Social recruitment platform Jobvite raises $25M

Jobvite customers include companies like Starbucks, Twitter and Farmers Insurance

(Updated with comment from Jobvite)

A lot of people complain about social media, but perhaps they are being short sighted. Yeah, so advertisers use it to gain insight into what you might want to buy. But what if it could also help you get a job? Sounds pretty nice, right? Certainly a lot better than the way I used to look for one: constantly refreshing the Craigslist job posts!

Social recruiting solutions provider Jobvite leverages the powers of social media to help some of the biggest companies in the world to find new people. And now it has raised $25 million in new funding, it was announced on Tuesday. The round was led by Catalyst Investors, along with existing investors CMEA, ATA Ventures and Trident Capital. 

Jobvite had previously raised $30.5 million, most recently a $15 million round in May of 2011. This round brings the company's total funding to $55.5 million.

"Since our last investment we’ve experienced exceptional growth and decided now was the time to raise more money to continue our growth. There is a big opportunity for companies at our stage with a big customer base to grow globally," Jobvite's CEO Dan Finnigan told me.

"Every single penny of this $25 million investment will be focused on our vision that recruiting is now marketing. We’ll use this round to spur continued innovation, grow our product capabilities and help us expand globally."

The San Mateo, California-based Jobvite offers tools to aid companies with recruiting, allowing them to harness the power of social media to their advantage.

These tools include Jobvite Refer, which provides employees to shae job openings within their social networks; Jobvite Engage, which allows companies to use social networks and résumé databases to find talent; Jobvite Hire, which allows companies to manage their hiring process with a applicant tracking system and social connectivity; and Jobvite Video, an on-demand video interviewing tool.

Jobvite now counts more than 1,600 companies as customers, including Starbucks, Twitter and Farmers Insurance, as well as nine of the last 11 top tech IPOs. By using Jobvite, its customers have hired more than 200,000 people and, every year, 46 million job seekers interact with a Jobvite-powered career site.

Since the last time it raised funding more than three years ago, the company has seen significant growth. It has since increased the number of job seeker profiles in its system by 400%, to 33 million profiles, and the number of hires through Jobvite has increased by 566%.

In that time, Jobvite has also more than doubled its employee count reaching more than 100 employees.

The job recruitment space is crowded, and Jobvite is just the latest company to raise money in recent months.

Hiring and recruiting platform Lever raised $10 million; job recruiting website ZipRecruiter raised $63 million; The Resumator, a recruiting platform for small businesses and growing enterprises, raised $15 million; Greenhouse, a provider of recruiting performance improvement systems, raised $7.5 million; HackerRank, a community for developers and recruiting platform, raised $9.2 million; and Work4, a social and mobile recruiting company, raised $7 million.

"We don’t have direct competitors. To an extent we are in a league of our own—no other company in the space offers the same standalone recruiting solution or capabilities as Jobvite. The other companies that we “compete” with have been consolidated into talent management suites that offer items like performance management software," Finnigan told me.

"We focus on all aspects of the recruiting “funnel” in one comprehensive platform this includes targeting talent, growing candidate pipelines and leveraging mobile, social and video."

The company's ultimate goal, he said, "is to provide recruiters with a solution that enables them to think like a marketer to engage job seekers, build talent pipelines and nurture candidates to hire."

"Recruiting has dramatically changed as a function in recent years. We live in new world now and employees are always looking for the next opportunity. A recent college graduate can expect to hold 15-20 jobs in his/her career, where as the Baby Boomer generation would hold between 6-8 jobs," said Finnigan. "Companies have to compete for a shrinking supply of skilled labor and therefore need to start recruiting long before an application reaches their desks. This means that recruiters must recruit the way their marketing department markets products and services — always engage across multiple channels."

(Image source: jobvite.com)