Recruiting startup Hunt Club has helped some of Chicago's top startups land the team leaders needed to take their company to the next level. Now, Hunt Club has raised a round of funding to help more businesses hire faster and smarter, at a time when remote work has upended the traditional recruitment process.
Hunt Club announced Monday that it raised a $10 million Series A round led by Teamworthy Ventures. Its other backers include Trunk Club founder Brian Spaly, Extend founder Woodie Levin, G2 founder Godard Abel, FJ Labs, Starting Line Ventures and Network Ventures. The startup has raised over $14 million since it launched in 2014.
Led by CEO Nick Cromydas, Hunt Club has created a recruiting service and referral network that helps companies hire based off warm recommendations from top experts and business leaders. Its candidate mapping software helps identify top candidates for a job, and then finds experts in its network who can recommend people for the role. Its network includes more than 11,000 experts, ranging from founders, CEOs, executives and other company leaders, who earn bonuses when a candidate they refer gets hired or lands an interview.
Hunt Club automates a significant part of the upfront hiring process, like targeting the best candidates, outreach, and scheduling interviews, and it can effectively reduce the time to hire by two to four weeks, Cromydas said.
The startup has essentially taken the internal company referral bonus model and flipped it, creating an external referral system that rewards people for providing warm intros of qualified business leaders in their network. Hunt Club counts firms like G2, Nerdy, Dollar Shave Club, gopuff, ShipBob and Oak Street Health among its customers. To date, it has helped facilitate more than 3,000 hires across the country, and around 1,000 in its hometown Chicago. It has helped Chicago unicorn G2 hire for more than 50 roles, including its latest CMO, and worked with Oak Street to hire several VPs last year as it prepared for an IPO.
Hunt Club has grown to 120 employees, and expects to be around 250 by the end of 2022, with revenue increasing 130% year-over-year, Cromydas said.
With Covid-19 ushering in the remote work revolution, hiring local executives is no longer a necessity. In fact, before Covid, more than 80% of Hunt Club's customers required their leadership team to be local. That requirement is now down to 20%, Cromydas said, which presents a challenge for many hiring managers: relationship networks outside their city are generally weaker than in-market.
"Covid changed the entire talent model," Cromydas said. "Now you’ve got everyone trying to figure out how to get the best person anywhere, because it's primarily a remote or hybrid culture. Most people don't have the access or network depth in new markets the way they do in their own backyard."
Hunt Club believes it can fill that gap, relying on its network and technology to help companies hire quality candidates, wherever they're located. The goal, Hunt Club says, is to enable firms to hire their entire management workforce via a trusted introduction from its platform.
