Y Combinator-backed recruitment CRM for teams Crew rows in $2.3 million

Parisian all-in-one recruiting CRM for teams solution Crew has raised $2.3 million in a seed round. After more than a year in closed beta, today’s disclosure of the $2.3 million raised coincides with the company’s public launch.

Crew’s $2.3 million seed round was co-led by a host of seed stage funds including Rebel, Secret, and Kima, alongside angel investors that include Indeed’s co-founder, Join’s CEO, Workday’s GM, Pitch’s CEO, Airbnb’s Director of Product, Spendesk’s VP of Sales, Twitter’s VP of Engineering.

According to Crew, “In 2004, Indeed launched the first job search engine, soon after online job boards emerged as the most efficient way for companies to reach a larger pool of potential candidates.” 

OG’s of the internet world might be quick to point out that hotjobs.com and Monster.com (amongst a host of other job sites) might have a thing or two to say about this claim, however, the follow-up up is absolutely true: online job boards changed the job seeker and job provider relationship forever with the click of a button.

While the internet and the relationship between labor and management have changed over the years, Crew argues that the foundations of job boards haven’t kept pace, particularly in the tech sector, an area where work that’s available today simply didn’t exist a decade ago. 

And this outdated approach says nothing of the currently employed, but if the right opportunity were placed in front of them …

“The war for talent means that companies are no longer willing to simply wait for candidates to come to them. The vast majority of talent, especially great ones, are not actively looking for work, and by targeting only the active job seekers, companies are closing themselves off to a huge pool of skilled candidates. Companies must therefore multiply their efforts to source passive candidates, which requires them to resort to new strategies to target a large number of qualified people” says Crew CEO and co-founder Amine Skalli.

Billed as a recruitment CRM and following a number of aspects of a traditional customer relationship management tool, Crew serves up three key features which it believes will allow companies and recruiters to shift from inbound to outbound hiring: an outreach automation tool, with strong nurturing capabilities, and an actionable database, team features that are designed to help spread the weight of hiring amongst hiring managers, team members, advisors, and investors with its team-based approach, all working in concert with a number of automation tools, reminders, and workflows.

“The adoption of CRM (Candidate Relationship Management) technology specifically for recruitment is a growing necessity for companies. For years, they have been building relationships with potential candidates through sourcing, but without a dedicated tool to assist them, similar to a sales and marketing team lacking tools like Salesforce or Hubspot to manage their customer relationships,” says Crew co-founder and CRO Ruben Guenoun.

According to the company they have over 100 companies already using their service and in January 2023 had 1,000 active monthly users.

Lead image: Mitchell Luo