One of the early and huge hits of the first dot-com boom was online recruitment. However, as more and more corporate operations go online, job searching online is becoming the gift that keeps on giving. As a result, news of another portal in the field raising a large round to take on the incumbents with more inventive and accurate technologies has emerged today. Talent.com, a portal that aggregates both job ads posted directly by recruiters and ads from third-party recruitment sites, has raised $120 million in a Series B round of funding, which it will use to expand internationally, invest more in its programmatic search platform, and introduce new products and services to users.
Talent.com has a global profile—it currently lists around 30 million jobs from 1 million companies in 78 countries and 29 languages, with more than 28 million monthly active visitors—but the startup is based in Montreal, and this round is led by Canadian venture capital firm Inovia Capital, with previous backer Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) and new investors Investissement Québec, Climb Ventures, BDC Capital, andIt has also raised $30 million in fresh loan funding from BMO Financial Group’s Technology & Innovation Banking Group, in addition to the $120 million in equity.
In an interview, Lucas Martnez, co-founder and co-CEO of Talent.com, who co-founded the company with Maxime Droux and Benjamin Philion, said in an interview that the funding will be used to build more tech to help consumers see results that are more relevant to what they are looking for, as well as to make Talent.com more appealing to employers, with tools to measure the responsiveness of ads and charge them based on what gets people clicking.
(The company knows a thing or two about using the proper words to pique people’s interest in content: it used to be named Neuvoo, which is Finnish for “advise,” and while it was successful, it didn’t develop very quickly, in part because many people couldn’t pronounce it.)
So when Neuvoo decided to rebrand in 2019 and discovered Talent.com was for sale, it leaped at the opportunity. It paid $1.3 million for the domain, but the rest of the facts were curiously under NDA for the next three years, so it’s unclear who was selling it. When I questioned whether it was Google, Martnez laughed and replied “no,” but didn’t expand.)
It’s also putting the money toward expanding internationally. Martnez spoke with me from Barcelona, where the company is establishing a new European headquarters.
Indeed.com, which is owned by Japan’s Recruit Holdings, which is valued at roughly $66 billion and controls other brands including SimplyHired, ZipRecruiter, which went public last year, LinkedIn, and the search behemoth Google, are some of the major players in the market today. However, a number of startups are currently competing with these more established firms, exploiting new technology and shifting market expectations to create new competitive battlegrounds.
Some, like Deel and Remote, are marketing themselves as platforms to assist in the hiring of remote workers, while others, like Turing, are focusing on a specific skill pool: engineers. SmartRecruiters aspires to be the “force” of recruitment, a goal that others, such as Beamery, are pursuing as well.
Talent.com, like the other three, is primarily focused on the hourly and gig labour sectors, as well as skilled labour. Other options for companies include the ability to integrate their existing applicant tracking systems and CRMs, in addition to its programmatic approach to job marketing. Users are given the opportunity to undertake pay research, calculate salary after deducting tax in their location, and answer profile questions to further tailor their search results on the consumer side, in addition to basic job search. This will also pave the way for the product’s future development.
“It’s an aspirational job hunt.” Many are unqualified for the positions for which they are applying. As a result, we’re combining experience and education to advise people on what they should do if they want to be an engineer, for example. We’ll recognise you and have your CV on our platform, and we’ll say, “These are the online educational programmes available in your field.” This is where we will give our users a lot more value. “
The company’s plan to offer a broader range of services in order to generate more income from users sparked investors’ curiosity.
The competition for talent has been heightened by the major challenges that organisations are currently facing. According to Chris Arsenault, partner at Inovia Capital, “Talent.com has rapidly expanded to become one of the largest and most international platforms for companies to search and recruit.” With the launch of a suite of value-added goods, they’ll be able to become a truly job-seeker-centric platform, says the company.
Benjamin Turner is a journalism graduate with keen interest in covering Technology news – specifically wall street business. He has as a keen eye for technologies and has predicted quite a few successful startups over the last couple of years. Benjamin goal with this website is to report accurately on all kinds of stock news, and have a great deal of passion for Technology news reporting. Benjamin is diligent and proactive when it comes to Technology news reporting.
