Recruiting startup Hunt Club wants to help businesses, from early-stage startups to industry giants, find top-tier talent — and not through outdated methods like cold outreach emails.
The Chicago startup followed a $10 million Series A that closed in October 2021 with a $40 million Series B announced this week. The latest round was co-led by WestCap and Sator Grove and comes as the company has experienced 156% year-over-year growth from 2021 to 2022 after placing more than 1,000 new hires in tech jobs across multiple sectors.
The new funding will be used to fuel the company’s expansion and technology platform advancements, and to help grow its network. Hunt Club wants to create a new model with its technology that automates and augments the hiring process in order to better modernize the process.
"Traditionally you work with a recruiter and you get hooked up with their Rolodex, which can be somewhere between 1,000 to 2,000 people on LinkedIn, but they really only know a couple hundred," Nick Cromydas, co-founder and CEO of Hunt Club, told Chicago Inno. "Because of how hybrid/remote work works today, if you're hiring a VP of marketing for a Chicago company, you can recruit anywhere in the world now. So we really think about it as creating a better mousetrap."
When a company is looking to hire a new leader, Hunt Club uses sourcing and matching technology to scan and filter thousands of networks to find the best talent from a pool of more than 7 million candidates available for referral. From there, Hunt Club initiates introductions for the list of candidates, which result in a six to eight times higher response rate, according to the company.
Prior to Hunt Club, Cromydas founded New Coast Ventures, a venture studio that started or invested in more than 40 early-stage startups, including companies such as GoPuff and Compass.
He said that his time in venture funding helped inform him in this new role as he watched companies across his portfolio pay for recruiters, would watch them fail and knew there was a better way to approach talent acquisition.
Hunt Club has scaled its national footprint to more than 200 team members, including a presence in every major metro market, and also announced Brian Reinken, partner at WestCap, will join the company's board.
