Hired – Upending Executive Search

August 15, 2024 by

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Traditionally, executive search has been an expensive service, and the relationship between applicants and search firms were generally tenuous.

Hired, like LinkedIn, moved in to change the traditional hiring model.

As Hired states, “Our mission is to make hiring, or getting hired, less painful.” Likely, those in the payment industry have used Hired to recruit on the technical side. Now they may be using Hired to recruit managerial talent.

The concept for Hired came to its founder Matt Mickiewicz in 2012 at an Irish bar in San Francisco. He recognized he could upend every aspect of recruiting. This included reducing the cost of the search, making hiring a two-way process, and providing talent with a reasonable window of time to simultaneously consider all offers. The window was framed as an “auction” so the startup was originally called Developer Auction. Later the name was changed to “Hired.”

Because the business was first focused on in-demand engineers, data scientists and designers, there usually would be multiple offers. Mickiewicz structured a one week auction for offers to job applicants from organizations Hired had vetted. When the applicants make the choice of job, there is a $2,000 signing bonus.

Since Mickiewicz had previously started 99designs, he knew his way around launching an enterprise, ranging from raising capital to scaling the enterprise.

Investors include Eric Chin, Crosslink Capital, Jeff Clavier, SoftTech VC, Tim Guleri, Sierra Ventures, and Shervin Pishevar, Sherpa Foundry.

TechCrunch reported that for July 2014, revenue at Hired was three times what it had been in January 2014 and had reached eight figures. So far Hired has offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York manned by 50 employees.

What’s most interesting is the direction in which Hired is moving. Recently, it has expanded from purely technical talent to the management kind.

This attention to hiring managerial talent might reflect the maturing of the tech industry. Even newbie entrepreneurs are getting it that genius is not enough. According to Statistic Brain, the failure rate for startups for year one is 25 percent, 36 percent fail in year two, 44 percent for year three, and by year four, 50 percent of startups have kicked the bucket.

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