Job-Listing Service ZipRecruiter Raises $63 Million

ZipRecruiter, a California startup that tries to simplify tasks for recruiters, has raised $63 million in initial venture-capital funding, as the 4-year-old service races to keep up with growing demand.

The investment, announced Tuesday, which includes money from a new Los Angeles venture-capital fund, will help the 140-person company add a second office later this year, pursue acquisitions and increase computing infrastructure.

“We’re going after a market that has been priced out of or (has not) had the time to learn higher-end recruitment tools,” said Ian Siegel, CEO and co-founder of ZipRecruiter. “We’ve been doing tens of thousands of small- and medium-business customers, but we’re going to need something more to handle hundreds of thousands of customers.”

Companies that subscribe to ZipRecruiter can simultaneously post job listings to 50 different websites, including Monster, Indeed and Craigslist. An employer can pay for a “traffic boost” to get its listing to turn up in a more visible spot on the search engines.

When applications are filed, hiring managers see them in a single queue. Sitewide, 2 million applications are coming in each month. Competitors include Workable, BambooHR and Jobvite.

Siegel launched ZipRecruiter in 2010, after seeing the annoyance of sorting resumes while working at Stamps.com, Rent.com and other Southern California dot-com companies. ZipRecruiter has since consistently produced a profit and rejected opportunities to accept outside funding.

Though annual revenue is expected to double this year, Siegel said the firm needed some financial help to maintain quality amid all the new users.

“There’s really an exciting moment as a founder when you realize the market has embraced your product,” Siegel said.

He envisions adding more services that would be tailored to simplifying other duties of human-relations managers. For job seekers, ZipRecruiter now sends a personalized email of job listings each morning. More than 3 million new people are subscribing to job alerts each month, the company said.

Institutional Venture Partners, which has stakes in companies such as Snapchat and Twitter, led the funding round. Basepoint Ventures and Industry Ventures rounded out the total.

The investment marks the first one for Basepoint, a new firm started by Dave Travers and Nate Redmond of the venture-capital firm Rustic Canyon Partners. Initially seeded by the Chandler Family Trust, Rustic Canyon’s fund had been depleted and founding partner Tom Unterman plans to retire. Redmond said he and Travers will continue to manage Rustic Canyon’s portfolio of more than two dozen companies while making new investments through Basepoint.

“ZipRecruiter is typical of the investments we’ll make, in that it’s the first money in to back entrepreneurs in Los Angeles,” Redmond said. “However, when we’ve built high conviction about a company that’s farther along, we’ll selectively partner with other investors.”

He said ZipRecruiter exemplifies the growing class of companies that’s taking online one of the legacies of newspapers — classifieds, real-estate, job and auto listings.

“We’ve wanted to invest in ZipRecruiter since it was formed, and this was the first opportunity for any investor, and we’re thrilled to partner with them,” he said.

This article appeared in print in the August 27th, 2014 edition of Hamodia.