For companies that want to scale up personnel fast, hiring can be a big problem. Conventional wisdom says that the best candidates typically get referrals from existing employees within the company, but those referrals can be tough to come by YesGraph has a solution for finding top talent, by highlighting people that employees already know.
YesGraph simplifies the process of finding new workers by asking existing employees to refer people in their social networks. But rather than simply asking them to name one or two people that they’ve enjoyed working with or would be happy to refer, YesGraph surfaces people in their social networks, and asks whether they’d like to refer them, or not.
Those looking to hire send a link to employees they’re looking for referrals from. Those employees then connect YesGraph with their accounts on Facebook and LinkedIn, and the platform does the work of finding connections who might be qualified. Thanks to the data that people share on those networks, YesGraph can easily recognize candidates who have the requisite experience and skills for a certain job.
What happens next is a kind of hot-or-not for talent acquisition. Users are given a feed of possible candidates and asked if they would recommend them or not. The results get fed back to the recruiter, who overall will have a better list of qualified candidates than just searching LinkedIn, and those candidates are more likely to fit a company’s culture than if they came without referrals.
Early trial customers for YesGraph include Airbnb, Stripe, and Pinterest, but founder Ivan Kirigin (who has worked for Facebook and Dropbox in the past), says the platform isn’t just for tech companies. “They’re a certain-size company that’s worried about scaling the referral process,” he said. But the same rules could be applied to any organization that is looking to find new talent.
As for growth, Kirigin hopes that the viral nature of the product will lead to greater adoption over time. While it’s a B2B play, he says “the core product is that you invite others to make recommendations.”
YesGraph is free at launch, but it expects to begin charging for usage on a SaaS seat license basis at some point in the future, providing advanced features to paying users.
The company has raised $1.3 million in seed funding from a group of investors that includes NextView Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Accel Partners, Founder Collective, Quotidian Ventures, Rivet Ventures, Michael Birch, Gustaf Alströmer, Lance White, Tom Williams, and Adam Gross.
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