Fetcher Raises $5.4mm from Accomplice and Slow Ventures to Reimagine Recruiting
Today we’re excited to share some special news: we’ve raised $5.4mm in seed funding from Accomplice and Slow Ventures, with full participation from our existing investors, Revel Partners and Picus Capital, as well as our angel investors, which include Paul English (founder of Kayak), Amol Sarva (founder of Knotel) and James Joaquin (co-founder of Obvious Ventures).
“Thoughtful recruiting requires a level of human expertise that’s not fully replicable by machines today. We believe Fetcher’s unique combination of AI and human intuition is the smartest and fastest way for a company to scale.” says, Sam Lessin, Partner at Slow Ventures.
Scaling our Outbound Recruiting Platform
We will use our new funding to further develop our outbound recruiting platform and to scale our Engineering, Data Science and Sales teams. Just as sales and marketing were transformed over the last decade by data driven technologies, recruiting is undergoing its own transformation thanks to emerging data and analytics technologies. Automation, machine learning, metrics and big data are now the hallmarks of intelligent recruiting and hiring. This is changing the way companies find new employees and also giving recruiters and hiring managers back the time they need to focus on the higher value aspects of recruiting, like ensuring an amazing candidate experience.
Fetcher uses a human-in-the-loop approach to complement our AI-powered recruiting, ensuring the highest quality matches with the greatest efficiency. Our recruiters and hiring managers spend on average 15 minutes a week in the platform to launch dozens of outreach emails and follow up messages to qualified candidates. This same effort would take approximately 12 hours a week with traditional recruiting practices.
To ensure high response rates, we’ve built out an in-house team of content writers that partner with clients to draft compelling outreach messages. By syncing with our customer’s Gmail or Outlook account, we can then automate the entire outreach process, including follow-ups, which has proven to be incredibly effective. Last year, 27% of Fetcher hires occurred in the 2nd or 3rd follow up.
We’ll also be investing in client facing metrics and analytics with an eye towards leveraging our own data so that we can provide specific, tactical insights on messaging and candidate targeting in a tailored manner. This will help companies hire smarter and faster, and give our clients the tools and insights they need to build more diverse and inclusive workplaces.
Ultimately, we want to elevate the role of recruiting to the most important task a company can undertake.
“Nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day, you bet on people, not on strategies.” - Lawrence Bossidy, Former COO of General Electric
Adding Key Executives
We’re also delighted to announce that we’ve hired several industry leaders to help scale our business:
Korneel Bouman, Chief Customer Officer. Korneel was previously at Stack Overflow where he led their Customer Success team. Korneel grew the customer success function to a team of eleven customer success managers, spread out over four time zones and worked with marketing and sales management to help define the customer journey. “I love to sit in the middle of it all. To make sure that all the dots are connected and that the client is supported, heard and enabled throughout their journey,” he says. Prior to Stack Overflow, he was the co-founder and president of The Brooklyn Design Company.
Scott Fowle, Chief Revenue Officer. Scott was previously at SmashFly where he served as Chief Strategy Officer. Scott is a passionate leader who loves to pioneer change, challenge the norm and drive new concepts to achieve better business results. “It is amazing to witness how changing a paradigm can be so instrumental towards optimizing an entire business,” he says. Scott was previously an executive at HireVue and SAP SuccessFactors and sits on the board of the non-profit organization, Inner City Impact.
Dario Salas Machado, VP of Finance. Before joining Fetcher, Dario was at Univision where he was Director of Ad Sales Analytics. Dario made his mark with astute industry research and ad-hoc analyses on internal, market and macroeconomic challenges to develop ad sales strategy and financial planning. He also conducted deep-dive data analyses to better understand revenue status and develop an effective strategy to operate and value enterprise partnerships. He was previously co-founder and CEO of MDI Holding.
Tara Cooper, VP of Sales and Enablement. Tara also comes to Fetcher via SmashFly where she was VP of Sales Enablement. Tara knows how to effectively influence strategy, train and build teams, and find ways to overcome challenges. “I am energized when I have the opportunity to take really great ideas and turn them into reality,” she says. Prior to SmashFly, she led Sales Operations & enablement efforts at HireVue.
From the team at Fetcher, we want to thank our customers, investors, advisors and partners for believing in our team and our mission.
Thank you!
