A unicorn is a term for a start-up – or sometimes longer-established company – with a valuation of at least a billion dollars. Usually, the value of such a company becomes apparent through interim investment rounds, from wealthy individuals, or investment firms, among others. Usually in the hope of a later, lucrative IPO. If such parties in a funding round pay more than $100,000 for 10% of the shares, for example, we are dealing with a unicorn.
Worldwide, there are a lot of unicorns. Currently, there seem to be more than eight hundred of them. 2021 was even a record year when it comes to new unicorns. There are also already quite a few unicorns, around 50 internationally at this moment, active in recruitment and HR technology. Precisely because the war for talent is becoming more acute (think of the recent labour market shortages in the Netherlands), finding the right employee is only becoming more important. This is driving investment in recruitment tech and is also producing more and more unicorns.
12 recruitment tech unicorns worldwide
Below is a selection of 12 companies from that growing group of recruitment tech unicorns.
Apna (India)
Apna is a professional networking platform that achieved unicorn status at lightning speed. In fact, it is said to be India’s fastest-growing company ever. The start-up takes its name from the rap Apna Time Aayega from the Indian film Gully Boy. 150,000 Indian companies are said to be using the platform already. Which leads to 18 million job interviews through the platform every month.
www.apna.co
Culture Amp (Australia)
Australian Didier Elzinga, son of a Dutch father and French mother, founded Culture Amp in 2009. Spreadsheets don’t tell the full story when it comes to your employees’ engagement, development, performance and satisfaction, Culture Amp argues. But with this company’s “science-based” tools, you can make employees “grow and retain” and “stimulate personalised, continuous growth”.
www.cultureamp.com
Degreed (US)
After an investment injection in 2021, the Silicon Valley-based company achieved unicorn status. The company’s mission is to make degrees less important in recruitment. Other measurable skills should streamline the recruitment process. Of the top 500 largest companies in the US, about one-third are said to be customers already.
www.degreed.com
Eightfold.AI (US)
This Silicon Valley-based company achieved unicorn status about four years after its founding. Eightfold AI focuses, among other things, on retaining the best-performing employee, learning new skills, increasing diversity in organisations and tracking hidden gems in the labour market. And all that is driven by deep learning AI.
www.eightfold.ai
GEM (US)
US-based GEM specialises in data-driven recruitment and raised $100 million in an investment round in 2021. The company aims to become the “Salesforce for the recruitment world”. The company’s top executives signal that recruitment is becoming more and more like marketing and therefore increasingly proactive. The company has more than 800 clients, including quite a few…unicorns.
www.gem.com
Handshake (United Kingdom)
Three British twenty-somethings started Handshake in 2013, when they were looking for jobs themselves. Initially as a kind of network for other recent graduates looking for entry-level jobs. The company has since grown into a platform where 18 million students and start-ups, more than 550,000 employers and 1,200 affiliated universities and colleges find each other.
www.joinhandshake.com
HiBob (Israel)
Israel’s HiBob (with European headquarters in Amsterdam, is now worth €2.4 billion). The company focuses on automating the entire HR process. As they say themselves, quite ambitiously: ‘HiBob is on a mission to change the way organisations work in the modern world of work with its HR platform Bob. Bob is paving the way for the future workplace, offering resilient, flexible technology that wraps all complex HR processes into a ground-breaking, easy-to-use tool that touches every employee across the company’.
www.hibob.com
Jobandtalent (Spain)
Jobandtalent claims to be the largest job platform in Europe. They claim to have helped more than 100,000 people find work in the first nine months of 2021 alone. The company specialises in matching workers for temporary work in sectors such as warehousing, manufacturing, logistics and e-commerce.
www.jobandtalent.com
Oyster (United Kingdom)
The London-based company focuses on smooth international hiring and onboarding, with its mission statement: We’re focused on building software and resources that enable companies everywhere to hire, pay, and care for talent anywhere. Just this year, the company received a capital injection of around €140 million. And thus became a unicorn within two years of its founding. Such rapid growth to unicorn status is rare.
www.oysterhr.com
Personio (Germany)
Personio bills itself as Europe’s “most valuable HR tech company”. Founded in 2015, the company helps automate HR processes with their ‘all-in-one HR Solution’. In doing so, it focuses mainly on SMEs. The company now has more than 3,500 SME customers across Europe. The company is currently valued at around €8 billion!
www.personio.com
Phenom People (US)
Board chairman and co-founder Mahe Bayireddi expressed that the Philadelphia-based company’s mission is “to help a billion people get good jobs”. The company claims that, by now, 25,000 recruiters and job boards worldwide are already using the company’s A.I. talent experience management platform. The company has offices in the US, Israel, India, the UK and, since several years, the Netherlands. Coinciding with the acquisition of Endouble in late 2020.
www.phenom.com
Recruitee (Netherlands)
Actually, this company does not meet the requirements to be included here, as it has not yet reached unicorn status. But the recent joining of forces with Finnish Sympa and the growth ambitions expressed in the process give Recruitee a place here anyway. The merged company specialises in “premium cloud HR software tools”. With these, they aim to support the essence of HR and talent acquisition at companies.
www.recruitee.com
Source: Werf&
