The most important investment you make as a company is in your people. It is extremely important to hire the right people because they are the ones that can drive your company to new heights. Therefore, it is crucial to build a good hiring process and have the right tools to attract and convince the right candidates to join you. Therefore, we are excited to announce our investment in Lever, a new way of recruiting for the collaborative world. Lever powers recruiting for more than 700 high-growth companies to help them to source, engage, and nurture candidates. We like this investment for many reasons. Let us start by taking you through our journey to partnering with Lever.
We discovered Lever when we were looking to improve our own internal recruiting process. We were looking to hire a new Associate for our investment team and we became overwhelmed. We were getting hundreds of resumes and speaking to dozens of candidates. Like many Lever customers, we realized our current process of managing candidates in Excel no longer worked. On the investing front, we were already doing diligence on the HR sector to find an investment in HR Tech. We came to the conclusion that we could address our problem with software.
We evaluated a couple of options and it was clear to go with Lever. Lever had the best UI, sourcing and collaboration features. It was the perfect solution for the modern recruiting workflow. Personally experiencing the evaluation process helped us understand the recruiter’s perspective and what they want in a system. As investors, we noticed Lever also addressed a couple of recruiting trends that piqued our interest including:
- The best candidates are often passive candidates. Recruiting a quality candidate has become extremely competitive. Many of the best candidates already have jobs. Thus, it is important to find and nurture relationships with these candidates so you can get them right as they’re thinking about a job change. Lever has great candidate nurturing features that helps with this. Lever’s solution is purpose built for hiring passive candidates.
- Recruiting is becoming more collaborative. ATS’s have traditionally been siloed in HR. Recruiters used ATS’s as a resume repository and employees outside of HR didn’t touch the ATS. Yet, this is changing. Recruiters are encouraging employees to use the ATS to leave feedback and refer candidates. The ATS is no longer just for the recruiter, other employees are engaging with it as well. Therefore, an ATS’s UI is important – it has to be intuitive and easy to use or employees won’t engage.
After our experience with Lever we knew we had to invest in the Company. We met with Sarah, was impressed with her vision and her management team including her two co-founders Nate and Randal. A great team, coupled with product market fit, large market and fantastic SaaS metrics meant it was a great investment for us. We jumped on the opportunity to partner with Lever and can’t wait to see how they overturn the recruiting process!
P.S. We had success on hiring from our end too. We brought Jeremy on board as our newest Associate.
Susan Liu contributed to this post and initially sourced Lever.
