SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - October 02, 2014) - Today, Lever, Inc. unveils the industry's most sophisticated and engaging hiring and talent management platform. Lever introduces collaboration to the hiring process by designing recruiting tools for the entire company. For the first time, managers and employees share in the mission to recruit and retain talent. The company's public launch comes on the heels of a highly successful private beta that included companies known for their cutting-edge recruiting practices. Current Lever customers include Box, Coursera, Foursquare, GitHub, Lyft, Quora, Reddit, and Slack.
The company also announced that it has received $10 million in Series A funding from Matrix Partners. Dana Stalder, general partner at Matrix, will join the company's board of directors. In addition to hiring on all fronts, Lever's funds will be used to mature the platform as it continues to provide organizations with the tools essential for strategic acquisition, growth, and management of talent. To lead these efforts, co-founder Sarah Nahm was recently named the company's CEO, as co-founder Nate Smith transitioned into leading engineering efforts for the platform expansion as CTO.
"Recruiting is a collaborative process that touches every single person in a company," said Lever's CEO, Sarah Nahm. "Yet when recruiting tools aren't designed for collaboration, teams are forced to adopt inefficient, manual workarounds. Lever is eliminating these inefficiencies by building software that is inherently human, social, and collaborative. Our platform helps managers and employees become deeply vested in recruiting efforts in order to make the right hires, preserve culture, and combat the calcification that happens as companies scale from startup to corporation."
Leveraging the Platform
Lever was designed from the ground up with close-knit teams in mind, seeking to end the miscommunication and apathy that has historically plagued the recruiting space. Lever empowers recruiters, interviewers, hiring managers, and executives to work together to source top talent, coordinate a high-quality candidate experience, and fill positions with someone who truly matches the needs and culture of the organization.
Unlike most enterprise solutions that try to eliminate the human component to recruiting, Lever emphasizes it through an intuitively-designed applicant tracking system (ATS). Lever's candidate profile unifies every detail and touch point with a candidate, from highlighting contacts with employees, to organizing interview feedback, to sharing questions or comments from members of the teams vested in the hire. The collaborative set-up and social feeds of the platform also enable managers to follow along with the activities of their recruiters. Intuitive communication workflows allow for decisions to be made in a manner that resembles a conversation.
Lever's ATS includes best-of-breed features for sourcing, referrals, email, reminders, interview scheduling, feedback collection, decision-making, and reports. It also boasts strong privacy and access control features so that the right people have access to the right information at every level.
"You can't work in a silo and expect to get quality hiring done, but collaboration has traditionally been incredibly manual and inefficient," said Sarah Smith, VP of Recruiting, HR, and User Operations at Quora. "Lever knows where communication needs to happen and helps get everyone in the loop. Because its interface is so easy to use, Quora employees not only provide their feedback on candidates, but they like doing it on Lever -- something I have never seen before with an ATS. By getting employees to actively engage in a cohesive system that streamlines our communications, we've experienced a tremendous spike in the returns we're seeing from proactive sourcing. This quarter, over 40% of our offer accepts were sourced, top-tier passive candidates, which is five-to-six times what it used to be."
Leveraging Investors
The $10 million investment from Matrix Partners comes as Lever is poised for expansion through increased sales and marketing initiatives and ongoing development of the platform. Matrix joins an impressive group of seed and angel investors who share the company's vision, including SV Angel, Y Combinator, Marissa Mayer, Aaron Levie, and others.
"Anyone who has touched the hiring process on any level can appreciate Lever," said Dana Stalder. "Not only is Lever's technology better than anything on the market, but the company has cracked the code on how to bring the intangible human element into recruiting software. As a result, employees actually want to engage and collaborate on hiring for the first time. This benefits the candidates who have a much more positive recruitment experience, current employees because they genuinely like and feel good about the people joining the team, as well as the company that can now attract top-tier talent and retain it by creating and sustaining a stimulating work environment."
To find out more about why Matrix chose to invest in Lever, view Dana Stalder's blog post here.
To learn how Lever can help you recruit, please visit https://lever.co.
About Lever
Lever.co was designed to improve the recruitment process at the organizational level by enabling managers and employees to engage and collaborate throughout all phases of hiring. Its best-of-breed technology was developed by engineers and designers who share a belief that by reinventing enterprise tools and the processes on top of them, we can reform corporations into places where talented people want to be, work, and stay. Lever is headquartered in San Francisco, California and is backed by Matrix Partners and a select group of seed and angel investors. Find out more at https://lever.co.
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