Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of Talent.com, left to right, Lucas Martinez, Benjamin Philion and Maxime Droux.Handout courtesy of Talent.com/Handout
Lucas Martinez realized that if he was going to build a challenger to online job listings giants Indeed, LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter, he needed a better name for his Montreal company than Neuvoo Inc.
The internet age gave rise to digital upstarts with silly names, such as Google, Yahoo!, Chewy and Zynga. When Mr. Martinez and his co-founders, Maxime Droux and Benjamin Philion, chose Neuvoo as the name for their new company in 2011 (it means “to advise” in Finnish), it was a whimsical idea. The problem was English speakers in key markets Canada, the United States and Britain didn’t know how to pronounce or spell it.
As Neuvoo scaled up, becoming one of North America’s fastest-growing tech companies, the founders thought, “If people can’t pronounce your name that’s a huge issue,” Mr. Martinez said.
So they ditched one dot-com 1.0 strategy (using a goofy name) for another: paying up for a great URL. One of the first things Neuvoo did after the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec invested $53-million in the fall of 2019 was to buy the web address Talent.com for between $1-million and $2-million and rename the company Talent.com Inc.
The new name, Mr. Martinez says, has increased closings on sales calls by 20 per cent and helped recruit sales leaders from rival companies. “‘Neuvoo’ left people guessing what we do. Talent.com is straightforward and approachable. It puts us on the right track to become a global brand,” he said.
That is now its focus after the company said Tuesday it had raised US$120-million in equity led by Montreal’s Inovia Capital and backed by Investissement Québec, BDC Capital, Fondaction, HarbourVest Capital, Geneva-based Climb Ventures and the Caisse. Talent.com raised US$30-million more in debt from Bank of Montreal.
“This was a gem nobody knows about,” Inovia partner Chris Arsenault said in an interview. Talent.com “has been growing extremely well, they adapted to the COVID-19 crisis and they have the potential … to bring this to the next level where they can become the source of trust for a job seeker.”
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Talent.com has become an up-and-comer to watch in one of the first online sectors – job listings – by specializing in postings for blue-collar and shift-work jobs such as retail and hospitality work, e-commerce warehouse pick-and-packers and truck drivers. By contrast, LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft Corp., and Indeed, a subsidiary of Japan’s Recruit Holdings Co. Ltd., focus on white-collar positions.
Talent.com has also done brisk business during the recent hiring crunch, Mr. Arsenault said. ”Right now the biggest challenge in any sector is attracting and retaining talent. For the blue-collar market it’s that much more important to fill the positions they have. There aren’t enough people.”
Talent.com says it is profitable and revenues nearly doubled to $125-million in 2021 from $69.2-million in 2019, after a brief COVID-19 pandemic slowdown. The company has listings in 22 languages in 79 countries (its shuttered Russian websites accounted for 0.1 per cent of sales), attracts 35 million unique visitors monthly (Indeed has 250 million) and estimates 500,000 people get jobs via its ads. Talent.com generates revenues as Google does: Listings are free, but employers pay per click to give ads better online placement.
The company “has delivered on their execution plan,” said Caisse chief technology officer Alexandre Synnett. “They have the content, the traffic and can play with the big guys. We have a lot of respect for Indeed, but feel there’s not a winner-take-all in that market. Talent.com can play a role.”
Changing its name was the first step in Talent.com’s push to become a global brand in the mature but growing online job listings market. David Placek, chief executive officer of Lexicon Branding, the Sausalito, Ca., company that created the BlackBerry, Pentium and Swiffer brand names, said, “Given what they do and who they’re competing with, to come in with a real word, Talent, is a great idea. It is a great, relevant name … that can play a strategic communications role. In today’s digital economy names have to do more and work harder. I think Talent will do more and work harder than Neuvoo.”
Talent.com has primarily pursued large companies for listings. It is now looking to become the online job board of choice for smaller businesses as well. Reaching them will require a marketing campaign expanding beyond its usual digital ads and into underwriting podcasts, airing commercials on television and YouTube, posting billboards and pursuing sponsorships. “Everything you can think of, that’s the goal – to become a consumer brand in our major markets,” Mr. Martinez said.
The company is looking for a chief marketing officer, and plans to add a chief product officer and human-resources leader to its ranks, joining former Cogeco Inc. executive Philippe Bonin, hired as chief financial officer last year. Over all, the 400-person company plans to hire 1,500 more people by 2026. “It’s a talent company and their key priority is to hire,” Mr. Arsenault said.
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Sean Silcoff