23 Feb How HireEZ arms recruiters to beat the “Great Resignation”
“We’d like to hire you!” – Being recruited for a role is a great feeling, until you get the same message from every recruiter and it starts to feel like white noise. A good friend who’s a DevOps engineer told me that he receives one LinkedIn inMail a day. Before COVID, such intense outreach was reserved for skilled engineers, but the “Great Resignation” has led to a labour imbalance through the entire economy. This leaves recruiters desperately needing better technology tools (and dare I say it, even some AI support). The gap and untapped opportunity is why we are delighted to lead HireEZ’s latest round. Here are a few insights from the diligence:
The Great Resignation is real, and labour supply and demand are imbalanced
COVID led to mass layoffs and a staggering nearly 15% unemployment rate, however, as the economy recovered, workers simply didn’t return to their old positions. Many people took advantage of the fact that companies were hiring like crazy in 2021. Look no further than the numbers: 6.5 million people were unemployed whilst 10.9 million jobs remained unfilled in December 2021. This pain is most acute in restaurants, hospitality, technology and manufacturing as they suffer to stay open. Recruiting teams feel like they are in a “Talent War” and desperate pressure to keep the company growing (and in some cases simply open).
Recruiting is no longer a cost centre but can determine revenue (and growth)
There was a time when HR departments saw recruitment simply as a function to overcome turnover. When available talent is plentiful in an industry, managing recruiting costs is the focus. The technology industry, however, never had this luxury and has struggled to hire technical talent. They empowered their recruiters to aggressively hire engineers (like my DevOps friend). Now all industries (blue and white collar alike) feel that same pressure to fill the pipeline. To do this they all need a fresh set of recruiting tools.
Additionally, finding the right candidate, not stuffing the pipeline with mediocre matches—quality over quantity—makes the difference. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the price of a bad hire is at least 30 percent of the employee’s first-year earnings. Translate that into business impact, and it may mean the difference between growing or staying open.
As a recovering marketeer, I’ve seen the role of recruiting start to look much more like growth marketing and critical for revenue expansion. Steven Jiang, HireEZ’s CEO, expressed this clearly, “In these unprecedented times, recruiting has become an impossible task. Recruiters and hiring managers can no longer sit back and wait for people to apply, they have to shift to outbound recruiting in order to scale their companies effectively.”
AI plays a key role in revitalising the way we source and recruit talent
AI in the talent acquisition process can enable everything from auto-screening candidates to managing communications around interviews. At a time when diversity is a key focus for many companies, it can reduce unconscious bias that can further lead to a lack of diversity. As pressure increases to build outbound lead gen, AI removes repetitive workflows and saves recruiters time on sourcing, and dynamically sorts large numbers of candidate profiles (from dozens of platforms). Recruiters can then focus on building relationships and focus on finding quality over quantity.
Georgiana Sanduleasa at Talentocrat uses HireEZ’s AI engine and says, “My sourcing is faster, my [talent] research is ready in seconds, the time I used to invest in this manually is now used to make sure my outreach to candidates is personalized and meaningful.”
Others agree, as 96% of HR managers believe that AI can improve talent acquisition and retention.
HireEZ has built an impressive platform, trusted by many entreprises and poised to grow quickly
HireEZ has the capabilities to become the single AI partner for recruiters. The company has a large library of potential candidates with a database of over 750 million from over 45 platforms. Their platform focuses on ease-of-use (it took me about 5 minutes to learn) and goes beyond superficial buzzwords to uncover the underlying skills needed for a role. It is easy to see how it frees up 50% of recruiter time.
As with all our portfolio companies, we are in awe of the company’s remarkably strong growth trajectory with 2.5x ARR growth last year, and of course their impressive capital efficiency (with more ARR than money raised). We are excited to join them for the next part of their journey!
P.S. If you are looking to staff up your recruiting quickly, reach out for a demo.