Social Recruiting Company Jobvite Raises $15 Million in Funding

Jobvite, a provider of social recruiting solutions and applicant tracking has raised $15 million in Series C funding. The areas of social recruiting, job referral, and SaaS recruiting technology have received strong levels of investment lately, but this amount of funding demonstrates a new level of confidence.

Jobvite’s press release cites a 600% growth in customer size over the last two years, indicating both strong demand for its service, but also interest in social job distribution and next generation hiring tools. As social media use has grown rapidly over the past few years, companies have struggled to leverage the distributive power of their own employees’ social connections.

Jobvite allows companies to leverage and engage the social graph of their employees. Among other functions, their software distributes the recruitment function across the enterprise, providing each employee with the ability to share jobs and participate in the recruiting process. The service additionally provides tracking and analytics on the performance of recruitment marketing efforts.

The CEO of Jobvite appears to believe that social recruiting and new technology will have a major impact on online recruiting. “The widespread adoption of social media is changing how people find jobs,” said Dan Finnigan, President and CEO. “We are leading the way to provide the new technologies companies need to find and engage quality employees where they socialize. This investment will allow us to accelerate the reshaping of the multi-billion dollar online recruitment market.”

Several trends are coming together which indicate broad transformation in hiring technology. Recruiting technology companies routinely leverage Facebook data for recruitment purposes. Facebook could itself become a major source of job referrals and employment networking. Linkedin’s IPO adds fuel to the fire and interest in the space. Social recruiting itself is new and not yet widely adopted; however, the broader trends of Facebook and Linkedin use may be creating an inflection point for recruiting technology innovation and investment.

Social technology promises to radically transform each major web marketplace: eCommerce, auctions, local search, product research, and talent procurement. Each area represents one of the core commercial uses of the Internet, so the stakes are high. Hiring is arguably the least efficient Internet marketplace; social technology represents perhaps the only force with the proper relevance, scale, and reach to address the problem.