Hired raises $40M Series C for tech talent marketplace

Lumia Capital backs one of a few companies making engineering hires more efficient for tech orgs

Careers marketplace Hired today announced that it has closed a $40 million Series C funding round led by Lumia Capital, a growth-stage VC firm.

The San Francisco company has raised $72.7 million in venture capital to date from Lumia, Crosslink Capital, Sierra Ventures, and others. When it closed a $15 million Series in December 2014, the company was reportedly valued at $200 million. We reached out to the company, but they're not disclosing what valuation investors peg them at with this new round.

Hired banks on the idea that, because marketplace models and sharing economy services have fundamentally changed our expectations around pretty much every single thing we do, there’s no reason why job seeking and recruiting should get left behind.

“You can get groceries, a ride to work or a massage at the touch of button, but the tools at your disposal to find a new job haven’t changed in 50 years,” said Hired CEO Mehul Patel in a Medium post announcing the new funding. “That’s pretty mind blowing. It’s also at the core of Hired’s mission: to create a career marketplace for the world’s knowledge workers.”

If you're looking for a job on Hired, you answer a few questions about yourself and then wait to receive offers with upfront compensation form companies looking for someone with your skills and experience.

For employers, the ones who pay for the service, Hired says it handles initial filtering so recruiting teams don't waste time sending messages to uninterested or unqualified candidates. Hired says 40 percent of interview requests it sends get accepted. It also says it takes, on average, 4.7 interviews and 19 days to close a hire.

Hired has two payment options in place that ultimately require customers to pay a percentage of the new hire's salary to Hired. One option is a flat 15% fee. So, on the marketplace's average salary of $125,000, the customer would pay Hired $18,750. If the customer doesn’t want to pay a lump sum, they can choose to pay 2 percent of the total salary every month for 10 months. So, on that same $125,000 salary, the customer would pay $2,500 every month for 10 months, amounting to a higher total fee of $25,000.

The fees are high, but if the service works as well as it says to match big companies with top talent, it will be worth it.

Patel wrote that Hired has “tripled annually across every key business metric, including revenue, candidates placed, and participating users and companies” over the past three years. The company has attracted half a million candidates to its marketplace, facilitated 100,000 interview requests, and $15 billion in offers.

Hired isn’t the only new Web service trying to change the way recruiting works, though it’s certainly one of the most well-funded. The Muse, which targets millennials and says it has helped over 50 million people with their careers (somehow a much higher figure than Hired), raised a $10 million Series A round last May. And Anthology, formerly known as Poachable, has raised just $1.8 million in a few seed rounds.

The group of clients using Hired today heavily skews toward the tech industry. Among over 2,000 companies using the site are the likes of Uber, Facebook, OpenTable, Groupon, Squarespace, Eventbrite, GitHub, Gilt Groupe, and more. That’s likely a result of the company focusing on tech-focused positions, such as engineers, UX/UI designers, data scientists, and product managers, in addition to some sales and customer success roles.

Today, Hired primarily serves London, San Francisco, New York City, Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, Austin, Washington DC, and Chicago, though with its new funding the company plans to expand internationally. Two acquisitions (Jobbop in Melbourne and Breaz in Paris) have helped the SF team establish itself in both Australia and Europe. They’re also “soft launching” in Singapore to kick off an Asia expansion.