Today, we announce our $6M Seed investment led by Jonathan Heiliger of Vertex Ventures US, alongside Fly Ventures, Seedcamp, Village Global, PrimeSet, Moving Capital, Palumni, Abakar and Sultan Saidov (Beamery co-founders), Matt Robinson (GoCardless and Nested founder), and Jerry Ting (Evisort co-founder).
This investment will help us accelerate in our mission to power People decisions with truth by enabling us to rapidly grow our phenomenal team. We're hiring builders on all fronts: engineering, design, sales, marketing, customer success, and operations.
We'd love to speak to you and tell you more about why now is the time to build the technology to reimagine how high-performing teams get built.
Why we started Metaview
Before we started Metaview, we worked in product and engineering teams at Uber and Palantir.
Though — on paper — our primary responsibilities were to ship product to customers, the highest leverage work we did was helping build out our teams. It must be true that this had the highest leverage, if only because many people we hired are still at these companies now, continuing to have impact well beyond our personal tenures.
It wasn't just us that realised this. Our employers had deeply internalised the reality that the fight for talent was the most important battleground of all. This was made tangible: people were expected to prioritise interviewing over existing meetings, and a tonne of time and energy was dedicated to hiring manager training, shadowing processes, and bar raiser programs.
Given this, we couldn't shake a few questions:
- Why, given the priority, energy, and expense focused on hiring the best people, were we still running inefficient processes with unreliable outcomes?
- How come we had such phenomenal tooling and such great leverage when doing what we were best at (in our case, product), but were almost totally un-augmented by technology when contributing to hiring and building teams?
- Are the conditions (societal and technological) now right to fix this?
Incredibly quickly, we were all-in on working out the answers to these questions.
Scaling Talent hurts
Everyone that has worked in a rapid-growth environment has viscerally felt the importance of hiring, and the associated pain of doing it at scale. Hiring is so important and so painful at high-growth companies for 3 core reasons:
- When you're growing fast (say, 50-100% headcount growth YoY), you're practically a new company every year. This means that if you systematically get it wrong, you'll dilute the culture and talent density of your organization. This is very hard to recover from.
- Hiring excellently takes a lot of time (~40 people hours per hire), so becomes a bottle-neck, quickly. To address this, you're forced to make (close to) everyone an interviewer. In fact, according to Metaview data, 60% of all employees at high-growth companies are involved in interviewing, and 1 in 4 interviews are conducted by inexperienced interviewers. Onboarding, training, and calibrating this many people is slow and painful. As a result, it's often minimized or skipped.
- Talent is the single largest budget item. It's where companies spend the majority of their cash, and therefore opportunity.
Right now, everyone is trying to fix hiring without the data that really matters
Because of these pains, organizations are desperately struggling to hire at the speed and with the quality they need. Despite substantial investment in processes for teams (training, structured interviews, hiring panels) and tech for recruiters (sourcing tools, scheduling tools), the results are still unsatisfactory.
Organizations are often losing candidates to rival offers, hiring folks that end up not being a fit, failing to root out bias and inconsistencies, and running inefficient processes with too many interviews for too many candidates.
Some interviewers are overwhelmed, others are unprepared.
Hiring Managers are forced to make decisions with patchy insight on the candidates ability.
The root of these problems is all the same: lack of data.
What leads to candidates rejecting offers? We don't know, because we don't know what actually happens in the most important parts of the hiring process.
What leads to making a hire that ends up not working out? We don't know, because we don't know what actually happens in the most important parts of the hiring process.
Why are we still running processes that result in people making the hiring decision based on memory, gut, or preconceived notions? We don't know, because we don't know what actually happens in the most important parts of the hiring process.
And so on, and so on.
That's changing though. The generational shift to remote hiring practises (even non-remote companies are continuing to run most of their hiring process remotely) means we are all now having our conversations via microphones and cameras. Suddenly, the ambient data we produce as we go about the act of hiring is harnessable.
Our mission is to power People decisions with truth
This shift means conversations no longer have to be a black-hole in the hiring process. Instead, they are the most meaningful source of hiring data in the entire process. Harnessing the power of this data is challenging: capturing it, cleaning it, structuring it, and — vitally — making it useful and actionable for end users (from business leaders, to hiring managers, to interviewers, to recruiters) is what we focus on at Metaview.
Our mission is to power People decisions with truth. And we're starting by harnessing the ambient data from interviews to help high-growth organizations run amazing processes.
Fairer, more rigorous interviewers. Better decisions. Quicker hires.
Interviews are just the start
Weak, inconsistent, unintentional interviewing impacts all high-growth companies. It slows down hiring, leads to mis-hires, and is a major headwind for overall business velocity.
Improving interviews is just the start though.
At the moment, every collaboration, touchpoint, and decisions in the hiring, talent management, and reward process is dehydrated. The data that really matters is nowhere to be seen. Now is the time to change that.
We're building the system of intelligence for talent. Our approach is to identify the most inflectional moments in the talent lifecycle, harness the data that matters, and create delightful products that provide super-powers for the people who's most important job it is to build teams.
With this new funding and new partners, we are aiming to triple our team and rapidly accelerate our growth. We are hiring Product Engineers, Product Designers, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Business Operations. With more to come.
If you're inspired by the idea of reimagining how teams get built, we'd love to speak to you.
Siadhal and Shahriar (Metaview Co-founders)
