Hunt Club Secures $1.8 Million In Funding
April 5, 2018 – Investment dollars continue to pour into new technology designed to change the talent management industry. The latest: Referral recruiting service Hunt Club has closed $1.8 million in funding. Headquartered in Chicago, Hunt Club leverages an influencer network of over 4,000 business leaders to generate warm introductions and reach passive job candidates.
The new funding comes from notable entrepreneurs, investors and angels including Brian Spaly (founder of Trunk Club), Godard Abel (founder and executive chairman of G2Crowd), Chris Hill (founder of Spotlite and PerkSpot), Coco Meers (founder of PrettyQuick), Dave Knox (former CMO of Rockfish Interactive and co-founder of the Brandery), Mike Pykosz (CEO of Oak Street Health), executives at Home Chef, Groupon, and funds New Coast Ventures, Network Ventures and Vine St. Ventures.
“Hunt Club is a new category of talent firm,” said Nick Cromydas, co-founder and CEO of the firm. “Think of 400-plus chief marketing officers or vice presidents of marketing referring for your next marketing search. That’s the power of Hunt Club and we reward every referral that gets an interview or gets placed with real dollars.”
In our latest episode of ‘Talent Talks, our host Andrew Mitchell is joined by Nick Cromydas, CEO & founder of Hunt Club, a referral recruiting service that leverages technology and a front-end automation process to help land passive candidates. Hunt Club recently closed $1.8 million in funding and the firm now hopes to continue its growth and explore new ways to leverage technology within recruiting.
“We don’t believe we can displace the human touch today,” Mr. Cromydas said. “But the same way Uber and Compass have rethought service industries and created efficiencies using technology and people, we too believe we can change a space that hasn’t had to innovate in forever.”
Funding
The funding will be used to accelerate growth, continue to build out Hunt Club’s technology platform and influencer network and expand its team. “The search industry hasn’t evolved much since LinkedIn,” said Mr. Cromydas. “The world is changing as digital touches every intersection of business. We just don’t think the firms of today are equipped to service the companies of tomorrow. Hunt Club plans to change that.”
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Since its launch two years ago, Hunt Club has partnered with over 200 different organizations. They include Fortune 500 companies such as OATH (Verizon), tech giants like Pinterest, as well as fast-growing start-ups across the country including G2Crowd, Shipbob, Homechef and Bellhops.
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“We started our partnership with Hunt Club about a year and a half ago,” said Andy Nielsen, CEO of Everything But The House. “Since then, they’ve placed over 20 roles using their unique referral model to help us get the best talent. It’s worked incredibly well for everything from executive to on-the-ground sales, and we’ve transitioned nearly all of our talent needs to them.”
An Influencer Network
Hunt Club is a referral recruiting service that leverages technology and a front-end automation process to help land passive candidates. The firm leverages a network of connected influencers, which include executives, entrepreneurs, subject-matter experts and connectors, to refer for roles. It has completed over 200 searches across functions, industries and experience levels in the past 12 months. Notable clients include Dollar Shave Club, Bellhops, and Wilson Sporting Goods, among others.
“If you think about what we are focusing on and investing a tremendous amount in, it is about how to unlock the power of the network,” said Mr. Cromydas.
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Mr. Cromydas recently sat down with Hunt Scanlon Media to discuss his company’s services and current projects as well as why referrals remain a great way to find talent.
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Nick, can you talk about Hunt Club’s services?
Hunt Club is a new category of search firm. We leverage proprietary technology and a platform that powers our end-to-end search process, a sourcing channel via the networks of more than 4,000 (and growing) industry leaders, and full service to help our partners get the best talent. We offer three services: Search – powered by the Hunt Club platform, we execute various levels of a search for our clients; Alliance – our fully outsourced model for fast-growing companies where we take an organization’s network and our network of over 4,000 influencers (referrers) to help find the best talent; and Pipeline – our ‘lightweight’ model that offers research, outreach via referrals, assessment and follow up to help companies build large pipelines of talent as they scale.
Why are referrals a great way to find a candidate?
LinkedIn is becoming incredibly saturated. The days of simply ‘finding a candidate’ and expecting them to pay attention to an opportunity without a relationship are coming to a close quickly. It’s no secret that the best talent listens to those they know and trust. We can cut through the noise by borrowing the social capital of others to introduce opportunities at scale. Referrals bridge trust, and we’ve created the largest network of incentivized leaders to help introduce opportunities to their network.
“Hunt Club plans to use the capital to expand our services team to 40, and invest substantially in technology to continue to build our vision of automating the manual and laborious parts of search.”
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Can you share some the company’s recent work?
We’re fortunate to help some of the most innovative companies in the world find amazing talent. We’ve partnered closely with Pinterest to help scale their sales team via our pipeline service. Hunt Club has helped G2Crowd, a category disruptor in the b2b software and services review space, recruit a world-class CMO from Hubspot. In addition, we have worked closely with OATH (AOL and Yahoo merger) to help build out their product and engineering function. We are also assisting Compass to build out their general manager model nationally. And lastly, we helped HomeChef land amazing operational talent.
How does Hunt Club plan to use the new funding?
Hunt Club plans to use the capital to expand our services team to 40 and invest substantially in technology to continue to build our vision of automating the manual and laborious parts of search.
Can you discuss any other future plans for the company?
The next year is really about investing in technology and infrastructure to continue to expand upon four areas: How to find the best person as quickly as possible via machine learning and artificial intelligence; How to reach them using the best relationship possible; How to buy back as much time so our team can focus on high output work; and How to become the smartest firm in the world via real-time search analytics.
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Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief; Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor; Stephen Sawicki, Managing Editor; and Andrew W. Mitchell, Managing Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
