Career insights platform randrr announced the acquisition of career-matchmaking site Anthology last week. Anthology is dubbed by some as a mix between Tinder and LinkedIn, anonymously matching employers with already employed but on-the-hunt employees.
After filling out a few job-related questions, Anthology matches the employee with companies aiming to hire someone with similar requirements and interests. While the length of time it takes to get matches varies, it’s a more passive way of career searching.
“Our mission at randrr is rooted in serving people in the pursuit of their dream job and Anthology will accelerate our ability to achieve that vision,” randrr founder and CEO Terry Terhark said in a press release.
Anthology co-founders Tom Leung and Ian Shafer said the acquisition will help expand Anthology and take it to the next level. “It became clear to that combining Anthology’s award-winning anonymous talent marketplace with randrr’s team, users, and career platform could be a game changer,” Leung and Shafer said in a press release.
The pair are giving up the reins of the four-year-old company which originally aimed to increase the transparency of the employment market after the revelation of Silicon Valley’s unjust poaching agreements.
In 2010, the Justice Department said that several companies including Google, Apple, Intel, and Adobe made secret deals not to hire each other’s engineers. The agreements hindered the employees’ ability to get better jobs with higher salaries. The investigation was followed by private lawsuits, and, eventually, a class-action lawsuit.
While these secret poaching agreements were in place, Leung was an engineer at Google. As the legal battle was taking place, he created a website to put the power back into the hands of the talent. Appropriate to the cause, he named the website “Poachable.”
The acquisition marks the second major change for the company. The first change came when the website rebranded in 2015 after it had trouble trademarking the name.
“We were on our way to becoming a household name,” Leung wrote in an Inc.com post titled, “How Not to Name Your Startup …” The growth of the company was then slowed when it got some bad news: Its trademark application had been denied. Since the names “Poached” and “Poachee” were already registered, the founders were forced to find a new name.
Eventually, after what Leung said was a “long, intensive journey,” he and Shafer decided on the name “Anthology.” The name, Leung wrote, conveyed the seriousness and trustworthiness of the platform.
Leung and Shafer teamed up prior to Poachable when they launched Yabbly, a platform for product reviews. Leung left his role at Google for the startup. Shafer was a former engineer at Amazon. After over two years, the pair shut down Yabbly and focused their attention on the job-hunting industry.
Despite leaving leading companies to become entrepreneurs, both co-founders have returned to the other side of tech as employees. Both Shafer and Leung have relocated to Switzerland to take on roles at Google, Shafer as a software engineer and Leung as a director of product management at YouTube.