Crew, the first all-in-one recruiting platform that takes into account the newest hiring methods, recently announced that it has raised $2.3 million in a seed round co-led by a host of seed stage funds, including Rebel, Secret, and Kima, alongside angel investors, including Indeed’s co-founder, Join’s CEO, Workday’s GM, Pitch’s CEO, Airbnb’s Director of Product, Spendesk’s VP of Sales, Twitter’s VP of Engineering.
With the funds, the Paris-based company intends to expand operations and its business reach.
Co-founded by Amine Skalli and Ruben Guenoun, Crew serves up three key features that allow companies and recruiters to shift from inbound to outbound hiring: an outreach automation tool with nurturing solid capabilities, and an actionable database, the team features that are designed to help spread the weight of hiring amongst hiring managers, team members, advisors, and investors with its team-based approach, all working in concert with several automation tools, reminders, and workflows.
Speaking about the platform, Co-founder & CEO of Crew, Amine Skalli, said:
The war for talent means that companies are no longer willing to wait for candidates to come to them. The vast majority of talent, especially great ones, are not actively looking for work. By targeting only active job seekers, companies are closing themselves off to a huge pool of skilled candidates. Companies must therefore multiply their efforts to source passive candidates, which requires them to resort to new strategies to target a large number of qualified people.
According to the company, In 2004, Indeed launched the first job search engine, and soon after, online job boards emerged as the most efficient way for companies to reach a larger pool of potential candidates. In recent years, a new paradigm for recruiting appeared, marked by the growing competition for talent. Companies are now recognizing the need to look beyond job boards when sourcing candidates and are increasingly seeking candidates out in an outbound fashion. This is especially true in the tech sector, where most jobs today didn’t exist ten years ago and where the pool of talent is, as a result, much smaller.
Co-founder & Chief Revenue Officer of Crew, Ruben Guenoun, added:
The adoption of CRM (Candidate Relationship Management) technology specifically for recruitment is a growing necessity for companies. For years, they have been building relationships with potential candidates through sourcing, but without a dedicated tool to assist them, similar to a sales and marketing team lacking tools like Salesforce or Hubspot to manage their customer relationships.
The HRTech startup later joined Y Combinator’s accelerator program to launch its product’s first version. It is now used by 100 active companies, representing 1000 monthly active users. These companies have added more than 100,000 talent and hired 800 talent in 2022.
Commenting on the fundraising, Managing Partner of Rebel Fund, Jared Heyman, said:
At Rebel, we like the recruiting CRM market due to its size ($50B+) and ACV ($12k+ per SMB client). Crew has the right team to build a better, more modern ATS since Amine founded two recruiting companies in the past with strong product experience, and Ruben was Head of Ops at a leading European Fintech. Their timing is good because while incumbents in this space are building ever more complex tools, mostly for enterprise, nobody is tackling the simpler end of the market as well as Crew.
Crew is now available in self-serve with transparent pricing. While Traditional ATS require a lengthy sales and onboarding process, which takes time to set up and train new users, the company is the first recruiting tool to offer self-service, with an intuitive interface that allows for easy setup and eliminates the need for training. Despite providing a high-end product, its low pricing is made possible by the platform’s streamlined sales process and reduced onboarding requirements.
