HireVisor, the company that let employers share the candidates that weren’t good enough to be hired with others, is calling it quits. Here’s an explainer video if you have 45 seconds to spare.
“There comes a time in the course of a company’s lifecycle where the founders look at each other and ask themselves whether it makes sense to keep going,” said CEO and co-founder Patrick Hillstrom in a blog post. “After careful consideration, It is with a heavy heart that Oliver [Zhou] and I share that Hirevisor will be shutting down. We apologize to those who found value in our platform, our Talent Exchange employers and job seekers, and we sincerely thank our investors, family & friends for supporting us over the past two years.”
The company launched in 2016 and raised two rounds of an undisclosed amount of money. Any success the company may have enjoyed is unclear. There are only a few customer success stories on the website, only two stories on its press page, and blogging is sporadic at best. Not that those are litmus tests for success, but it doesn’t help either.
Ultimately, however, there was too little success, whether visible or not. “Sometimes timing is everything,” wrote Hillstrom. “For finding investors, for closing customers, for launching the right features. We could have done all these things perfectly, and it could have made all the difference … or not. We’ll never know. All we could do was mind the data and trust our guts. We ideated, designed, built, and sold something from scratch. I wish we could have built Hirevisor into something much bigger, but I’m incredibly proud of how far we came.”
I first met Hillstrom at an event in Utah earlier this year. I found him intelligent, but couldn’t quite grasp his vision for the company. Why would companies pay for candidates, only to share them with the competition. It reeked of millennial naivety to me. And in my podcast, I told Hillstrom he would eventually do something great, but that HireVisor wasn’t it.
“Startups are hard,” said Hillstrom. “They manage to be as hard and harder than you think at the same time. Speaking for myself, I learned more in these past two years than I did in the previous 10, and I’ve found a new level of depth to my self confidence. At the same time, I’ve gained even more respect and admiration for those who have built the 1 percent of startups that succeed.” Hillstrom said he has taken a job in strategy and operations for a startup called ScaleAPI, which has nothing to do with the employment space, or at least not directly. Co-founder Zhou is “looking for interesting opportunities where he has the chance to build something challenging and worthwhile.”
There was no official date given for when the site will sunset, and it’s currently operating with no message to that affect.