The US job market is seeing increased job-hopping, stable unemployment levels and the pressure on recruiters to increase wages. Job seekers and employers seem to be more active than they have been in over a decade. However, companies’ hiring practices are changing. AI is being used across the recruitment cycle from targeting to filtering to scheduling and predictive analytics. 98%+ of Fortune 500 companies use an Application Tracking system (ATS) to filter, rate or prioritize resumes during the recruitment process. While these products are easy for larger companies to afford and integrate into their business practices, small and medium sized businesses are often priced out of the market – leading to archaic and inefficient hiring processes that are frustrating for both the employer and the candidate. Workable aims to cater to this market by providing a unified portal for candidate search, ATS, and Talent CRM with collaborative capability.

Workable was founded in 2012, in Athens by CEO Nikos Moraitakis and CTO Spyros Magiatis as Greece was still reeling under the influence of the Great Recession. The pair had worked together at Upstream and saw an opportunity to disrupt the $2Bn (annually) Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) recruitment industry which accounts for around 70% of total US hiring. The firm is now headquartered in Boston and has 100+ employees with local offices in Athens and London.

Workable and its Offering

Workable’s product is not just an ATS. Workable allows recruiters to integrate their candidate search with social media, match candidates to job profiles, schedule interviews, track a candidate through their recruitment cycle and make internal notes on candidates which can be viewed by other team members. The two-way sync allows recruitment team members to be aligned at all times with respect to a candidate’s prospects. Recruitment team members can access details about open positions, open candidates, prospects and reports through an integrated dashboard. While smaller recruiters benefit from the increased reach and streamlining the tool provides in managing the recruitment cycle, larger recruiters (who typically have recruitment teams) benefit most from the shared dashboards and internal documentation and tracking system.

The Workable software is available on Cloud as a SaaS with web and mobile versions (both Android and iOS). The scalability of the product immediately stands out. The company offers a 15 day free trial and has offerings starting as low as $50 per job per month. For larger customers, rates are negotiated and volume discounts are extended. (Summary of plans here.)

Workable claims to have 6000+ clients including Decathlon, Porsche, Ryanair, Sears, M&S, Dominos, Make-A-Wish, Fnatic and Upwork (to name a few). Verified customers on Capterra and G2Crowd have rated the software a healthy 4.5/5. In general, the negative reviews of the product seem to be centred around a few quality–of-life improvements in navigation and customizability of features, but overall the product certainly seems to have delivered on its promise of streamlining the hiring process.

Workable’s revenues are estimated to be in the range of $3M to $4M. Among its major competitors, Jobvite, founded by President & CEO Dan Finnigan, is estimated to rake in revenues of $22.5M while Lever and JobScore’s revenues are estimated at $5.5M and $3M respectively.

Funding History

According to Crunchbase, till date, Workable has raised $84M in six rounds of funding. In early 2015, it secured $5M of additional funding from its existing investors 83 North, the Openfund and some angel investors. Immediately after this round it went into partnerships with Portfolium – a college campus recruitment tool and Checkr – a software for facilitating background checks by employers. Later that year, it secured $27M of Series B funding in a round led by Balderton Capital with the participation of Notion Capital. A little over one year after this round, in 2017, the company announced its pivot to a platform strategy by releasing a Workable Developer site and a Developer Partner program. Workable released its APIs for integration within other, more niche, talent hiring software. This platform strategy unifies the entire recruitment process and gives Workable a window into the end-to-end recruitment cycle. It allows them to assess (and improve) the user experience of their end user through a holistic lens. If history is anything to go by, the latest round of $50Mn capital infusion led by Zouk Capital is setting up for interesting times ahead.

Interesting Times

With LinkedIn announcing the launch of its ATS in 2019, all firms in this space have their work cut out for them. Strategically, the social media integration with LinkedIn for existing software may soon be a thing of the past as LinkedIn would look to cement its own position as the prime recruiting tool of choice. Workable’s strategy to pivot into a user experience focused, seamless API provider for overseeing the end-to-end recruitment process for smaller firms may prove to be strength in this challenging market. Workable processes over 25 million candidates a year and the monetization and use of this data to develop better matching algorithms for its clients may be central to its growth strategy. The fresh infusion of $50M indicates that the firm may have a few more pivots up their sleeve, but it would be surprising to see them move away from their core philosophy of prioritizing user experience and design.