getTalent, a startup offering candidate engagement tools for recruiters, is emerging from stealth mode today. It’s also announcing that it has raised $2.6 million in funding.
The company’s largest investor is HR software maker SuccessFactors, which was acquired by SAP last year. Angel investors include Krutal Desai (head of special projects at Automattic/WordPress) and Micrel CFO Ray Wallin.
Founder and CEO Abraham Shafi says getTalent’s tools are aimed at a common scenario — someone visits a company’s job page, or an individual listing, and they don’t see anything that seems like a good fit. Shafi says that instead of just letting that visitor wander off, companies should try to build a relationship with them. After all, they might be a great fit for a job that opens up later on.
So getTalent customers can add buttons to their postings asking people to join their talent community. Recruiters can also sign people up in person, say at a job fair, thanks to the startup’s resume scanning and QR code-creation tools. Once someone has signed up, employers can send them emails to notify them about new job listings and offer other content, such as articles about what it’s like to work at the company. Different content and listings can be targeted at different groups within the community.
“It’s all about taking what’s happened in other industries and modeling it for this market,” Shafi says.
Job listing sites like Monster and CareerBuilder allow recruiters to build similar “hooks” for engagement, he adds, but only through custom solutions that cost tens of thousands of dollars. getTalent, on the other hand, works as a standard, “out-of-the-box” online service.
Even during its supposedly stealth period, getTalent was already signing up customers, including Viacom, Hearst Media, Kaiser, Box, and Hulu.