Many in the talent-acquisition field have joked about the number of times some startup has claimed to be either the “Uber of recruiting” or the “eHarmony of recruiting.”
Well, there’s one company you haven’t heard of until now, working quietly behind the scenes, that actually sounds more like an Uber of recruiting than anything at least I’ve ever heard.
Talenya is its name, and its front-end website isn’t anything to write home about. But it’s worth keeping your eyes on where this thing goes.
The company is headed by Gal Almog, who you may remember as the founder and CEO of the highly successful RealMatch. (Funnily enough, I think RealMatch said it was the eHarmony of recruiting at one point.)
Anyhow, with Talenya, what happens is that non recruiters (kind of like the non-taxi-drivers driving us around for Lyft and Uber) become recruiters. They are subject matter experts who agree to spend at least 50 percent of their work time on Talenya.
Those experts spend a couple of weeks learning the recruiting ropes online, and then often a couple of days in person. It’s easier to train people to recruit than to make recruiters experts in a subject, Almog says.
They get access to the Talenya system, with some hand-holding since they’re new at this. A job description goes into the system; then, based on the hiring manager’s feedback about what the actual job requirements are, the system updates its search tags. The recruiter selects five matching profiles from a list of candidates the system found. The employer gets a link to view these profiles and to provide feedback. The search is further refined.
Talenya delivers for the recruiter a list of candidates, which it ranks in two ways. The first is a job-match score. The second is a predictability score, indicating whether the candidate might be willing make a move. This latter score takes into account things like whether the company’s going through layoffs, its stock is going down, or it issued a press release with negative guidance.
The newfound recruiter then screens the candidates — perhaps a couple dozen of them — and sends the hiring manager the finalists – perhaps three to five. They’re supposed to do that in 10 days.
The system sounds more potentially disruptive to third-party recruiters than to tech vendors. In other words, it’s not a product like Entelo or HiringSolved that corporate recruiters would use for its technology; the Talenya subject matter experts-turned-recruiters use Talenya as their back end.
Almog raves about Talenya’s technology, saying that it can find people who, for example, may not have a LinkedIn profile and do not have what he calls an “obvious footprint.” They may have, however, attended a Meetup, for example, and can be found that way.
Talenya is expanding out from New York, Silicon Valley, soon Boston, particularly focused on technology, finance, and pharma, as well as on companies that have employees in the U.S. and Israel, where Almog is from. The potential Israel connection includes a long list of tech companies, like HP.
It has 35 recruiters now, he says, 20 in the U.S., doubling each quarter. After an angel round that included Manpower, a few million dollars combined are now coming in from Gal Ventures (Gal means wave in Hebrew; the VC firm isn’t related to Gal Almog) as well as from lool (Hebrew for “hatchery”).