Announcing our Investment in jobpal
The Emergence of an Intelligent Talent Interaction Platform
Today, we are thrilled to announce our investment in jobpal. jobpal is one of our first investment in Acadian Ventures and we are excited to partner with lead investor, InReach Ventures, to support founders — Luc, Andriy, and Christoph — and the growing team as they accelerate the business.
A big part of our investment strategy is getting to know companies before we make an investment. We met founder and CEO, Luc Dudler, when he was seeded by 500 Startups back in 2017. Over the last 18+ months, we’ve been able to observe the development of the product and the market itself, the growth and working style of Luc and his team, and most importantly, the value from early customers and the feedback from users.
Solving a Big Problem
Companies spend over $200 billion on recruiting worldwide. In both high and low unemployment economic cycles, companies are always recruiting. In the US alone, nearly 25% of the workforce, or approximately 40 million people, are searching for jobs and being recruited into jobs every single year. On average, it costs approximately $4,000 per candidate on interviewing, scheduling, and assessment to decide if someone is right for a job, and that number doesn’t include the cost of advertising, sourcing, and hiring!
Unfortunately, after 20 years of investment in recruiting technologies, we have barely moved the needle on the candidate experience. For a typical job seeker, the process to find and apply for that new job can be frustrating, tedious, and discouraging. Most job seekers have experienced the “black hole” of recruiting where they find that perfect job on a career site, submit a finely polished CV, and hear nothing back from the company.
Increasingly for both passive and active candidates, the job search can be very personal. Unlike other online searches, a job search can require finding an employer that matches one’s values, benefits needs, and career ambitions. These search “criteria” are important and almost none of this information is available in a job description.
Rethinking The Way Companies Engage with Candidates
If Amazon can tailor our shopping experience and Spotify can personalize our playlist, why can’t companies create a unique candidate experience for all job seekers. Enter jobpal.
jobpal enables real-time interaction with candidates. Want to know what it’s like to work at the company? Curious to know what makes someone successful as a product manager? Do you just want to know the flexible work policy or benefits program? jobpal’s conversational recruiting platform can enable a candidate to understand their fit for a position, ask questions about the company, and even learn about the company’s culture, benefits and values. The company uses machine learning and their proprietary natural language processing engine to automate intelligent conversations with prospective job candidates and deliver a superior candidate experience at scale.
One of our investment thesis is “AI is the next UX”. We believe the rise of messaging platforms will shape the future of all digital interactions including how we interact with our enterprise applications. With the emergence of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat, companies are leveraging conversational platforms such as Jobpal to increase engagement while also reducing costs. Companies including Airbus, McDonalds, and British Airways are using jobpal today to create engagement with candidate while dramatically reducing the operational cost of recruiting.
Building Early Evangelists
One of the biggest challenges for early stage companies is selling into large, complex enterprises. Not very often do you find early stage companies that have sold their products into iconic global companies such as Airbus, DHL, and McDonalds. These are all jobpal customers.
As David Mills, at Airbus describes, “Candidates’ expectations are very different today than they were only a few years ago. We’ve seen a phenomenal success using jobpal — something that far outstripped what we were expecting. The number of questions we get is far more than we ever received via email, so being able to answer all these questions automatically helps ensure that we can deliver a great candidate experience.”
That ability to sell, though must be outmatched by having a product that customers love and generate long-term value. We love that jobpal delivers value to all stakeholders in the recruiting process. For talent acquisition executives, they can substantially reduce operational costs while improving the candidate experience (as witnessed by favorable candidate NPS). For recruiters, you deliver better, more qualified candidates faster. For job seekers, you actually get to engage with someone that actually responds to your questions and makes the candidate experience fun and engaging.
We are excited to partner with jobpal and help them execute their vision.
