efficient by giving recruiters better tools," Kazanjy told me.

"To date, that has been helping recruiters find amazing talent that are the perfect fit for the roles they're hiring for, but over the coming years, that's going to be ensuring that recruiters have the best search, qualification, and outreach tools to help them recruit more staff, faster, with better satisfaction."

Since it officially came out of beta mode in May 2012, the company says that it has aggregated more than 500 million profiles of potential candidates, and is adding more than 10,000 profiles each week. TalentBin now has over 200 corporate clients, including leading companies like Facebook, Amazon and UPS.

The recruiting space

The job recruiting space is crowded with companies that are going after the same market share, and raising money.

BranchOut, a free service that allowed Facebook users to create a professional account that pulled work-relevant information from their profile and allowed them to search for available jobs or company connections, debuted a new tool last year called RecruiterConnect. It was designed to help companies and other professionals search, through BranchOut's connection to Facebook, to find viable candidates.

There is also Zao, an Israeli-based start-up which helps employers manage referral programs and hire quality staff. The company announced in June of last year that it raised $1.3 million in funding from Oren Zeev, founding partner at Orens Capital and former General Partner at Apax Partners.

In September, social recruitment company Work4 Labs debuted an expanded suite of products for companies to recruit workers off of Facebook. In addition, it also announced that it raised $11 million in Series A funding. 

The company uses social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, to help businesses recruit people to come work for them. The app gets permission to scan a users Facebook profile for education and work history. It then matches job openings from its clients to any openings that user may be qualified for.

In October of last year, Entelo, a search engine for employers to find suitable recruits to fill positions in their companies, came out of stealth mode with an undisclosed amount of money from Battery Ventures and Menlo Ventures.

So how does TalentBin stand out?

"TalentBin is the undisputed market leader when it comes to open web talent search, having been at it the longest, with the largest customer base, and with the most industry accolades. This market recognition largely stems from providing access to otherwise unfindable and uncontactable by traditional means, like LinkedIn's recruiting products," Kazanjy said.