Even today with all of the layoffs we have seen in the tech industry over the last year, there is still a shortage of technical talent. That’s partly because there is a limited number of workers with these skills, and partly because it’s not just technology companies that are looking for technical talent.
Enter Hackajob, a two-sided marketplace that brings together technical candidates and companies looking for help. One twist with this approach is that Hackajob makes the companies apply for the talent, rather than the other way around. It’s an approach that seems to be resonating, and today the company announced a $25 million Series B investment.
Company co-founder and CEO Mark Chaffey says that the reason we are not seeing a dip in technical talent demand is that tech workers are needed everywhere. “Technology has evolved from a standalone industry to a function that touches every single industry. And I think what we see is that the demand for technical individuals far outstrips the supply,” Chaffey told TechCrunch.
“We describe ourselves as a full stack talent platform that is primarily focused on helping enterprise organizations find, engage, hire and retain technical individuals,” he said. This involves a few products. The first is the two-sided marketplace where companies and job seekers post their requirements, and because the companies pitch the job seekers, rather than the other way around, this creates a situation where the candidate feels wanted and is more likely to respond.
“This creates a really magical candidate experience because you only get that positive reaffirmation from companies that want to speak to you,” he said. That in turn generates an 85% response rate to employers. “So employers have got this really engaged talent pool that they can access.”
The other products include a testing and remote interviewing platform and a diversity and inclusion module to make sure companies are interviewing a diverse pool of candidates.
They collect a bunch of data to help companies find a good match including salary expectations, visa status, location preferences, tech stack, etc. In addition, they validate the skills, so the employer knows they are getting someone with the skill set they require for the job.
With all that data, they can feed it into machine learning models, which can help interpret the information on the candidate’s resume into structured data “to make the relevancy work better on both sides.”
The company was founded in 2014, and Chaffey reports they are just north of $10 million ARR with a net revenue rate of around 150%, so they are getting customers and keeping them. They have over 500,000 users on the candidate site with 200 paying customers, which he describes as global enterprise organizations, across multiple industries.
Hackajob currently has 120 employees.They hired 19 people recently, of which 16 were hired through the company’s own marketplace, and Chaffey says he thinks a lot about building a diverse workforce..
“I’ve spent a lot of time speaking about diversity and inclusion and working with customers on the importance of it, and the point is that more diverse teams are typically, from all the data, higher performing because you’ve just got different opinions coming together. So it’s something that’s central to us,” he said.
Today’s $25 million round was led by Volition Capital with participation from Axa Venture Partners, Foresight and Future Fund.The company has now raised a total of $33 million, per Crunchbase data.
