Lever (YC S12) Raises $30M for Effort to Transform Hiring | Hacker News Reader

Lever (YC S12) Raises $30M for Effort to Transform Hiring

forbes.com

26 pointsnateps25 comments

Hey all!

I'm Nate, Founder and CTO of Lever. We are excited to announce this key milestone. We're a lot more excited to continue creating new innovative products, features, and technology that every company needs to finally master their talent acquisition challenges.

I'd love to answer any questions you might have, Lever customers and people interested in YC startups alike!

What do you think about google hire?

I think it is a best practice to avoid commenting on specific competitors publicly. In addition, I'm a former Googler (2007-2011), so best I sit this conversation out. :-)

Happy to talk about our vision for Lever, hiring practices, what it is like to start a startup in YC and grow to 120 employees and many other topics!

Fantastic and respectful way to not take the bait.

Hi Nate,

Will any of that $30M go towards making Lever's website even remotely accessible to screen readers and such? If you're not sure what I'm talking about, try visiting your website with Safari and VoiceOver enabled and watch it crash the browser (or put it into a perpetual loading state). If I see your website linked in a job listing I just skip it altogether. I don't ask for much, just don't kill my screen reader.

Thanks for the tip! I do know that one of our engineers did verify that our public job postings sites for compatibility with screen readers before. I'm not sure we tried Safari with VoiceOver specifically. Will report back.

Unfortunately we were not able to reproduce: https://github.com/nateps/assets/blob/master/lever-jobs-safa...

Do you remember when this last was that you encountered this or what specific job site you were using? Might be best we take this offline. Could you please email support@lever.co so we can track this and are sure we get the issue resolved? Thank you!

Here’s a text description of the GIF, for anyone who relies entirely on a screen reader (compared to using it together with a magnifier).

A user has www.lever.co open in Safari, with the VoiceOver narration popup open at the bottom. They type jobs.lever.co/lever into the address bar. On that page, they navigate down to the Backend Engineer position and go to the job description page for that position, where they then hit the Apply button. On the application form, they quickly go through the form fields, all the way down to the Submit Application button. The GIF ends there.

What are the next steps for Lever? What new features or products are you planning?

So much to do! We believe that talent acquisition is the most important thing that each company needs to master in order to be successful at its core purpose. This might sound obvious now, but it is pretty new! Thus, most companies are still figuring a lot out when it comes to recruiting.

I'm sure we have a lot to learn as well, and what we've learned so far is years in the making. Lever Nurture (https://www.lever.co/nurture) is our most innovative product to date, which we released a bit less than a year ago. There is a lot more we can do to make this new product even better, and we have some other tricks up our sleeves. :-)

Hey Nate, Great product. Question: Is Brian Noguchi still around?

Thank you so much!

Brian is not currently with the team. I'm personally grateful that I had to the opportunity to work with Brian as my partner before Lever on our open source efforts (http://derbyjs.com/ and https://github.com/share/sharedb), taking part in YC, and in the founding and early days of Lever.

Hi Nate, Wanted to give you a heads up that I'm seeing a blank screen your "Our story" page. Chrome. No console errors. There is markup in source. https://www.lever.co/our-story

Looks like an issue with the template on that page. You can actually scroll down and the content is below actually. I'll ping the marketing team.

Thanks!

Thanks, we just fixed it. There is a new about page now that this now redirects to

Hey, Nate. I'm a marketing consultant that specializes in B2B (I have a couple other YC clients right now). What's the most challenging part of your marketing stack? Getting initial leads, getting them from lead to interest, or from interest to closed?

This article mentions that you all are focusing on identifying potential hires that aren't even looking for jobs. Given that this turns traditional hiring on its head, can you share any thoughts/predictions of what the hiring environment will look like in 5-10 years if this is successful?

Yes! This does in fact turn hiring on its head. Our vision for Lever is "Connect human potential to meaningful work." What we mean by that is that if we are able to help organize talent a bit better so that human potential is realized and the most meaningful work is done by talent that is the best fit for it, the world will collectively produce more value and people will be have a better experience of work itself.

Already, Lever believes that the talent acquisition is everyone in the company's job. This idea will become even more mainstream. While recruiters are only getting more valuable as hiring becomes more important, everyone in the company will think of the suite of hiring products as part of the tools that they use to do their job, not as the recruiting team's tool. Just like every knowledge worker in a company thinks of email or calendar as a tool to help them do their job, we believe hiring will be so much a part of everyone's job that they think Lever is a tool for them.

As well, we predict that 5 years from now, every company will be developing long standing relationships with potential, current, and future employees at scale. Talent acquisition will be about predicting attrition and strategically modeling future hiring for a company, anticipating pipeline development well in advance. There is a great model for this—sales is a function that has mastered this already. It will be a revolution in the strategic importance of talent acquisition into a key operational function at every company.

Thanks for replying! That last point is quite interesting. So if I'm understanding correctly, companies would develop relationships with an employee potentially months or years before an actual job or application is on the table? If that's correct, what do you envision taking it from a casual relationship to an actual job getting offered?

For example, is it about getting in touch with prospective employees who are content in their current role but may be interested down the road when their circumstances change? Or perhaps about identifying people who seem promising, but aren't ready for the job yet, and maintaining the relationship as they develop? I'm curious because I've thought a bit about the latter option, of companies giving potentially promising candidates insight into how they can develop to become competitive for a role, and have wondered why that doesn't take place more often.

Yes, I think both scenarios you outlined are what the companies that are most successful in the changing world of employment will do. They will both get to know people far in advance so that when the timing is right, they are able to get the best of both worlds—highly qualified talent when needed.

In addition, companies will look ahead to anticipate which talent might be a strong fit in the future and keep tabs on them as they develop in their careers. I think the honest truth as to why it is not happening more today is that it is so difficult! One part of the solution is building software that has this model for hiring as key part of it works, and that is Lever's focus.

Thanks for asking such a great question and offering your commentary as well!

Very interesting stuff! I've wondered quite a bit what this would look like in the future, so it's cool to see that companies are thinking about how to change the current state into something that is more effective in the long term. Thanks again!

If I was to start a company, what are top reasons I should use Lever vs competitors? You don't need to specifically state opinions about competitors, just curious about the differentiators of Lever.

If your goal is to get good employees, you'll want to use a number of different recruiting practices. No single app, company, or recruiter has access to the entire pool of developers, and each is nurturing their own pool in their own ways. Use a recruiter, post to a couple different hiring sites, and have a dedicated team member doing cold calls.

My take is that Lever's features are well-optimized for companies doing outbound sourcing for roles like engineering (e.g. the extension, snooze features, pipeline structure) and where most hiring is owned by managers who don't have time to devote to mastering recruiting best practices (multi-touch sourcing with Nurture, easy scheduling, pipeline management, email sync, reporting).

Ultimately, you save a lot of money by not having to hire dedicated recruiters and recruiting coordinators, and you actually get a much better candidate experience and hiring effectiveness by having hiring managers and interviewers more closely involved in the process instead of trying to translate them through a separate recruiting team.

Lever's products are quite different. We believe that in order predictably master your hiring goals, you must go beyond applicants and get in front of the best candidates for your company. You must go outbound with sourcing, referrals, and more—speaking to the people that are the very best fit for your team's needs. Applicants are a vital piece of the puzzle, and Lever absolutely provides all of the features that applicant focused products provide. However, those features are seamlessly integrated into Lever Hire, which is a full CRM for job candidates + an applicant tracking system.

We recently posted a piece describing how the Shopify team has used Lever to grow from a a few hundred to over 1900 employees. Sourcing was a key part of their strategy. https://www.lever.co/blog/how-shopify-revolutionized-proacti...

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