Recruiting tools linger in the past, believes Achuthanand Ravi, the co-founder and CEO of Kula, which is today announcing a $12 million round of funding for its innovative recruiting technology platform. “Recruitment methods have evolved rapidly in recent years, but the tools available to recruiters have not kept pace,” Ravi says. “In functions like sales and marketing, new technologies are having a huge impact, but recruiting is still subpar.”
In a world where organizations constantly emphasize that people are their greatest asset, that seems surprising – all the more so given the talent shortage that companies face in so many markets today. Even the best-performing companies are currently struggling to identify and recruit the people they need – and see their growth being held back as a result.
Ravi believes Kula can solve some of those problems, with tools that specifically target the pain points many hiring leaders are feeling. “The problem so far is that no one has focused on recruiting department workflows,” he says. “CEOs describe recruiting as their competitive priority, but their recruiters are expected to perform while using the tools of the 1990s.”
Kula’s focus is specifically on outbound recruitment, where companies proactively try to identify candidates for specific positions and approach them individually to convince them to seize the opportunity. Unlike inbound recruiting, which relies on a wide selection of candidates that organizations find through job postings and similar channels, outbound recruiting is especially important for small and medium-sized businesses that lack brand awareness and struggle to make themselves heard, as organizations try the best talents. Kula will, at least initially, target companies with fewer than 1,000 employees.
The idea is to automate large parts of the outbound hiring process so that organizations can work more efficiently and focus their resources on building engagement with the best candidates – and ultimately attracting the right people to fill their gaps.
To realize this ambition, Kula offers two different modules. The Circles suite of tools is designed to automate referral processes, where organizations identify potential candidates through recommendations, especially from staff they already employ. Circles brings together employees’ individual networks into a centralized database, giving the company better visibility into talent pools where they can make more personalized connections.
Separately, Kula’s Outreach tool gives employers the ability to automate contact with candidates on platforms such as LinkedIn and GitHub. The idea is to eliminate the repetitive work of identifying and approaching multiple potential candidates over and over again.
Kula’s founders, Suman Kumar Dey, Achuthanand Ravi and Sathappan M
Since its launch earlier this year, Kula has worked with a small number of companies to test and refine its tools. Ravi says this work has delivered spectacular results for recruiting functions: The Circles tool has reduced company time-to-hire by an average of 60%, he says, while Outreach has more than tripled company engagement.
Kula built its tools, which it sells through a software-as-a-service model, based on the founders’ own experience. Ravi has held senior recruiting positions at high-growth companies, including Stripe, Uber and Freshworks. “We understand a recruiter’s challenges through first-hand experience,” he says. “We want to empower them to do their best work, close more candidates and focus on the future.”
It’s an approach that seems to appeal to investors. Today’s seed funding round brings the total amount the company has raised to $15 million, though Kula has yet to begin selling its tools on the open market.
The latest round is led by Sequoia Capital India and Square Peg Capital, with Kula’s initial backers, Venture Highway and Together Fund, as well as a number of angel investors, who also contribute to their investments.
Aakash Kapoor, vice president at Sequoia Southeast Asia, believes Kula’s tools are well placed to take advantage of the evolution of the recruiting market. “We’re seeing a tectonic shift as organizations across the spectrum switch to outbound hiring processes by default,” he says. “Achuthanand and his team have gathered unique insights into outbound recruitment from their own past experiences and they are using this to build a platform that replaces ad-hoc hiring processes with an automation stack.”
Today’s funding will help Kula deliver on that promise, with Ravi and his colleagues planning investments in further product development alongside a determined go-to-market strategy.
“Recruitment is a top priority for companies across the spectrum of size, industry and geography, and is still an undervalued business function,” added Piruze Sabuncu, a partner at Square Peg Capital.
