We’re really excited to announce YesGraph, the best way to do referral recruiting. Our early users have really helped us with great feedback and support, so thanks to you all! We’re also announcing the details of $1.3M seed financing we closed. But first, a story.
An Excellent (Manual) Recruiting Process
The idea from YesGraph came from my time working at Facebook and Dropbox. Both companies are full of incredibly talented people, and they knew that they needed to hire the best people to keep growing. Over the long term, a good cultural fit matters just as much as talent.
This is why referrals proved to be such an effective recruiting channel. If you’ve worked with someone before and want to work with them again, then recommending them is both a talent and culture filter.
Both companies adopted what has become a hiring best practice: searchlight meetings. This is where you sit down as a team and try to come up with referrals and notable people in the field.
The problem is that this is pretty laborious. Spreadsheets work, but they don’t have resumes or social data. For example, writing down someone’s name doesn’t tell you who else in the company might know them.
Enter YesGraph: Scale Referral Recruiting
YesGraph solves this problem by building collaboration tools around referral recruiting. Powerful social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn are each part of your social graph. YesGraph makes it easy to take the thousands of contacts you might have, narrow them down to just those that would fit a role, and recommend the best with a single click.
You can see how this works below. In this example, all the engineers are right there, and recommending one is as easy as clicking “yes”. If for some reason they aren’t a good referral (maybe a bad cultural fit, maybe starting their own company), click “skip”. In neither case is the candidate contacted.
Hiring is a team sport, so YesGraph really shines when you invite your whole team to make recommendations. It isn’t just one person going through their contacts, but ideally every employee. In addition, try inviting domain experts, investors, advisors, and friends to help cast a wide net. This can dramatically increase the quality and quantity of referrals coming in to your hiring team.
The best part is that this is all free! We’re going to add more collaboration and social features in the future that will require a subscription, but that is for a future post. So go try out YesGraph, and tell others about it.
Building YesGraph’s Team.
We raised $1.3M in seed financing from some of the best investors in the world. Lee Hower at NextView led the round and joined the board. Also in the round are Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Founder Collective, Quotidian Ventures, Rivet Ventures, and angels including Michael Birch, Gustaf Alströmer, Lance White, Tom Williams, Adam Gross, and one secret angel.
The funding is here to build out the team that helps build YesGraph. We now have 7 people on the team and we’re hiring more. Oh, and since we know you’ll ask: 50% of our hires came from referrals through YesGraph.
We’re really excited with what’s coming around the corner. If you want to help, try out YesGraph, give us feedback, and tell others about us!