Even today, with all the layoffs we’ve seen in the tech industry over the past year, there’s still a shortage of tech talent. That’s partly because there are limited numbers of workers with these skills, and partly because it’s not just tech companies looking for tech talent.
Enter hacker job, a two-way marketplace that brings together tech candidates and companies looking for help. A twist in this approach is that Hackjob lets companies apply for talent, not the other way around. That approach seems to be resonating, and today the company announced a $25 million Series B investment.
Company co-founder and CEO Mark Chaffee said the reason we haven’t seen a drop in demand for tech talent is because there’s a need for skilled workers everywhere. “Technology has evolved from being a separate industry to a function that touches every industry. And I think what we’re seeing is that the demand for technologists far outstrips the supply,” Chaffey told TechCrunch.
“We describe ourselves as a full-stack talent platform focused primarily on helping enterprise organizations find, engage, engage and retain tech workers,” he said. This involves some products. The first is a two-way market where companies and job seekers post their requirements, and since companies market to job seekers, not the other way around, this creates a situation where job seekers feel wanted and are more likely to respond.
“This creates a really magical candidate experience because you only get positive reaffirmations from companies that want to talk to you,” he says. This in turn yielded an 85% employer response rate. “So employers have a really engaged talent pool that they have access to.”
Other products include a testing and remote interviewing platform and a diversity and inclusion module to ensure companies are interviewing diverse candidates.
They collect massive amounts of data to help companies find the right candidates, including salary expectations, visa status, location preferences, technology stack, and more. Plus, they validate skills, so employers know they’re looking for someone with the skills they need for the job.
With all this data, they can feed it into a machine learning model, which can help interpret the information on a candidate’s resume as structured data “so that the relevancy is better for both parties.”
The company was founded in 2014, and Chaffey reports that they’re doing a little over $10 million in ARR and a net revenue margin of about 150%, so they’re attracting and retaining customers. They have over 500,000 users and 200 paying customers on the candidate site, which he describes as a global enterprise organization spanning multiple industries.
Hackjob currently has 120 employees. They recently hired 19 people, 16 of them through the company’s own marketplace, and Chaffey says he thinks a lot about building a diverse workforce.
“I spend a lot of time talking about diversity and inclusion and working with clients to understand how important it is, and the point is, from all the data, more diverse teams generally perform better because you just have different opinions Come together. So that’s important to us,” he said.
Today’s $25 million round was led by Volition Capital, with participation from Axa Venture Partners, Foresight and Future Fund.The company has raised a total of $33 million to date, with each Crunchbase data.
