Hunting club, a senior talent recruiting platform powered by AI, today announced it has raised $40 million in a Series B round led by WestCap and Sator Grove. In an interview with ukbusinessupdates.com, CEO Nick Cromydas said the new capital will be used to further develop the platform while expanding Hunt Club’s national footprint.
Before starting Hunt Club, Cromydas ran New coastal ventures, an enterprise studio headquartered in Chicago. While there, a friend of Cromydas – an executive recruiter – complained to Cromydas about challenges in the recruiting industry. After researching the field, Cromydas says he noticed a trend where company founders are allocating too much capital to hiring leadership talent — often with software that was simply not up to the task.
“Traditional existing recruiting firms rely on a single recruiter’s book, limiting the geographic reach and diversity pool they can reach through traditional recruiting tactics…Largely due to the fact that the industry still relies on an individual recruiter’s relationships, traditional companies risk a large portion of their candidate pool if a recruiter leaves the company,” Cromydas told ukbusinessupdates.com via email. “Hunt Club was created to improve the talent partner experience by combining referrals, network effects and technology to help their clients hire incredible talent.”
So how does Hunt Club differ from the other recruiting solutions out there? That is a valid question. It’s a busy field, after all, with startups like Workstream, Ashby, and Circular.io putting their own unique spin on the hiring process. Last year, Dover raised $20 million for its platform that helps recruiters juggle candidate pools to automatically find suitable candidates. More recently, Kula, which automates tasks such as sending introductory messages, raked in $12 million in VC funding.
What Hunt Club envisions are three things, Cromydas says: an automated hiring process, AI algorithms for matching candidates, and a robust social graph. It’s a fully managed experience; Hunt Club acts like a recruitment agency, assigning a dedicated team to work with clients to understand the roles they are trying to fill.
A screenshot of the Hunt Club recruiting dashboard, where candidates appear once they’ve been narrowed down by matching algorithms. Image Credits: Hunting club
When a company launches a candidate search on the platform, Hunt Club scans an internal database of more than 7 million job seekers for matches and identifies contacts in the company’s network who know the most suitable candidates. The company’s matching algorithm tries to understand the strength of the relationships between candidates by analyzing data points about people and companies to rank opportunities for between 80 and 100 potential employees.
Hunt Club also automatically pings the aforementioned contacts, connecting recruiters with both them and the eligible candidates. Contacts in the network come from a roster of about 20,000 vetted business and industry experts, says Cromydas, who warmly propose to senior talent who would otherwise be difficult to reach.
Over multiple rounds of screening and introductions, Hunt Club narrows the initial crop from 80 to 100 candidates to 5 to 7. Clients see only this final selection.
“Hunt Club’s technology aims to automate as much of the hiring process as possible, such as finding candidates, funnel management, communications and scheduling,” said Cromydas. “The platform automatically enriches talent profiles with people and company data from more than 20 sources, and builds custom workflows to engage them… quality referrals and trusted network recruiting, Hunt Club seeks out the most relevant candidates with the greatest inclination for cultural and skill matching.
Hunt Club says it has worked with more than 1,000 companies, including Gopuff, Upwork, and Circle K, and has posted more than 150 roles for Gopuff alone. Cromydas would not release detailed sales figures, but said sales grew 156% year-on-year from 2021 to 2022.
In the coming months, Cromydas says Hunt Club will be doubling down on product R&D, aiming to provide customers with more detailed insights about candidates. The goal is to reach a $100 million run rate within the next 15 to 18 months as Hunt Club’s workforce exceeds 200 people.
“The pandemic has had a significant lasting impact on the way businesses operate and the way they hire – creating a strong tailwind for Hunt Club,” said Cromydas. “Today’s recruiting landscape spans from a group of legacy and relationship-driven companies on the one hand – Egon Zehnder, Korn Ferry and Russell Reynolds, among others – to technology-focused platforms such as LinkedIn, Hired and Paro. Hunt Club has created a new category of executive talent search, filling an important gap where traditional and boutique recruiting firms have fallen behind.”
To date, Hunt Club has raised $54.71 million.
