Phenom People announced a $100 million Series D round of venture capital, which brings its total raised to $167 million. Phenom also announced a valuation of $1.36 billion which makes them HR tech’s latest unicorn. Launched in 2010, Phenom delivers a recruitment marketing platform with a focus on personalized candidate experiences. Since its launch the platform has extended to include CRM, conversational interfaces, internal mobility, and analytics.
In a video announcement, Phenom CEO Mahe Bayireddi stressed the firm’s ability to “hyper-personalize” the experience for every stakeholder in the talent ecosystem as its key differentiation. Much of the PR messaging around the raise is focused on Phenom doubling down on AI. This isn’t surprising, large enterprise buyers focused on candidate experience, where Phenom lives, have shifted their attention to AI-powered conversational recruiting platforms like Paradox.ai.
Since the beginning, we have rooted our platform in intelligence versus simply adding AI as a single tool or feature. This makes our AI dramatically different, and helps us cultivate a healthy talent ecosystem.Mahe Bayireddi, Phenom People CEO
Source: Phenom Announces $100M Series D | Phenom
Scotland-based Candidate.ID raised an additional USD $965K of Seed funding from an existing investor for its recruitment marketing app. Candidate.ID helps employers develop candidate pipelines and nurture campaigns. This brings its total raised to USD $3.2 million.
Launched in 2017 Candidate.ID stands largely alone in the recruiting tech ecosystem as a developer of marketing funnels for recruiting. They’ve been conservative with regard to raising funds, bootstrapping, crowdfunding, and taking small Seed investments from VC as they’ve built out product functionality and refined their go-to-market strategy. The product has evolved into a very smart addition to the recruiting tech stack for employers competing to find and hire talent with skills high in demand.
We like our sales and marketing tech analogies for recruiting tech. Think of it this way: Candidate.ID is to your recruitment marketing or ATS platform what Pardot or Hubspot is to Salesforce or a CRM. It’s a very sophisticated funnel automation and lead-scoring engine complete with a drag and drop landing page creator, basic email capabilities, candidate matching, and more. While a large enterprise would fit this nicely in front of its recruitment marketing/CRM or ATS, a growing middle market employer may be well served for this app to be the CRM and recruitment marketing platform in front of the ATS.
Candidate.ID has about 30 customers that range in size from 400 to 80,000 employees. CEO and co-founder Adam Gordon says that the common attribute among its customers is a focus on “in-demand talent.” Their path has definitely been one of more customer-led and controlled growth. As we begin to emerge from COVID in 2021 and companies are rethinking the role of the recruiter and recruiting automation, with signs for job growth and hiring being optimistic globally, this may be the time for a solution like Candidate.ID.
I recommend adding them to your shortlist of marketing automation providers to take a closer look at whether you’re in the market to buy recruitment marketing tech, an investor, or larger recruiting tech provider thinking about your next M&A deal.
$2.7 billion was invested in work tech globally in Q1 2021 alone. Get our free report and analysis on Q1 here.
Source: Venture capital firm invests £1.3 million into Glasgow start-up – Business Insider