ZipRecruiter: The #1 Rated Employment Marketplace Goes Public
By Eric Liaw, Jules Maltz, and James Black
Today, we’re excited to congratulate Ian Siegel and the entire ZipRecruiter (NYSE: ZIP) team on their direct listing! As the #1 rated employment marketplace in America, ZipRecruiter is delivering on their mission to connect people to their next great opportunity, and today’s listing highlights the company’s success in delivering a premier experience to job seekers and employers alike.
IVP first invested in ZipRecruiter in 2014, and we’ve enjoyed every step along the way. Here are a few of the reasons we’re proud to have partnered with Ian and team:
Meaningful Mission
ZipRecruiter makes the labor market more efficient. Ian got the idea to start ZipRecruiter out of personal pain from having to post jobs across dozens of job sites, filter through volumes of candidates of varying suitability and just generally being frustrated by the immense amount of time it took to hire. Now, ZipRecruiter sends job postings to 100+ top job sites with just a single click, and 4 out of 5 employers who post a job on ZipRecruiter find a quality candidate in 24 hours.
But that was only half of the equation. As ZipRecruiter grew, Ian realized the job seeker experience was also broken. People wanted to know — Am I applying to the right jobs? Did the recruiter even look at my resume? By applying the power of machine learning to a proprietary database of billions of real world data points in the job seeker process, ZipRecruiter built a technology platform to empower job seekers, with features like guidance on job matches, curated opportunities, one-click apply, and application read receipts.
With AI-powered tools for both employer and job seeker, ZipRecruiter is now playing the role of active matchmaker for both sides of the marketplace. Say goodbye to the dreaded job hunt!
Strong Business From The Start
ZipRecruiter shares many traits with successful start-ups that have become public companies, including:
- An experienced and cohesive senior management team that inspires
- A talented, motivated and resilient employee base that
- Develops innovative products and solutions to
- Serve a massive market and
- Bring delight to its stakeholders, employers and job seekers alike!
However, unlike many startups, ZipRecruiter was profitable from inception including at the time IVP led the company’s Series A investment back in 2014. For ZipRecruiter, raising outside capital was a matter of choice, not necessity, and we were honored when Ian picked IVP as their first outside investor and board member. The company has grown more than 10x in size since we made our first investment and it has been a privilege to work with them for the past 7 years.
A Team That Pulls Together in Tough Times
The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a tremendous toll around the world in many dimensions. The impact on the labor market was nothing short of devastating, with US unemployment rates spiking to Depression-era levels literally overnight. Some would say that adversity builds character, but we respectfully disagree. We believe that adversity does not build character, but rather reveals it, and in a time of crisis, ZipRecruiter showed its mettle. Ian made difficult decisions to rally the entire company together, and that collective grit not only enabled the company to survive but to emerge in 2021 stronger than ever. As we head towards reopening and a safer tomorrow, ZipRecruiter is already playing a vital role in getting people back to work and we look forward to the journey ahead!
Eric Liaw, Jules Maltz, and James Black are Investors at IVP, a premier later-stage venture capital firm.
The comments expressed above are not a statement on ZipRecruiter’s behalf.
Originally published at https://www.ivp.com on May 26, 2021.
