Eventbrite’s ex-engineering director nabs $1.2M for his data-driven employee referral service

If you’re looking for new talent to join your company, one of the best ways to find them is by asking your employees. Jobvite considers this type of resource “undervalued” and believes that by leveraging your current team, you’ll be able to increase your reach across a much larger network.

Helping companies tap into this area is the reason Simppler exists, and since its launch in 2014, at least 11 companies have signed up for the data-driven employee referral service. Today, investors are paying attention and are investing $1.2 million into Simppler’s seed round.

Started by Eventbrite’s former engineering director, Vipul Sharma, and Shikhar Mishra, Simppler takes on Jobvite and other similar companies through its use of social networks, contacts, and big data. It counts the likes of Auction, MobileIron, Tilt, Reddit, Change.org, and Box among its customers and will be using the new funds to further build out its product and bring on a sales team.

Investing in the company are Greylock Partners, Correlation Ventures, zParks Capital, and several angel investors. None led the round.

Simppler utilizes a recommendation system that’s somewhat similar to the one used by Eventbrite, and which suggests events you might be interested in. Employees sign up and import their contacts either through their address book, CSV file, or one of the major social networks.

The system will parse through the Internet to build up profiles of potential candidates, and when the time comes to look for a new engineer, designer, product manager, or chief executive, you can search through the system and say “yes or no” to each one. Each response will be catalogued, and the algorithm becomes smarter to better understand how each referral fits into the big picture.

The company started while both founders were building out the engineering team at Eventbrite. Sharma tells us that as the company was growing rapidly, they were trying to analyze what was the most efficient way to get candidates: “We realized that we were spending money on various social solutions, but what was working was employee referrals.”

LinkedIn might seem like a logical option to recruit talent, but Sharma explained that it’s “primarily for personal use where people can express their professional experience and where recruiters can see if someone is connected with an employee.” Simppler comes at the hiring problem from the employee’s perspective, rather than that of the recruiter or the hiring organization.

“The best hires come from referrals, and we believe we can change how companies think about hiring as the first technology focused squarely on employee referrals.” Vipul wrote in a blog post. “Existing employees understand the DNA and demands of their company better than anyone else, so they are in the best position to recommend the right people.”

Simppler claims that its recommendation engine has caused a 10x increase in its customers’ employee referral rates. What’s more, engagement among employees averages around 70 percent.