Back in 2012, we put together a simple recruiting system, just the way we wanted it to be. This is how Workable started, firmly opinionated in its design, made for its users by its users, originally meant to be appreciated by a few people who thought about recruiting in the same way we did.
Six years, 20,000 customers and 50 million candidates later, I get the feeling that our design philosophy was not as idiosyncratic as I once thought it to be. It appears we were in good company all along.
Now, here’s what happens when you start paying attention to a few hundred thousand recruiters and hiring managers, sifting through 50 million candidates: you realize that most of their time is wasted in things they should not be doing in the first place. Like sending scheduling emails. Or trying to screen hundreds of applicants manually. Or writing boolean queries.
Unless you really think that a junior recruiter spending as little as six seconds per resume (by their own admission) will not be outdone by a computer who has observed millions of human decisions and hiring outcomes. Or that your local staffing agency who needs three weeks and a few thousand dollars to produce a longlist will fare better than a computer who can match candidates out of a pool of millions instantly and reach out to them with programmatic, hyper-targeted advertising within 24 hours. The world spends about $270 billion a year outsourcing recruiting labor, most of it administrative or lookup work that could – and will – be done better by software, at a fraction of the cost. Giving back a lot of control to hiring managers, freeing up time for human connection, cutting down time to hire and increasing success rates.
There are several million SMBs in the world, and they do 70% of all hiring worldwide. We want to make the best recruiting technology accessible to them, and this means making a product where you spend all of your time actively hiring people and none of it figuring out the technology itself, or doing work that’s best suited for computers.
We can’t wait for this future to come. So we raised an additional $50 million to get there faster. This new round of financing is led by London-based private equity firm Zouk Capital, with participation from existing investors 83North, Balderton, Notion, TriplePoint, and Endeavor Catalyst, bringing the total amount of venture capital we have raised to $84 million.
For our customers, this means a renewed commitment to deliver the best recruiting software in the market, a more ambitious product development plan, a stronger company with more resources to help you get results, and an ever-increasing user community to connect with and learn from. We’re excited at the prospect of building the recruiting tool you will be using in the next decade.
If you look at how the product has evolved over the last couple of years, you’ll see it’s already moving in this direction:
Our audience reach has expanded significantly with a network of more than 180 job sites, top-tier partnerships with LinkedIn and Indeed, and job syndication with Google and Facebook.
We released People Search, a technology that lets you search by skill across hundreds of millions of individual profiles. Even better, you don’t need to know how to search. Workable automatically matches the right people to your job description and compiles a long-list to get you started on your passive candidate outreach.
Our AI-driven hyper-targeting product will even advertise your jobs to your passive candidate long-list, reaching those candidates for you on places like Facebook and Instagram. It does everything a human recruiter would do: searching, qualifying, building a long-list and reaching out to passive prospects.
We are now adapting the same AI system for your existing candidate database, automatically picking good prospects for new openings and managing outreach and response for you.
At Workable we believe the quality of your hiring really comes down to the quality of your choices, so we built a hiring platform that puts a lot of emphasis on sourcing. But the fun doesn’t stop when the candidates are at the door. Much has been happening, and more is coming, in the tracking and evaluation stages of your process.
We introduced a marketplace of hiring tools with more than 30 pre-built integrations so you can choose your favourite assessments, video interviews, culture-fit measures or background tests. Even if you don’t know what an API is.
Interview self-scheduling, multi-part interviews, calendar syncs, offer letter automations and a full-fledge hiring planner are already saving you a ton of administrative work and streamlining the process. One by one, we’re moving layers of busywork out of your hands, to be dealt with by the software.
Your hiring managers can now do everything they need through the mobile app. From simple conveniences like FaceTime calls and texting, all the way to power tools like CRM smartlists and evaluations. Nearly half of your Workable sessions are on mobile devices already, and we plan to enable you to do as much as possible away from your desk. This year we’ll be introducing auto-pilot pipelines that schedule events or conduct assessments directly with the candidate as soon as the hiring manager has decided to move on them.
But it’s not just about what the technology can do. At Workable it has always been about what you can do with it. 85% of our customers have never needed to speak to us, because the software is easy and intuitive. This is not changing. For those who did need some kind of help, our average response time on support is 23 minutes, regardless of how much you pay, or where in the world you are.
We will continue building tools that are flexible and don’t force you to change the way you do your job. We will continue to be the friendliest, easiest to adopt, and most affordable solution in the market.
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