Online personnel selection processes were one of the first and great successes of the first dotcom boom. But with more and more business processes moving online, job hunting remains an untapped market. Another portal gets a big round to take on the major players in the space with more innovative and precise technology. talent.com, a portal that aggregates both job ads posted directly by recruiters and ads from third-party recruiting sites, raised $120 million, a Series B round. It will use this capital to continue expanding internationally, invest more in its platform search and introduce new products and services for users.
talent.com has an international profile – it currently has around 30 million jobs from 1 million companies in 78 countries and 29 languages and is visited by more than 28 million monthly visitors – but the startup itself is based in Montreal. The round was led by Canadian VC Inovia Capital, with previous sponsor Caisse de dépôt etplacement du Québec (CDPQ), and new investors Investissement Québec, Climb Ventures, BDC Capital, Fondaction and HarbourVest Partners also participating. Along with the $120 million in equity, it has also raised $30 million in new debt financing from the Technology and Innovation Banking Group at BMO Financial Group.
The co-founder and co-CEO of talent.comLucas Martinez, who co-founded the company with Maxime Droux and Benjamin Philion, said the goal is to use the funds to develop more technology to help consumers see results more relevant to their needs. what they are looking for; and make of talent.com the most attractive platform for employers, with tools to measure the responsiveness of ads and charge them based on what makes people click on them.
The company itself knows firsthand about the right wording to get people interested in content: the startup used to be called Neuvoo, for "Advise," and while it was profitable, it wasn't growing very fast, in part because it found that many people didn't know how to pronounce the word and that its meaning wasn't particularly relevant to the mass market, so when Neuvoo decided to rethink its name in 2019 and saw that talent.com It was for sale, he bought it and renamed it. He paid $1.3 million for the domain, though mysteriously the rest of the details are under NDA for three years, so it's unclear who was selling. Martinez laughed and said no when I asked if it was Google. , but he did not elaborate.
It is also investing the funding in further international expansion. It is setting up a new European hub in Barcelona.
Some of the big players in today's market include Indeed.com, owned by Japanese HR giant Recruit Holdings, which is valued at around $66 billion and owns other brands such as simplyhired, ZipRecruiter, which was made public last year. It also competes with LinkedIn and search giant Google. But today there are a number of startups going head-to-head with these more established players, taking advantage of new technology and changing market expectations to introduce new competitive services.
Some as Share y Remote they are positioning themselves as platforms to help hire remote employees. others like Turing they use the remote concept and focus it on the search for a specific talent pool: engineers. SmartRecruiters has the ambition to be the "sales force" of recruiting, an ambition that others like beamery They also chase. Dover it's borrowing a concept from another business field (its buzzword is orchestration) on its recruiting platform. Y Jobandtalent, Workstream y Fountain they have business models to target casual, gig, and hourly workers.
talent.com, like the latter three, largely targets markets that include hourly and gig workers, as well as skilled labor. Along with its programmatic approach to job postings, its other tools for employers include the ability to integrate with your existing CRM and applicant tracking systems. On the consumer side, users have the ability, in addition to basic job search, to conduct salary research, calculate after-tax salary for their location, and answer profile questions to better tailor their search results. This will also pave the way for how the product will be developed in the future.
"This is crucial," Martinez said. “The job search is aspirational. Many are not qualified for the jobs they are applying for. Therefore, we are combining experience and education, and guiding users on what they need to do if they want to become, for example, engineers. We will know who you are and we will have your CV on our platform and we will say, these are the educational programs in that area online. This is where we will provide much more value to our user.”
It's all part of the value offering with a broader set of services to generate more revenue from users that piqued investor interest.
“The race for talent has only been heightened by the significant challenges companies are facing right now. talent.com it has quickly grown to become one of the largest and most international platforms for employers to search and hire,” says Chris Arsenault, partner at Inovia Capital. "This partnership is fueling a new phase of growth as we launch a suite of value-added products to become a true job seeker-centric platform."
