I'm Nate, Founder and CTO of Lever. We are excited to announce this key milestone. We're a lot more excited to continue creating new innovative products, features, and technology that every company needs to finally master their talent acquisition challenges.
I'd love to answer any questions you might have, Lever customers and people interested in YC startups alike!
Will any of that $30M go towards making Lever's website even remotely accessible to screen readers and such? If you're not sure what I'm talking about, try visiting your website with Safari and VoiceOver enabled and watch it crash the browser (or put it into a perpetual loading state). If I see your website linked in a job listing I just skip it altogether. I don't ask for much, just don't kill my screen reader.
Do you remember when this last was that you encountered this or what specific job site you were using? Might be best we take this offline. Could you please email support@lever.co so we can track this and are sure we get the issue resolved? Thank you!
Already, Lever believes that the talent acquisition is everyone in the company's job. This idea will become even more mainstream. While recruiters are only getting more valuable as hiring becomes more important, everyone in the company will think of the suite of hiring products as part of the tools that they use to do their job, not as the recruiting team's tool. Just like every knowledge worker in a company thinks of email or calendar as a tool to help them do their job, we believe hiring will be so much a part of everyone's job that they think Lever is a tool for them.
As well, we predict that 5 years from now, every company will be developing long standing relationships with potential, current, and future employees at scale. Talent acquisition will be about predicting attrition and strategically modeling future hiring for a company, anticipating pipeline development well in advance. There is a great model for this—sales is a function that has mastered this already. It will be a revolution in the strategic importance of talent acquisition into a key operational function at every company.
Thanks!
Happy to talk about our vision for Lever, hiring practices, what it is like to start a startup in YC and grow to 120 employees and many other topics!
I'm sure we have a lot to learn as well, and what we've learned so far is years in the making. Lever Nurture (https://www.lever.co/nurture) is our most innovative product to date, which we released a bit less than a year ago. There is a lot more we can do to make this new product even better, and we have some other tricks up our sleeves. :-)
Brian is not currently with the team. I'm personally grateful that I had to the opportunity to work with Brian as my partner before Lever on our open source efforts (http://derbyjs.com/ and https://github.com/share/sharedb), taking part in YC, and in the founding and early days of Lever.
We recently posted a piece describing how the Shopify team has used Lever to grow from a a few hundred to over 1900 employees. Sourcing was a key part of their strategy. https://www.lever.co/blog/how-shopify-revolutionized-proacti...
Ultimately, you save a lot of money by not having to hire dedicated recruiters and recruiting coordinators, and you actually get a much better candidate experience and hiring effectiveness by having hiring managers and interviewers more closely involved in the process instead of trying to translate them through a separate recruiting team.
A user has www.lever.co open in Safari, with the VoiceOver narration popup open at the bottom. They type jobs.lever.co/lever into the address bar. On that page, they navigate down to the Backend Engineer position and go to the job description page for that position, where they then hit the Apply button. On the application form, they quickly go through the form fields, all the way down to the Submit Application button. The GIF ends there.
For example, is it about getting in touch with prospective employees who are content in their current role but may be interested down the road when their circumstances change? Or perhaps about identifying people who seem promising, but aren't ready for the job yet, and maintaining the relationship as they develop? I'm curious because I've thought a bit about the latter option, of companies giving potentially promising candidates insight into how they can develop to become competitive for a role, and have wondered why that doesn't take place more often.
In addition, companies will look ahead to anticipate which talent might be a strong fit in the future and keep tabs on them as they develop in their careers. I think the honest truth as to why it is not happening more today is that it is so difficult! One part of the solution is building software that has this model for hiring as key part of it works, and that is Lever's focus.
Thanks for asking such a great question and offering your commentary as well!
