Lever (YC S12) Raises $20M for Hiring Software at Netflix, Reddit and Lyft | Hacker News Reader

Lever (YC S12) Raises $20M for Hiring Software at Netflix, Reddit and Lyft

forbes.com

30 pointsnateps24 comments

Founder and CTO of Lever, here.

We are so thankful to our many users in the YC community. Would love to hear from anyone already using Lever or companies looking for tools to help them refine their hiring process on how we can continue to improve. I'll be following along today and respond to any ideas!

Hiring is the most difficult and important thing most companies and founders have to learn, and we are hoping to do our part in providing software to make it more successful and a better candidate experience. We believe the very best hiring is accomplished by building long lasting relationships with candidates.

Congrats to you and the team, Nate! We have several shared customers and they all speak very highly of Lever.

Thanks so much, Chris! Yep, http://interviewed.com/ is an awesome product as well. Glad that YC companies have been moving the needle in the hiring space.

High quality, repeatable assessments of candidate's real work is so much better than unstructured interviews with under-prepared and inconsistent interviewer training. We're looking forward to more integrations with all of the companies providing great tools that improve the relationship between candidates and companies.

Congrats! Lever is a joy and probably my favorite hiring tool I use at RealScout. Can't wait to see what is to come in the next few years.

(HackerRank integration would be awesome!)

Thanks so much! In fact, statements like this from our customers were our very best asset in fundraising. We literally would not have been successful without you.

The partners at Scale told us this was one of the most important factors in their decision; they told us they almost never see the same kind of customer passion from other Enterprise SaaS products.

100% hear you on HackerRank integration. We've rolled out a number of integrations on the sourcing side of things the past few months, and we are so excited to grow our coverage to every single tool that our customers use alongside Lever. We have a great relationship with the team at HackerRank, so I am looking forward to it as well. :-)

Congrats, we at Rainforest love you guys :D

Awww, shucks. Love you too! :-)

I hope you guys replace Taleo as soon as possible. I can't believe how many companies use that garbage. Whenever I see it, I automatically back out.

We certainly do hear from candidates that appreciate how much simpler it is to apply for a job with Lever on a regular basis. Not just that, but when companies have better tools internally, the candidate experience becomes much more personal. For just one small example, when you send an email to a candidate with Lever, we default to sending from your real email address and then use IMAP to sync the emails from your inbox. It is technically more difficult to implement than forwarding the email through some random email address like XXXX123-reply@ats-product.com, but the difference in establishing a real human connection is worth it.

Is Lever specifically designed to not allow for general searching for jobs? I like the interface and in general the companies using Lever are pretty interesting, and I'd like to see which of them are looking for engineers in my field. I suppose it might be so that every applicant through Lever had to find the company first and know a little about them, so they have some motivation to work there specifically.

Thanks for the feedback! It is great to hear that you've been finding that companies using Lever tend to be high quality and are interested in a way to get to them more directly.

Thus far we haven't focused on this, as there are quite a number of job boards from the super general to specialized niches. Actually, most companies have been finding that they are bringing more and more recruiting in house. Agencies and sites like traditional job boards aren't working very well for them. This is a very recent and rapidly moving trend. According to Bersin, an analyst division of Deloitte, in 2011, company websites were the 4th ranked source of hires (just 13%) after Job Boards and Aggregators (19%), Internal Candidates (19%), and Employee Referrals (16%). Three years later in 2014, Company Websites became the #1 source of hires, now 19% with Job Boards, Internal Candidates, and Referrals falling to 16%, 14%, and 12% respectively. Companies are paying attention to what works, and they now realize that making their own website high quality is now more effective than posting on job boards. Of course as someone applying to jobs, that means you are better off going to the company's job site directly and applying there than going through a job board.

I know with our own hiring, we find that the candidates that have invested a bit in getting to know us, reading our blog posts about our internal company culture at https://www.lever.co/inside, or have checked out our open source projects such as DerbyJS (http://derbyjs.com/) do tend to have better motivation alignment. At least at Lever, we take this as seriously as technical or skills fit; we even call our first interview step "Motivations Screen".

Google can provide some value depending on how you want to search - "some job skill site:lever.co"

Great idea. Actually slightly embarrassed I didn't suggest that since I was a PM on Google Search once upon a time.

As an agency recruiter I've been underwhelmed by some of the software on the market. Is Lever designed for use by agencies as well as hiring companies, or is it specific to internal hiring? There would be a fair amount of overlap in functionality, but significant differences as well.

As you point out, there is overlap, but there are some pretty large differences between the needs of recruiting agencies and companies. We believe we can create the best product by keeping focused on the needs of companies doing internal recruiting. As well, the industry is trending in the direction of internal recruiting being used for a larger percentage of hires at most companies. We think this makes sense, because employee tenure is shortening. Companies are learning that recruiting must be an ongoing operational function they are always doing even to remain the same size.

Thus, we've kept focused on the needs of companies doing internal hiring for now.

Can you list one or two of the things/features that you feel are the biggest failures with what you have tried?

Categorizing candidates beyond just buzzwords, integrations with other common tools/sites, general applicant tracking issues through full process, effective mail lists/merges. I've used a few systems but none that I've seen seem to entirely "get" agency recruiting needs, so I've typically bought based on cost and tried to modify as much as possible or used several tools where one great one would suffice.

Wow, that sentiment rings incredibly true. While the specific use cases may be a bit different, many companies are similarly fed up with the legacy ATS products for internal recruiting. Every time we encounter a recruiter or a hiring manager using a spreadsheet we ask ourselves why. We take design very seriously at Lever, and the workarounds extreme users do are some of the most insightful ways to learn what the real needs are.

Agreed - I used spreadsheets longer than I care to admit. If you ever want to pick an agency recruiter's brain to get another perspective I'm happy to help.

When you say categorizing, this would be placing them in categories yourself, or some sort of smart categories the software creates?

Good job guys. The SMB space desperately needs some new players.

Thanks! We certainly have seen a lot of success in SMB because of Lever's modern design. Design is a huge part of what makes the product work so well for such a wide variety of company sizes, from 5 employee startups doubling to 10 all the way up to industry leading public companies like Netflix.

Thanks! Is there a press release for a website that doesn't discriminate against AdBlock users?

This is the first announcement that has been published for the current round. We have additional press links from a variety of sites on our press page: https://www.lever.co/press

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