Interview with Matt Mickiewicz, CEO and Founder of Hired.com

The following interview was conducted with Matt Mickiewicz, Co-Founder and CEO of Hired.com, on February 17 2014 by Philip Thomas. Permission to record was obtained before the interview.

Philip	How does a company begin using Hired?
Matt	They submit an online application and have an onboarding call with one of our account managers.
Philip	Ok, so there is no subscription fee, right?
Matt	No subscription fee, no.
Philip	And what type of size and stage of company make up most of your active users?
Matt	Mostly series A and series B companies, but we have a lot of later-stage companies as well. We work with everybody from Square and Facebook to Staples, Amex, Capital One. jkk
Philip	Is there a threshold for starting to use Hired that you use a metric?
Matt	Well, we only deal with venture-funded or publicly-traded companies. We don’t talk to bootstrapped businesses. The seed-stage companies are generally better off recruiting through their network, based on our extensive data analysis. It’s only the later-stage companies that, you know, really you can hit the hiring title hard that get the most out of the marketplace. A lot of guys just pick the seed-stage companies or are dealing with first-time founders and CEOs, looking for some other specific cofounder - basically looking for a life-partner, not an employee - and they’re five or six people in.
Philip	In terms of the offers that candidates receive - are those always reflective of the final salary? Are those binding?
Matt	90% of the time, they are.
Philip	90% of the time? Ok. And, where are your candidates from, geographically?
Matt	About 70% are in San Francisco, 20% are in New York, and 10% are from around other parts of the US, like Seattle, Chicago, Austin.
Philip	Ok, so not many relocations. It’s mostly local candidates?
Matt	That’s right.
Philip	Ok. And, in terms of Hired as a recruiting tool, is your goal to make it the primary recruiting tool for most of your companies, or is this going to be something that is more geared more towards the candidates?
Matt	We’re going to become a career marketplace for workers in the world, ranging from new grad [Audio cut-out]. We’re very candidate-focused whenever we have to make a decision or take side of the [unintelligible]. Our goal is to empower them and allow them to conduct their own job search in a really trendy and comprehensive way, as opposed to submitting resumes and hoping for a reply. Or using agency recruiters who don’t have your best interest in heart.
Philip	Yeah. So then, is the bottleneck for growth right now getting more candidates on the website, or getting more employers to use it?
Matt	They’ve been growing in line very steadily. So, when we look at the graphs for Q4 the numbers [Audio cut-out] are trending almost perfectly in line with number of candidates. So, for us, it’s more a matter of scaling geographically and to different markets.
Philip	Which metrics are you using are you using to decide to open in a new city? Are you opening to more markets, then?
Matt	Yes, we will be opening additional offices this year. We opened our New York office in December. It’s already profitable.
Philip	Oh, great. How has the retention of recruiters, company-side, been?
Matt	It’s been tremendous. We have hundreds of active employers every single month.
Philip	Ok. And, your website shows how many candidates receive an offer. But, do you have information on how many go through with accepting offers?
Matt	We don’t disclose that information.
Philip	Ok. And, can you talk about the phishing emails that some recruiters were sent last month?
Matt	Sorry, what was the question?
Philip	I spoke with some recruiters who were using Hired, and they reported that there had been some phishing emails that ended up being sent, or seemed to be sent, from Hired. Do you know - was there a data breach of some kind?
Matt	Ah, yes. So one of our employees had their GMail account hacked. So, some phishing emails were sent from her personal email address to our employers. But it wasn’t a data breach. No one gained database access to the application or the marketplace itself.
Philip	Ok, great. Thank you. Was there anything else that you wanted to mention? I think this basically wraps up my questions.
Matt	I’m not sure what you have this because I haven’t seen your research, but we also just had our first international auction in partnership with Sequoia Capital.
Philip	Great. I noticed in an Australian newspaper that there was discussion about international recruiting. Are you working for those international auctions for bringing international candidates to existing US markets?
Matt	That’s right. We ran a global casting call over the last four to six weeks in partner with Sequoia to get their companies on board with sponsoring H-1B visas.
Philip	I think that answers all of my questions. Thanks a lot for your time, Matt.
Matt	Ok, thanks. Bye.