Greenhouse, a popular applicant tracking solution, joined a growing number of its peers raising money lately. Hired, for example, just raised $30 million. Phenom People recently raised $22 million. I could go on, but the gist is recruitment remains hot and the number of firms looking for a piece of the pie is growing.
Whether they know it or not, the time to raise money goes beyond growth of the sector and the need for talent. The timing, in part, should have a lot to do with well-funded players like Google, whose ATS offering, Hire, is evolving fast. LinkedIn, which is now going after the SMB market, is now a major threat. It’s a big ocean. The bigger your boat, the better your chances of surviving the impending perfect storm.
Announced Thursday, Greenhouse has raised $50 million in Series D funding from Riverwood Capital. It will use the cash to expand globally and improve its product suite around recruiting, onboarding, hiring analytics, and diversity and inclusion. Founded in 2012, New York-based Greenhouse has now raised more than $110 million.
“Enterprise businesses compete for the best talent and manage thousands of candidates across their organization,” said Daniel Chait, co-founder and CEO at Greenhouse. “This is why interest in our category has exploded. An optimized recruitment process is a competitive advantage. We built Greenhouse to help companies get better at every area of hiring — from finding the right candidates, to conducting more focused interviews, to making more data-driven decisions.”
Interestingly, the company spends a lot of time talking about diversity in its release. Not sure you need $50 million to support diversity initiatives, but I suppose I could be persuaded otherwise. The company says it has partnered with Paradigm in order to take a data-driven approach to diversity and inclusion to design and execute high-impact diversity and inclusion strategies. Greenhouse Inclusion, its product to support this, is designed to help companies get a better handle on eliminating bias during the hiring process.
“Diversity isn’t just a box to check in HR,” said Maia Josebachvili, VP of marketing & strategy, Greenhouse. “Leading organizations see diversity and inclusion as critical to every part of their business. It enhances employee engagement, improves reputation, and boosts revenue.”
Being the diversity ATS is an interesting strategy. It’s going to be hard to sell yourself as the most technically advanced player when the likes of Google are playing, and no one wants to be the cheapest. So, I guess diversity is one way to play it, although I suspect the impact of such a message has limitations.
“Smart leaders are committing to building diverse and inclusive businesses,” said Chait. “As a member of the Founders for Change coalition, we are proud to value diversity and inclusion, and we are very excited with our Inclusion product.” Smart leaders are also making decisions to buy into platforms like the ones Google and Microsoft are busy building. For Greenhouse’s sake, I hope it can come up with 50 million reasons to convince employers that it’s a better option.
Maybe I’m being too negative. I generally hear only good things about Greenhouse. Vendors especially rave about how easy it is to integrate with Greenhouse’s platform. Plus, the proof is in the pudding. The company touts more than 2,500 customers using its service in over 50 countries.