Atomico leads a $42m Series B round for Jobandtalent

Atomico is delighted to announce that we have just led a $42m Series B round for Jobandtalent - a disruptive startup that solves two major pain-points in the world of recruitment: matching the right talent with the right jobs, and massively reducing the bureaucracy involved in the hiring process. We are very impressed with the founders’ vision and execution capabilities so we are excited to join Juan and Felipe on their mission to reduce unemployment and hiring inefficiencies around the world.

Niall Wass, an Executive-in-Residence at Atomico, will be joining the Jobandtalent Board. Using his experience of working with three global, multi-billion dollar marketplaces (Betfair, Wonga and most recently Uber where he was SVP of International), he will help Jobandtalent with their overall strategy and growth. The investment will be used to accelerate the company’s international expansion and further develop its product and engineering team.

Additional investors and advisors include world class recruiting and marketplace experts such as Adeyemi Ajao, founder of Identified and currently VP Technology Strategy at Workday; Steve Goodman, founder of Bright.com, sold to LinkedIn in 2014 and Fabrice Grinda, founder of OLX.com.

Talented people everywhere now have smartphones, yet when it comes to the recruitment industry most of the work is still conducted offline, using outdated and inefficient business approaches like job postings in retail stores or manual screening of CVs.

By using sophisticated algorithms to filter out the right jobs for the right people across millions of users and hundreds of thousands of employers, Jobandtalent is bringing unprecedented scale, speed and precision to the SME hiring process. Now for the first time, companies will be able to instantly access a pipeline of highly qualified candidates and manage the screening in real time, for free and from the convenience of their mobile.

With their innovative transaction-based platform, Jobandtalent will further help SMEs dramatically reduce their overheads as they onboard successful candidates. By automatically conducting background checks, enforcing standard employment contracts with online signature capabilities, tracking working hours as well as filing taxes and employee benefits, Jobandtalent will save companies hundreds of hours a year and help them quickly respond to their continuously changing recruiting needs. This is a big challenge in the high-churn, low margin service industry.

Yann de Vries, Atomico's lead Investment Partner on the deal, explains why Atomico is so excited about this investment in Jobandtalent.

Why are you so excited about this investment?

Yann: The global +$100Bn SME recruitment market, which is very local, offline and fragmented today, will undergo a profound transformation over the next decade and create several multi-billion dollar companies. After screening 20+ companies across 4 continents and analysing the various trends that matter for this market, we strongly believe that Jobandtalent is best positioned to become the global category leader.

The vision of Juan and Felipe’s team and structure of their business was an excellent fit for us: we like the strong network effects of their marketplace model, the global potential, their strong technology and attractive business model. With our global presence and experience in scaling marketplaces, we believe we can add a lot of value and become a natural extension of their team.

Why is the recruitment sector now ripe for disruption?

Yann: Firstly, with over a billion workers in possession of a smartphone, SMEs and job seekers can now reach each other like never before. At the basic level, geolocation means you can match the right person to the nearest and most appropriate job, reducing the time and money wasted on expensive and polluting commutes. With chat, reviews and integrated video capabilities, recruiters will have instant access to job seekers and face-to-face interviews will soon be a thing of the past. Automation will soon replace tedious manual tasks such as background checks, CV screening, contract negotiations and tax filing, reducing the hiring process from weeks to days. Machine learning will analyse a number of signals across job postings and applicants (such as salary expectations, skills and reviews) to match demand and supply in real time. This will fundamentally change how recruiters and employees interact with each other. As an employee looking for work, there will be no need to actively search because new jobs matching your criteria will be sent to you on your mobile via push notifications. Sophisticated matching and scheduling will help employees fill their time according to their preferences and flexibility, improving their quality of life. Employers on the other hand will finally have a tool to fill different roles, including shift work in near real time since they will have permanent access to a qualified pool of relevant candidates.

Do you really think Jobandtalent can disrupt such an established sector?

Yann: Given the trends above, I am absolutely certain that the offline payroll and staffing agency model will be disrupted by pure digital players. The traditional outsourced staffing model has been a big success for large employers since it helps them focus on their core competency and reduces fixed costs. However, the agency staffing model has so far been inaccessible to SMEs because it’s too expensive and traditional agencies are ill-equipped to serve thousands of small accounts. Jobandtalent is about to change that by providing a better service at a lower cost, just like Uber did for taxi services.

What sets Jobandtalent apart?

Yann: We've been very interested in recruitment marketplaces for some time, and have seen many teams attacking the opportunity in different ways. For us, Jobandtalent really stood out. Firstly, because they have an outstanding founding team with deep experience and very strong execution capabilities. Atomico focusses on working closely with the next generation of outstanding entrepreneurs with the vision and ambition to disrupt established industries - and we think that Juan and Felipe perfectly embody this. Secondly, we were impressed with their job matching technology validated by world-class job matching experts Steven Goodman from Bright.com (Linkedin) and Adeyemi Ajao from Identified (Workday). Thirdly, we like the fact that Jobandtalent is a performance-based marketplace, marking a big shift away from the generation of companies built on the classified ads model which are ill suited for the SME market. With Jobandtalent, SME owners only pay if they hire someone through the payroll platform so this works as a scalable performance-based model. Finally, they have become market leaders in every market they have entered (Spain, UK, Mexico & Columbia) so they have a proven track record and have shown they can execute at speed in multiple markets. The next decade will be very exciting and we are thrilled to be joining forces with the best team in the market to transform the industry.