Layoffs normally drive attention and sympathy towards affected employees, but rarely does anyone discuss what happens to the recruiters who’re sometimes also asked to go away when corporations resolve to chop headcount. Indeed, tech firms cut as much as half of their recruitment teams once they were laying people off in droves back in 2022 and 2023.
Paraform, a recruitment platform aimed toward startups, feels there’s a possibility in tapping the pool of laid-off recruiters who’ve since branched out to begin their very own business, and helping startups source talent and access a broader talent network. To fund that effort, the corporate recently raised a $3.6 million seed round led by A*, a enterprise capital firm founded by Kevin Hartz — the co-founder of Everbrite and Xoom, and AirBnB’s first investor.
“Through the 2022 and 2023 wave of tech layoffs, we saw 100,000 recruiters laid off, driving many recruiters to go independent and begin their very own recruiting business,” John Kim, CEO of Paraform, said in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch. “This has left many independent recruiters with beneficial skill sets and high-quality networks available and open to latest ways of working.”
“To this point, we’ve got hundreds of recruiters on the platform and have supported greater than 200 corporations in hiring for roles,” he added.
The startup charges a list fee (subscription fee) to publish jobs on the platform and a hit fee when a hire is made. “The listing fee ensures buy-in from startups to the two-way marketplace and a commitment to the recruiters they’re working with,” Kim said.
Along with early- and late-stage startups, Kim said the platform also works with larger in-house talent teams to fill difficult roles. “Greater than 50% of our customers have great in-house talent teams, but they proceed to post roles on Paraform. They’re in a position to leverage recruiter networks without having to rent full-time recruiters and may flexibly scale hiring up or down,” the corporate CEO explained.
The brand new funding, which brings Paraform’s total capital raised to $5 million, comes a 12 months after Paraform’s pre-seed raise in March 2023. Kim said that because the pre-seed round, Paraform’s revenue has increased 10x, it has onboarded greater than 100 latest customers, and has grown its team. The corporate generated greater than $1 million in revenue with a three-person team in its first 12 months of operations, he added.
Other investors within the seed round include DoorDash co-founder Evan Moore and leaders at corporations like Affirm, Hightouch, Palantir and Ramp. Previous backer Primer Sazze Partners also participated.
Paraform will use the brand new capital to expand across the U.S. and hire more engineers and operators to service its growing customer demands. It also intends to enter latest countries and markets. It’s now a team of 4 and hopes to double that this 12 months.
A screenshot of Paraform’s recruiter management screen. Image Credits: Paraform
“We’ve supported just a few customers in EU, Korea, and Australia, and the best way the businesses worked with headhunters was homogenous and worked thoroughly. We’re excited to give you the option to expand globally.”
The startup has rolled out an enterprise product, and is planning to expand its platform to cater to roles beyond software engineering and go-to-market jobs at startups.
“We’re already branching out into research, science, manufacturing and defense roles as a result of the demand we’re seeing from potential customers,” Kim said.
Paraform believes recruiting continues to be “a really human-to-human process” and desires to reinforce that human element through the use of technology like AI to assist recruiters and startups make hiring easier on the platform.
Kim said AI will enable recruiters to know what hiring managers are searching for. AI technology will allow them to summarize and supply “probably the most common the reason why they’ve passed on a candidate, ultimately helping recruiters gain a greater understanding of the best way to discover the very best candidates.”
