CHICAGO, Oct. 18, 2021– Hunt Club, a tech-enabled talent and recruitment company placing leadership roles across the fastest growing companies in the tech sector, raises a $10M Series A from Teamworthy Ventures to further the development of their Talent Expert Network, candidate referral technology, and their growing high-performance recruiting team.
Hunt Club is on a mission to disrupt recruiting – an industry that has not changed since the launch of LinkedIn. Hunt Club specializes in placing leadership roles (Director and above) in sales, marketing, product, finance, customer success, human resources/people, operations, and other roles for fast-growing businesses in half the time it takes the competition. The company operates with a trusted network approach, focusing on identifying quality candidates through warm referrals served by the Hunt Club tech-enabled recruiting team.
Talent Expert Network
Hunt Club understands that the best candidates don’t invest their scarce time and talent in a new job based on an impersonal algorithm. The best candidates are passive candidates and only consider a new job opportunity based on trusted referrals and recommendations, so CEO Nick Cromydas set out to create the most premium community of business leaders made up of entrepreneurs, executives, innovators, investors, and team leaders. In a few short years, Hunt Club’s Talent Expert Network has grown to over 12,000 experts, connecting 6 Million quality candidates through people and technology. With Hunt Club, a search for talent is focused on quality – not quantity.
Godard Abel, CEO of Chicago unicorn G2.com and Hunt Club customer agreed, “Hunt Club helped G2 hire over 50 key roles across our executive, product, marketing, and sales teams. These hires have turned out to be some of our top performers. We landed better talent faster because Hunt Club’s network-based process is so advanced. They helped us land multiple key diverse leaders that our network, board, and leadership team lacked exposure to. Hunt Club has not only helped G2 but also has a leading 4.8 star review score from their trusted customers on our platform.”
Oak Street Health, which IPOed in 2020, has also had success with Hunt Club’s model. “Last year Hunt Club helped us scale across our VP layer and added exceptional talent across technology, data science, customer service, sales, and other departments. Their talent network and technology has routinely outperformed other talent models, ” shared Geoff Price, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Oak Street Health.
Technology + How It Works
When a search is kicked off at Hunt Club, their technology begins mapping their Talent Expert Network looking for relevant candidates based on criteria that predict job compatibility matching. When candidates are identified, the technology pings individual experts in the club’s network for a warm introduction to the candidate. When a candidate is hired via a referral through the system, the expert is rewarded with a monetary referral bonus. Hunt Club has taken internal referral bonuses and flipped them into an external referral network that incentivizes and rewards connections. Imagine 100 top CMOs helping you find your next VP of Marketing. That’s Hunt Club.
Stephen Schmalhofer, Partner at Teamworthy Ventures and new Hunt Club Board Member said, “After experiencing firsthand the power of Hunt Club’s multi-sided talent network to help our portfolio companies, our team saw that Hunt Club was developing a category-defining recruiting platform that is built to solve the urgent problem of finding the right talent and providing a great experience for candidates, employers, and recruiting teams. We’ve been impressed by their remarkable progress, scaling revenue, growing headcount from approximately 20 to 120 in a short period, and bringing on several talented new business and product leaders to serve the market demand.”
This round of funding complements the company’s Seed Round of $4.5M with key investors such as Brian Spaly (Chairman of Tecovas, founder of Bonobos and Trunk Club), Woodie Levin (CEO and founder of Extend), FJ Labs, Starting Line Ventures, Network Ventures and more. Hunt Club works with high-growth start-ups, unicorns, and companies looking to build the best teams including gopuff, Typeform, G2, Nerdy, Dollar Shave Club, Terminus, and Oak Street Health.
People + Tech = Full Customer Solution
While many technology companies have tried to take the recruiter out of the process, Hunt Club has taken a different approach, building a team of high-performance recruiters who provide white-glove service to customers. Powered by Hunt Club’s proprietary Talent Expert Network and candidate mapping/referral technology, Hunt Club recruiters have an unfair advantage – often closing searches for customers in half the time it takes the competition. By reducing the candidate volume (the majority of Hunt Club jobs are not posted on external job boards) and focusing on high-quality referrals and trusted network recruiting, Hunt Club sources the most relevant candidates with the highest propensity for cultural and skill fit.
“We believe that the best recruiters in the world have incredibly valuable networks that they cultivate and curate. With our network mapping and referral technology, we can turn any one of our 100+ talent team members into the most connected recruiter,” shared CEO & Co-Founder Nick Cromydas. “Rather than trying to disintermediate the recruiter, we invest in our product and engineering team so we can quickly build the best technology and tools to give our recruiters an unfair sourcing advantage. This is still a people-powered business today, and when you’re competing with other companies to hire a candidate who has 4 offers, the right digital candidate experience and human touch both matter”.
Today’s War for Talent is Heating Up
The pandemic has created turmoil in the workplace, instigating “The Great Resignation” with close to 55% of Americans currently looking for new jobs. Complicating the hiring market even further, 2021 has marked a record-setting year in venture capital funding, with more VC dollars invested in the first quarters of 2021 than ever before. The influx of cash has created competition for talent at historic proportions with startups and larger companies alike undergoing digital transformation and fighting to secure the same top talent.
The hiring environment is equally unconventional. According to Hunt Club’s data, over 85% of their customers have lifted the requirement for a candidate to relocate to the company’s headquarters. Similarly, the average candidate now is negotiating their initial offer more than 28% due to market factors, up from 9% in 2019. The traditional tool kits, technology, and reliance on local recruiters with dense local networks won’t win in tomorrow’s war for talent as companies are facing increasing pressure to compete financially and expand their talent pool nationally.
Companies are also striving to build diverse teams. With Hunt Club’s platform, their recruiting team has access to top diverse business leaders across every function, industry, and seniority level, unlocking warm referrals to hard-to-reach candidates across the country and around the world.
“Our network-based approach helps our clients connect with diverse and difficult to reach talent, giving them an entirely new talent pool to access. This includes candidates in geographic areas previously untouched by their in-house recruiting team, diverse candidates with no affiliation to the customer, and relationships of trust that would otherwise go overlooked,” said Cromydas.
What’s Next
With a growing database of 6 Million quality candidates, referred from their network of over 12,000 subject matter experts, the funding will enable further development of their machine learning technology that automates much of the recruiting process, will further facilitate Hunt Club’s impressive growth of its Talent Expert Network, expand the company’s talent team, leadership, and help expand the company’s headcount to over 150+ by end of the year, with plans to scale to 300 by 2022.
“Companies face unprecedented headwinds with the competition for talent getting tougher every day. You used to only compete with companies in your backyard for talent. Now the whole world can hire anyone, anywhere. At Hunt Club we are taking on this goliath problem, bringing technology innovation to a market in need of disruption. We empower our team with an unparalleled hiring network and technology automation so they can work faster, smarter, and beat the competition by securing the best talent for a role,” said Nick Cromydas, CEO and Co-Founder of Hunt Club.
“At the end of the day, we believe the one thing that will always turn a passive candidate into an active one, is a trusted introduction. By 2024, our goal is to have the entire management workforce available via a trusted introduction. Our technology powers that at scale, and when you’re an LA-based company trying to hire the best marketing leader anywhere, you need trust to bridge the relationship gap. Hunt Club powers trust.”
