There’s been a bit of a leadership shuffle at Hired: President Mehul Patel has been promoted to CEO, while the previous CEO, founder Matt Mickiewicz, has become chief product officer.
Patel (who has also worked at Lyft, Oracle, CNET and Kaggle, and who joined Hired two years ago), told me this isn’t as big a deal as you might think. In fact, he said there was a longtime transition plan in place, and even before the official switch, he’d been taking on more and more business responsibilities.
“It’s not a dramatic change,” he said. So why make the change now?
“All the signs were this model is working and we have product market fit. The growth rate of the business is increasing, so it seemed like a good time to have the CEO transition.”
Patel actually became CEO back in July, but the company has been relatively quiet about it (though I guess the promotion was apparent to anyone who looked at his LinkedIn page).
The company recently hired its first CMO, too — Juney Ham, co-founder and investment advisor of startup Upside.
On the growth front, Patel said Hired’s revenue has been tripling year-over-year since it was founded in 2012 and is projected to reach a $100 million annualized run rate next year. The service is fully launched in nine cities and in beta testing in another four. And the company it just signed a lease on a 25,000 square foot office in San Francisco’s Mid-Market neighborhood.
Companies that have used Hired include Facebook, Twitch and Uber. Plus, naturally, Hired itself — Patel estimated that about 95 percent of the engineering team came in through the Hired service.
Hired says it screens job candidates through a rigorous process combining algorithms and human curation, so employers don’t need to sift through a giant pile of résumés. Candidates are then wooed by the companies with “reverse cover letters,” they get transparency into compensation and they receive a $2,000 bonus from Hired if they accept a job.
Perhaps most importantly, instead of dealing with a recruiter who’s just trying to fill a role to earna commission, the candidates work with Hired Talent Advocates, and those advocates are judged based on the job seeker’s satisfaction.
The service was initially focused on tech roles, but it has since expanded to sales jobs. Ultimately, Patel said Hired could be used “for marketers, for human resources, for accounts for architects — all knowledge workers should be able to find a job this way.”
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