Today, Anna and I are excited to share that we've closed a Series A funding round of $17 million led by Founders Fund. We’ve welcomed Keith Rabois (former exec at Paypal, Square, and LinkedIn) to Searchlight’s board. Keith not only brings strategic and operational expertise to our team, but also shares our belief that talent strategy is business strategy.
“The most successful companies understand that their business performance is tied to hiring quality and retention. Searchlight is eliminating guesswork through data, leading to incredible results for their customers. I wish I had this platform as I built my teams at Square, Paypal, and Linkedin, and recommend all companies to use Searchlight.” - Keith Rabois, Founders Fund GP and Searchlight Board Member
Other investors include Accel, Shasta Ventures, Kapor Capital, Operator Collective, and prominent angel investors including past and present Heads of People and Talent at companies like Airbnb, Coda, Confluent, Cruise, and Pendo. We’re also proud to share that more than half our investors are from underrepresented backgrounds. This financing signals growing support for female founders that are changing the future of work.
Introducing Talent Intelligence designed for Quality of Hire
With our latest funding round, we're also announcing the launch of our new Searchlight Talent Intelligence platform that gives companies the ability to improve quality of hire. When the right people are in the right roles, everyone wins. Over the past year, customers who’ve used our platform in beta to hire thousands of candidates saw a 45% increase in retention and 40% decrease in time-to-fill across candidates. They can now confidently hire faster, mitigate bias and retain a stronger workforce.While Quality of Hire is known as an elusive metric, we’ve been able to help our customers finally measure it by connecting pre-hire talent data with post-hire outcomes. This creates a powerful hiring and retention engine that provides prescriptive insights that are applied across the recruiting cycle (e.g.; creating job specs, sourcing, candidate assessments, onboarding).There’s the famous business saying, “What gets measured gets managed.” It’s time companies finally manage their quality of hire, for the good of everyone.
Putting Customers First
Anna and I deeply believe the best software is co-built with our users. In the last 2 years, all our platform extensions were built in direct partnership with them. For a period of time, the average turnaround from product ask to feature launch was 16 days! Big thank you to Snapdocs, Talkdesk, Udemy, Doximity, and Zapier who have provided critical feedback to help us launch a platform we’re proud of and create a product roadmap that inspires us.
“With Searchlight, we’ve created a hiring system in one quarter that took more than one year at my previous company, saved $3M+ in recruiting costs, and generated $3M+ in increased revenue. Searchlight provides a virtuous cycle between great employee performance and great business performance that brings in more high performers.” - Chad Herring, Chief People Officer at Snapdocs
What’s New?
Searchlight’s expanded platform includes:
- One-Click References and Self Assessments deliver a complete view of a candidate’s behavioral profile, including their competencies, culture alignment, strengths and gaps, and career interests. Hiring managers use this data to replace interviews and ramp new hires faster to long-term success. No more vague arguments about “culture fit” or “gut feelings.”
- Quality of Hire Dashboard gives people-focused leaders a standardized formula for Quality of Hire and fine-grained visibility across teams, demographics and geographies. Searchlight’s software takes what is usually a manual, years-long process and replaces it with continual pulse checks and seamless integrations to create a source-of-truth for hiring quality.
- People Science Engine connects pre-hire behavioral data to employee outcomes to surface the unique DNA of high-performers at each company and learn from what the best-performing hiring managers and recruiters do. Searchlight’s prescriptive analytics recommends better practices and target candidate profiles to improve recruiting efficiency and quality of hire.
“Searchlight has become the foundation of our talent analytics framework that finally bridges the gap between pre- and post-hire data to improve quality of hire. For each hire, Searchlight gives my managers the insights to jumpstart onboarding and speed up the time to productivity. From a company standpoint, I can finally gain prescriptive hiring insights that improve outcomes for my recruiters, managers, and company’s bottom line.” - Shauna Geraghty, Talkdesk Senior Vice President of Talent
We're excited for you to join us on this journey
To our customers, thank you for believing in our product and helping us build our new platform.To our team, thank you for your hard work, camaraderie, and unwavering belief in seeing the strengths in people. We couldn’t ask for a better group of people to work with!
To those who want to learn more about Searchlight – whether you’re a future customer, Searchlighter, or both at some point, we'd love to hear from you!
We’re hiring across the board. Join us!
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