Strip District-based Niche, a company that developed a platform of rankings on schools, colleges and places to live, announced another pair of new executive team appointments following last year's hiring spree that increased the company's employee count by more than half.
Kelly Lavin takes on the new role as the company's first chief people officer where she'll craft the company's future strategies and processes relating to talent acquisition and retention as well as leadership development and performance management, among other tasks. She joins Niche with over two decades of experience working in people-focused jobs, most recently coming from a similar post at global talent acquisition software company Jobvite, which is based in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Paul Moore joins Niche with the role of vice president of engineering and will lead feature and functionality developments for the platform as well as overseeing the company's development processes and ensuring Niche's engineering function is adhering to best practices relating to sustainability and scalability. He spent the past decade at Chevy Chase, Maryland-based The Knot Worldwide, formerly WeddingWire, where he led engineering that grew from a four-person team upon his start at the company to over 50 during his tenure there.
"I’m thrilled to have Kelly and Paul at the helm of two very robust teams,” Luke Skurman, Niche's CEO and founder, said in a release. "Kelly has been a successful executive at several growth-stage companies, so she will bring key expertise to our People team and the business as a whole. Paul’s deep understanding of marketplaces as well as his experience scaling engineering teams will help strengthen and grow our engineering function. I’m excited to work with each of them to push the company forward."
In 2021, the company grew its full-time employee count by more than 50%, from 156 workers to 241 workers. It's pacing to have 330 full-time employees on its payroll by the end of 2022.
Founded in 2002 and initially named CollegeProwler by then-Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business students Skurman and Joey Rahimi, the company has since evolved from its original form of publishing print guidebooks on U.S. colleges to one that posts online rankings of K-12 schools, colleges, cities, neighborhoods and companies throughout the nation. In April 2020, it raised $35 million in Series C funding led by Radian Capital and with participation from Salesforce Ventures, as well as the company's existing investors; Allen & Co. LLC and Tim Armstrong.
