Talent marketplace Hired adds $30M to its Series C

With every industry hungrier than ever for talent, this company is stacking up cash and clients

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From healthcare to hospitality to technology, every industry looks hungry as ever to hire great talent. As a result, recruiting companies and talent marketplaces are reaping the benefit.

Hired, one of many companies seeking to connect job searchers with employers, just announced a new $30 million add-on to the $40 million Series C it originally secured back in February.

While the original round was a more typical venture capital round led by growth-stage investor Lumia Capital, the latest funding comes largely from Glenmede Trust and Ontario Pension Board, limited partners that had previously invested in Hired through their VC partners.

“Direct investment from LPs is a pretty significant indicator of the strength of our business and their confidence in our vision, as limited partners tend to be more conservative investors than traditional VC firms,” wrote Hired CEO Mehul Patel in a Medium post. “This additional funding was not something we actively sought, but will nonetheless help us continue to invest in our core technology, expand the Opportunity Network and further enable Hired to grow.”

Hired, or the “Opportunity Network,” addresses what Patel describes earlier in his post as the “Opportunity Crisis.”

The challenge is essentially that more and more companies are struggling to make the hires they need to stay in business. He cites a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which found that the number of unfilled positions in the U.S. labor market peaked this past July. In June, there were 5.6 million open jobs; in July, there were 5.9 million.

Patel goes so far as arguing that the “disappearance” of half of the Fortune 500 list since the year 2000 has been attributable to this massive gap in the labor force.

Of course, there is quite a bit of nuance here. Even the article Patel shared about changes in the Fortune 500 specifically says that those changes have been “a result of mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcies,” and suggests that those have in turn been fueled by disruptions generated by the technology industry. And when it comes to the record number of open jobs, many people believe that's due to a dearth of workers with the skills required to get the job done—a skills gap.

After all, even tech companies that are hiring like crazy don’t just need anybody. Often, they’re specifically looking for competent, experienced engineers.

“Looking ahead to 2016, one of the greatest challenges I see affecting companies and workers alike is the continued expansion of the skills gap — the disconnect between the needs and expectations of today’s employers and the current skills of our nation’s workers,” wrote Udemy CEO Dennis Yang last year.

Can Hired, a talent marketplace, do much to bridge the skills gap? Maybe not, but it can do the very important work of matching the appropriate worker with the appropriate job.

And with investors apparently dying to hand more cash to the company, it’s clear they must be doing something right. Last I checked on Hired (in February), they had over 2,000 companies as clients, including Uber, Facebook, Forbes, Squarespace, and Eventbrite. Today Hired says over 3,400 companies have used the service—a 70 percent increase in clients.

The company plans to use its new funds to invest in its technology while expanding to new geographies, Patel told me over email. Today they're serving 10 cities in the U.S., in addition to London, Toronto, Paris, Singapore, Sydney, and Melbourne. By 2021, Hired wants to be in 75 cities.

I asked the company about their profitability and revenues, but they declined to comment.