San Francisco-based Teamable, which uses social networks to facilitate employee referrals, has raised $5 million in additional funds and acquired Simppler, a competitor in the referral space. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Teamable raised the funds from new investor Foundation Capital and previous investors True Ventures and SaaStr Fund. The company has now raised $10 million since it was founded in 2013. Foundation was also an investor in Simppler, along with Greylock Capital.
Simppler raised a little over $3 million. Simppler was founded by Vipul Sharma, who earlier in his career ran machine learning engineering at Eventbrite and has been working as engineering director at Indeed since November 2017. He’s been away from Simppler since Oct. 2017 and no one from Simppler is expected to be joining Teamable. Amusing side note: Sharma is wearing a Simppler T-shirt on his LinkedIn profile instead of an Indeed shirt.
The company says Simppler’s machine learning-based matchmaking technology combined with Teamable’s frictionless user-experience helps companies create highly qualified passive and employee referral candidate pipelines that achieve the highest ROI in terms of quality and quantity of hire.
Teamable sources referrals from existing employees’ social media contacts, factoring in previous experience, relevant skills, location, and a host of other variables such as how that company tends to hire and if they could benefit from more diversity. The referral is finalized by prompting the corresponding employee to directly make the connection.
“Using Teamable has saved our hiring managers, recruiters, and employees a lot of work and time,” said Fredrik Johnsson, head of global talent acquisition at Spotify. “Teamable has been a game-changer for us by scaling our referral hiring process and improving it with Teamable’s matching algorithms and seamless workflow. It’s become an effective channel for hiring, with much higher than average diversity and offer-acceptance rates.”
In a release, the company added, “The addition of Simppler’s advanced matching algorithms with Teamable’s intelligent social recruiting algorithms and workflows is taking the searching, guesswork, and spam out of the candidate sourcing process, enabling recruiters to focus on more strategic candidate experience activities further down the recruiting funnel.”
Vendors have been attempting to crack the employee referral/married to social media riddle for years. Old-timers will remember Jobster, which hoped to turn email blasts into the ultimate referral tool. It didn’t work out. There was a time when everyone made jobs sharable on social media. Referral models like H3 hoped to use financial incentives as a road to success. It’s not around anymore either.
Maybe Teamable has solved those challenges. Maybe the timing is right. “Teamable helps us save countless hours that would have otherwise been burdensome to our hiring managers and recruiters,” said Linsey Jackson, head of technical recruiting at Lyft. “Their intelligent approach to crowdsourced recruiting generates the highest-quality pipeline in the most efficient way, plus their commitment to our success is noteworthy.”
“We saw an opportunity for Simppler to become the company that crowdsourced recruiting, building a far better solution for recruiters than what has traditionally been available on the market,” said Joanne Chen, partner at Foundation Capital. “With this acquisition, Teamable has been able to take Simppler’s vision even further, streamlining both the hiring and referrals processes.”
Teamable is a 50-person company and says it is cash flow positive with 200 customers.