Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Fetcher, a startup that promises to make the recruiting process easier while also diversifying the candidate pool, is announcing that it has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding.

Originally known as Scout, the New York startup was founded by CEO Andres Blank, CPO Chris Calmeyn and engineering directors Javier Castiarena and Santi Aimetta.

Blank told me that Fetcher automates parts of recruiters’ jobs, namely finding job candidates and sending the initial outreach emails. When I wondered whether that just leads to more spammy recruiting messages, he said that Fetcher emails actually result in “a very good response rate” because they’re targeted at the right candidates.

“The reality is that if you’re looking for a job, you don’t need an email to be so amazing, and if you’re a recruiter, you don’t want to spend 10 minutes thinking about what to write to each candidate,” he said.

He also described Fetcher’s approach as a “human in the loop” approach. Yes, the initial outreach is automated, but then the recruiter handles the conversations with candidates who respond.

Image Credits: Fetcher

“By automating both the sourcing [and] outreach sides of recruiting, Fetcher reduces the amount of time a recruiter spends in front of a computer searching for candidates, making a recruiter’s job more balanced, strategic and impactful, all while continuing to build a robust, diverse pipeline for the company,” Blank wrote in a follow-up email.

He also suggested that automated sourcing allows recruiters to reach a much more diverse candidate pool than they would through traditional methods. For example, he sent me a case study in which Fetcher helped video collaboration startup Frame.io hire 11 new employees in less than 12 months, nine of whom were women and/or underrepresented minorities.

“Fetcher has freed up time and given us the capacity to diversify our pipeline more organically,” said Anna Chalon, Frame.io’s senior director of talent and diversity, equity and inclusion, in a statement. “This has allowed us to make some incredible hires, mostly from underrepresented groups, over the last year.”

Blank added that after Fetcher has seen its revenue increase every month since July of last year, owing to shrinking recruiting teams needing to be able to do more with fewer resources, as well as a greater corporate focus on the aforementioned diversity, equity and inclusion.

Fetcher has now raised a total of $12 million. The Series A was led by G20 Ventures, with participation from KFund, Slow Ventures and Accomplice. Blank said he’s planning to double the employee count (currently 80) by the end of the year and to build out additional analytics (including diversity analytics) and CRM tools.

Enterprise recruiting company iCIMS is announcing that it has acquired Altru.

ICIMS declined to comment on the terms of the deal, but a source with knowledge of the companies told us that the price is a combination of cash and stock, totaling around $60 million.

Founded in 2000, iCIMS offers a “talent cloud” used by more than 4,000 employers to attract, engage and hire new employees, and to help existing employees continue to develop their careers.

Former Marketo chief executive Steve Lucas became CEO in February, and he told me that the recruiting world is overdue for reinvention. After all, every company says they want to hire the most talented people around, so he wondered, “Well, okay, if you want that, why do you create such boring content? Why do you take a job that is exciting and should demand amazing human beings and create this super boring job description?”

Lucas sees video as a key piece of the solution, allowing companies to bring more “authenticity” to what can be a stuffy and bureaucratic process. Just over a month ago, iCIMS announced another acquisition in this area — Paris-based Easyrecrue.

Lucas said that while Easyrecrue has created tools to enrich video interviews, Altru can be most helpful earlier in the recruiting process, when companies are trying to stay connected with the most promising candidates and get them excited about a potential job.

Altru CEO Alykhan Rehmatullah (who founded the startup with CTO Vincent Polidoro — they’re both pictured above) told me that while the company started out with a focus on recording and sharing employee videos for recruitment, its asynchronous videos are becoming used more broadly across companies. He suggested that’s particularly true this year, while teams are working from home and everyone’s looking for ways to communicate that are more expressive than Slack and don’t require putting “another 30-minute Zoom call on your calendar.”

In fact, Lucas said that before talking to me, he’d actually been recording videos on Altru to explain the acquisition to his own team. He praised the platform’s ease of use, joking, “If I can use this thing, anybody can use it.”

Rehmatullah said the entire Altru team will be joining iCIMS, where he’ll become vice president of content strategy. The goal is to continue operating Altru as a standalone product while also finding new ways to integrate it into the iCIMS platform.

Altru previously raised a total of $1.3 million from Birchmere Ventures, Active Capital and Techstars.

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