Back in February, and after raising $70M in total from Comcast, Crosslink Capital or Google Ventures, talent recruitment marketplace Hired.com has acquired its Paris-based competitor Breaz.io, with the aim to tackle a French recruitment market, an essential target according to Mehul Patel, CEO of Hired: “We started thinking about entering the French market two years ago. France’s tech sector has been growing rapidly over the last few years and is expected to add more than 40,000 jobs in 2016. However, the options for finding a job are particularly bad.”
The marketplace responds to a need, that seems necessary: “Our mission is to get everyone a job that they love. We flip the recruiting model on its head, so rather than have candidates applying to companies, which is the traditional model, we pick the very best candidates and we have companies apply to them. The problem we’re solving is a really big problem, actually, the global market for the recruitment of knowledge workers is estimated to $400B. The job search process is very broken and difficult for job seekers. We hear statistics like 70 to 80 percent of workers are unhappy at work but only 20 percent plan to change job, the reason is that changing job is really hard. On the other hand, for companies, hiring the best people very quickly is essential, and so our approach is to make a more efficient approach to connect candidates and companies. At Hired, companies see a 95 percent response rate and more than 50 percent of it is positive.”
Quickly gaining steam as an alternative to recruitment firms for fast-growing technology companies and even Fortune 500 companies, the candidates selection made beforehand by Hired algorithm gives them access to a top-notch base of knowledge workers. Indeed, only the top 5 to 10 percent of the 25,000 application to Hired France are selected. “The algorithm automatically chose the candidates who match the interests of the companies present on the platform,” added Edouard Rosenblum, former CEO of Breaz and today France’s Market Manager of Hired.
For candidates, Hired represents a meaningful alternative to traditional job boards or even professional networks like LinkedIn: “Even the most talented candidates take nearly 90 days to find a new role. The newly combined Breaz and Hired teams have managed to cut that down to just 21 days — a 4x increase over the national average. What’s more, the demand we’ve seen to date is evidence that both companies and candidates are looking for a better way to get connected: we’ve had more than 20,000 candidates and nearly 2,000 companies sign up for the platform,” explained Patel.
Every 7 hours, Hired France places a candidate in a company, and their business model is precisely based on this hiring efficiency, each time companies recruit a talent through the platform, they have to pay Hired an amount equal to 12 percent of the annual employee’s gross salary: “We are on the good path to reach $100M in revenue this year. Our annual revenue has tripled each year since we launched Hired in 2012.”
The former Breaz team operates in Paris as the second European office of Hired.com, just after they launched in London last year. Local startups like Algolia, Slimpay, BlaBlaCar, Teads and Aircall are already using the service to get connected with local candidates. Through Hired, these fast-growing companies will be able to tap into Hired’s global marketplace of top talent. “We’ve been really fortunate to meet Edouard and his team. We had the same philosophy and mission, and they already had a strong knowledge of the French market, that’s why we decided to combine with them and launch Hired in France that way,” commented Patel.
The French team, currently composed of 10 people, is also recruiting talent advocates and account executives to evangelize the platform and expand the presence of Hired around the country.
For the moment, Hired is only opened for technical profiles such as developers, product managers, and data scientists, but they plan to open the platform to different types of profiles and industry. You can imagine sales people, marketers, accountants, lawyers and even nurses on Hired, the aim is to become the essential platform for every qualified worker who is looking for a job, and not only a recruitment marketplaces for tech companies.
