Today San Francisco-based Entelo announced it has secured an undisclosed amount of funding from Battery Ventures and Menlo Ventures, and will be coming out of private beta to offer their proactive recruiting solution for enterprises on a wider scale. The company provides companies with a predictive analytics search engine that alerts them of professionals who are likely looking to move to a new career opportunity. It bases its rankings on a number of variables and is currently focused on helping organizations target candidates for technical positions. To date, Entelo has over 40 paying customers, including the likes of Box, Lookout, LevelUp and Indiegogo.
Founder Jon Bischke recognized the need for the service after talking to others about the challenges startups face when it comes to talent. “There’s so many companies out there right now starved for talent and we felt there was an opportunity to help with that. In particular, what we saw was that there was now a rise in sites that people were going to talk about the different areas they had expertise in, demonstrate their knowledge, and show their interests off to their community,” Bischke said. “Then, you have all these companies looking for talented people and we thought there should be a bridge between these companies and all those people doing great things online.”
Entelo’s search engine is built on an algorithm that takes into account more than 70 different variables to boost individuals up in rankings when companies run a search for talent. It takes into account everything from increase in recent online activity in both social networks and knowledge-sharing platforms like GitHub, Stack Overflow, Dribble, and Quora to other variables like the length of time they’ve worked for a company, and it also analyzes social data including Tweets to measure whether the person is happy or sad. Other variables also take into account company announcements, acquisitions, partnerships, and other real-time events. After aggregating all that public data the company indexes and creates social profiles in its database for companies to use in proactively searching for talent.
Because each social profile is geo-tagged, companies can run specific queries like “Ruby on Rails Engineer, Palo Alto,” with the option to filter results and sort by relevance. The site will then provide links to the potential recruitment candidate’s social networks or pull their email if it’s publicly available on their blog to provide them with a variety of ways to get in contact. Companies can also then receive a daily email alert that let’s them know of new talent and individuals that may be looking to make a move.
“We’re looking at all that data, announcements and events, and we’re essentially predicting which people are going to be likely to move to a new opportunity and we’re surfacing those people to our customers so they can more actively recruit,” Bischke said.
The company will provide its services on a SaaS model, charging for the number of users per month. Monthly subscription starts at $500 per month for each user and annual subscriptions start at $5,000.
The race for talent in technology coupled with the onslaught of publicly available data about individuals provides a unique intersection for companies to step in as potential match-makers. Entelo will be going head-to0head with other recruitment platforms including TalentBin, which also lets companies run queries based on specific skill-set and location, and Gild, which provides a variety of sourcing and filtering tools to help companies recruit the best tech talent. It’s obvious differentiator is that it tries to identify candidates before they apply for a job, or before they even start looking, but its engine might not always prove to correctly identify someone who’s willing to make a move, while other recruitment platforms have full buy-in from the candidate.
With over 300 million social profiles indexed, the company is looking to continue to expand the data it can provide to companies. It also plans on adding CRM capabilities that better enables recruiters to keep track of who they’ve reached out to or are considering, in addition to a Rapportive-style browser plugin that displays a snapshot of an individual’s social profile. Entelo’s current focus is on building up its customer base in tech-centric arenas like San Francisco and New York City, however Bischke said it’s already getting traction internationally. While it’s a new tool for recruiters to add to their toolkit, it will likely need to be paired with traditional hiring resources in order to pull from a pool of candidates who have applied, and ones who don’t even know they’re looking to make a move.
