Introducing Intrro: the collaboration tool for building an inclusive referral culture
This week, Intrro announced their Seed round — congratulations to Nasser, Neel and the whole Intrro team! We are excited to be partnering up with Intrro as the lead investor. Here are a couple of thoughts on our rationale behind the investment and what makes Intrro and their product stand out.
Intrro builds on the largely untapped opportunity that is hidden in organizations’ collective network data and aims at bundling these into valuable products — starting with talent acquisition. The company’s referral solution empowers customers worldwide to gain access to better talent, make informed hiring decisions and build diverse teams.
The ever intensifying ‘war for talent’
Intrro’s co-founder Nasser and Neel know the problem first-hand. Both spent a number of years recruiting talent for high-growth companies. This meant conducting cold outreaches to an extent that one could call ‘spamming’, sifting through an endless amount of CVs and diaries packed with mind-numbing introductory calls. And, while Nasser and Neel were among the most sought-after recruiters, it was impossible to keep up with the hiring needs of today’s most desirable employers. In fact, apart from access to talent, choosing the candidate that fits most is an equally challenging task that leaves clients regularly overwhelmed, frustrated and with lots of money spent on the wrong candidate. In short ‘it was a mess’ — as Nasser pointed out several times during our first meetings.
Employees are your best recruiters
Paradoxically enough, companies are currently failing at leveraging their most promising recruiting channel: their very own employees. Intrro’s data show that referred candidates are 7x more likely to land the job than candidates from other sources BUT usually represent the smallest group of total new hires. This becomes even more striking as there are a number of other benefits associated with employee referral programs:
- Referred candidates have a shorter time to hire of approximately 29 days vs. 39 days for job boards and 55 days for career sites (according to Jobvite — an Applicant Tracking System and recruiting software provider)
- The cost per hire is lower as costly platforms are omitted
- The predictability of cultural fit is much higher, as candidates are pre-screened and come recommended by your own trusted employees
- Referred candidates lead to higher employee retention due to the better cultural fit mentioned above (according to Recruitee — a recruiting software provider)
I got tired of hearing clients wanting to increase referral hiring so decided to do something about it — Neel, COO and Co-founder Intrro
Unsurprisingly, employee referrals are by far the preferred form of hiring. However, current referral processes are manual, poorly tracked and largely memory-based, producing inconsistent and unscalable results. Many companies — especially high-growth companies — already have monetary incentives in place, but also they are not doing the trick, as has become apparent when we spoke to several leading recruiters out there. What is needed is a systematic approach to referral programs that seamlessly integrates employees into the process of hiring early on and engages them to actively contribute to the company’s hiring goals.
A systematic approach to referral programs
Intrro’s recruitment product suite is aimed at solving exactly this. Its software analyzes existing employees’ digital networks, enriches the profiles with publicly available information and matches relevant prospects with (future-) open positions. This gives customers unprecedented access to an otherwise difficult-to-reach talent pool at the push of a button. Through integrating into clients’ internal communication tools such as Slack, employees are able to provide further insights into prospective hires throughout the entire candidate journey and thus enable their company to make much better informed hiring decisions and avoid personal bias. Each additional employee network adds tremendous supplementary value — just 60 connected employee networks surface around 50,000 potential candidates, as one of Intrro’s customers tells us — empowering recruiters to proactively tackle even the hardest to fill open positions. Et voilà, employee referrals are suddenly scalable and collaborative.
If you’ve found candidates and you discover that there’s existing relationships within your organization, why would you approach them cold? Why wouldn’t you get valuable reputational data and a warm intro to them? — Nasser, CEO and Co-founder Intrro
The product is built with the end user in mind. Recruiters are facing demanding hiring quotas and they dread the wasted time sifting through irrelevant profiles and the ineffective cold outreaches — who wouldn’t. Once they start using Intrro, it tends to become a daily habit and they share it among their peers leading to strong adoption and a central component of a company’s hiring efforts.
Hiring and beyond: “Who do you know at X to solve Y”
Unlocking the power of employee networks for recruiting, Nasser, Neel and the whole team at Intrro are off to a great start, but there are a myriad of opportunities. Essentially every business function that has a dealing with the outside world can be enhanced by using employee network data. We are sure you’re already thinking of one while reading this. Fundamentally, Intrro answers the question ‘who do you know at X to solve Y’ for enterprises.
Why Intrro and signals Venture Capital are a great fit
We at signals Venture Capital are focussing on B2B enterprise technology. We believe in businesses that want to fundamentally change enterprises for the better and improve the lives of people working for them. Finding novel ways to gather and use enterprise data is a core aspect for companies in their transformation to the intelligent enterprise of the future. Intrro ticks those boxes. Finally, Nasser and Neel wooed us with their powerful vision, outstanding leadership qualities as well as their priceless industry experience. Nasser, Neel, we at signals Venture Capital are excited to support you on your entrepreneurial journey!
