Active candidates just aren’t enough these days. Not with the unemployment rate under 4 percent anyway.
For Palo Alto-based Uncommon, this meant the startup’s programmatic job advertising software needed more than just a way to drive active candidates to recruiters through its distribution algorithm. So, available this week, the company added automated sourcing to the suite of products it offers, taking on a wide variety of competitors in the space.
“We built Uncommon because we saw how manual and time consuming it is to source qualified talent today, and as data scientists we realized that we could build tools to automate a lot of the busywork, such as screening profiles and writing personalized outreach messages,” said Teg Grenager, Uncommon’s CEO.
Uncommon touts a database of 150 million resumes to source from in the new system. Users will start seeing a navigation tab labeled “Passive,” which pulls from that pool of resumes, in addition to “Active,” representing candidates collected from the original programmatic solution. Employers like PwC, Lockheed Martin, and Kindred Healthcare were part of a private beta for the new offering.
“I found that 38 of the 50 passive candidates Uncommon delivered were qualified. On LinkedIn, it takes looking through 200 profiles and a full day of sourcing to come up with the same amount of targeted candidates,” said Elisa Escobar, a veteran recruiter and company advisor with experience at Google, AOL, and Apple. “
Uncommon says its new tool can cut sourcing time by 75 percent.
The company is using a third-party vendor for its database of 150 million resumes, which largely pulls data from a variety of job boards and resume depositories. Grenager says the database is updated every quarter to guarantee freshness. Engaging the candidates sourced automatically by the new tool can be done with integrated email messaging, automated sequencing, and bulk outreach.
“Adoption of sourcing automation tools like Uncommon over the next few years will give recruiters a breakthrough in productivity, while at the same time allowing them to focus on the human connection with the interested and qualified candidates,” said Grenager.
The company is launching its new sourcing tool as a freemium model, allowing recruiters to view and message up to 10 candidates a week for free, with no credit card required. Beyond that, pricing will be between $100- to $400-per-month, depending on usage.
Uncommon announced a round of funding back in February 2018 to the tune of $18 million. You can also checkout an interview with Grenager back in March for The Chad & Cheese Podcast, which I cohost.
Disclosure: Uncommon is a sponsor of The Chad & Cheese Podcast.
