Note: This article has been updated to include Vettery’s acquisition of Hired.
Hired, a premium recruitment platform to hire tech talent, has been struggling to stay afloat since 2019.
The pandemic-induced recession has predominantly focused on job losses and cost-cutting measures by companies. There have also been headlines about acquisitions becoming a common strategy that allows companies to remain afloat. But more challenging times lie ahead. Many companies are likely not to find buyers, and they are likely to go out of business.
The InformationOpens a new window has reported that one such company is Hired, a recruitment platform primarily for tech candidates. According to the report, the company has already started selling assets, paying off creditors, and winding down the company, though denied by the company’s CEO. He suggests instead that the company is in the process of being acquired. Though efforts to sell the company have been underway since the beginning of 2020, Hired has found no buyers.
This is significant. A startup founded in 2012, Hired was recently valued privately at more than $500 million. The platform has supported companies such as Twitter, Airbnb, and Lyft in their recruitment and raised more than $150 million.
Companies like Hired were meant to be niche hiring platforms for tech talent, especially engineers. What went wrong in terms of the hiring of software engineers and other such specialized skill sets?
Hired Has Been in Trouble Since 2019
The Information’s report says that Hired has been facing challenges due to its premium recruitment model even before the coronavirus pandemic. In 2019, it missed its revenue goals by more than 50%. The company laid of many employees and now the current number stands at fewer than 80, down from 250.
In addition, the immediate rise of remote work has led employers to seek talent in diverse geographic locations, independent of external recruiters. To save costs and eliminate the fees that companies usually pay recruiters, this process has shifted in-house.
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Why a Premium Tech Hiring Model Is Likely to Fail Now
Three significant factors that are likely to drive the downfall of a recruiting platform for tech talent are:
- the ease of access to wider talent pools, due to virtual hiring by the companies directly
- a dip in the hiring for some of the roles
- availability of lower-priced platforms with the added feature of tech hiring
For instance, in August 2020, MediaOps announced the launch of RecruitOps, which combines the strength of brands such as DevOps.com, Security Boulevard, Container Journal, and the DevOps Institute to match top, technically skilled professionals with many hard-to-fill positions in organizations of all sizes. Some of the skills it will cover are specialists in DevOps, cloud native, and cybersecurity, with large enterprises and venture-backed startups.
In April this year, after seeing a rise of 55% in conversational activity on its networking platform, LinkedInOpens a new window introduced new measures specifically linked to job listings. Several of its recruitment tools are now available for free, especially for those companies that hire essential workers. Some of these industries likely include tech roles as well.
Tools such as SourceHubOpens a new window allow recruiters to find tech talent with more ease on a comprehensive and vast network like LinkedIn.
AngelListOpens a new window is a different kind of platform that focuses on allowing angel investors to find out what companies in the tech world are doing and which ones are looking for investment. But tech talent puts up its resumes there for easy access and to be hired or even have their smaller startups acquired, and therefore get hired automatically to that process too.
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Update: Since this news was first covered, Hired was acquired by VetteryOpens a new window , an AI-driven talent marketplace that matches highly-qualified and individually-vetted candidates with top companies. This acquisition will result in the creation of a new recruitment platform that will combine data from 1.5 million interviews to create a robust predictive hiring algorithm. This tool will bring the best of hiring in marketing, sales, finance, and tech to users. This platform promises to help reduce hiring bias and improve the vetted candidate pool. With broader hiring tools available, this acquisition will leverage Hired’s tech talent data and create a competitive tool, likely to be on par with other robust recruitment technology market.
(Updated: Nov. 25, 2020)