Job matching platform Jobandtalent raises $42M Series B

The Madrid-based job recruitment platform is currently in five cities and will expand geographically

It seems like, all of the sudden, there has been a ton of activity in the job recruitment space over the last two weeks, with big funding rounds and major acquisitions.

That includes Madrid-based job matching platform Jobandtalent, which announced a new $42 million Series B round of funding on Tuesday.

The round was led by Atomico, the firm set up by Skype founder Niklas Zennström, with participation from FJ Labs (José Marín, founder of DeRemate.com, and Fabrice Grinda, founder of OLX.com); Adeyemi Ajao, founder of Identified and currently VP Technology Strategy at Workday; and Steve Goodman, founder of Bright.com, which sold to LinkedIn in 2014.

Jobandtalent last raised $25 million in March of last year, and this round brings its total venture funding to $85.73 million.

Founded in 2009 by Juan Urdiales and Felipe Navio, Jobandtalent's mission is to connect small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with local talent by using machine learning, all via a mobile platform.

"At the heart of Jobandtalent is our innovative algorithm developed by our team of Data Scientists and Engineers. This technology combines different algorithms that interact in a learning to rank function, also introducing machine learning techniques to fine-tune the matchings," the company says on its website. 

"Our algorithm learns from the users and their interaction with the platform. We measure the effectiveness of our technology with a self-created industry performance metric: ATR (Application Through Rate), that measures the rate of applications that the algorithm generates per job view."

Jobandtalent has more than 10 million registered users and over 450,000 new users joining the site each month, all via mobile. It is also currently used by 150,000 businesses.

Right now, the company operates in five cities, Madrid, Barcelona, Mexico City, Bogota and London, and plans to use the funding to expand further geographically.

"We are ready to scale our platform internationally, and with Atomico we now have the additional investment and expertise to make that happen. They are a perfect fit with their hands-on approach and track record of building global category winners," Juan Urdiales, Co-Founder of Jobandtalent, said in a statement. 

The company will also use the funding to reinfornce its presence in its existing markets, and to expand its product and engineering team. 

The recruiting tools market

The recruiting space has seen a lot of activity recently, including Glassdoor raising a $40 million round, bringing its total funding to roughly $160 million.

Last week, job search website Monster acquired mobile job recruitment app Jobr for an undisclosed amount of funding. Jobr, which had raised $2 million, will remain a separate, independent business. And just yesterday Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. LinkedIn may be known as a social network, but the majority of its money actually comes from its recruiting services. 

There have also been a number of small companies that have also raised funding in the last year and a half, including Handshake, a recruiting platform for students, which raised $10.5 million in February. Blendoor. a mobile job matching app that hides candidate name and photo to circumvent unconscious bias and facilitate diversity recruiting, raised a $100,000 seed round in March. 

Talent identification and retention software company Pegged Software raised $7.5 million in January of 2015; HourlyNerd, a job recruitment site for recent MBA graduates, raised 7.8  million in February 2015; and Entelo, a platform for professionals to findin-demand talent, raised $12 million last month.

VatorNews reached out to Jobandtalent for more information on the round. We will update this story if we learn more. 

(Image source: jobandtalent.com)