R E P O RT R E P R I N T

How Lever built the ‘Salesforce

for recruiting’
FEBRUARY 7 2019
By Conner Forrest
The company helps firms get strategic about talent by storing data on given candidates, and surfacing the most
relevant candidates from their database whenever a new job requisition is opened.

THIS REPORT, LICENSED TO LEVER, DEVELOPED AND AS PROVIDED BY 451 RESEARCH, LLC, WAS
PUBLISHED AS PART OF OUR SYNDICATED MARKET INSIGHT SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE. IT SHALL BE
OWNED IN ITS ENTIRETY BY 451 RESEARCH, LLC. THIS REPORT IS SOLELY INTENDED FOR USE BY THE
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WITHOUT EXPRESS PERMISSION FROM 451 RESEARCH.

©2019 451 Research, LLC | W W W . 4 5 1 R E S E A R C H . C O M

R E P O RT R E P R I N T

Summary
Companies today face different challenges in the knowledge worker economy than the companies that came
before them. Attrition is high, and employees aren’t staying as long as they used to. The war for talent is heating
up in nearly every vertical, and companies have to constantly be on the lookout for the next star candidate. Lever,
a next-generation recruiting software, was founded in 2012 to help firms become as strategic about talent as they
are about revenue.

Lever was founded by Sarah Nahm and Nate Smith – ex-Googlers with deep expertise in design thinking. The
company was incubated inside Google and later Twitter, giving the founders access to insights from hiring
managers, interviewers, legal teams and executives, which they used to form a hypothesis for how Lever could
disrupt recruiting. After taking on its first customers in 2014, the company leveraged its early-mover advantage to
grow its customer base to more than 2,000 companies, including Netflix, McGraw Hill, Yelp, Eventbrite and more.
This report will detail Lever’s product offerings and strategy, while tying its development plan to trends that 451
Research has identified in the HR tech space.

451 TAKE

Thanks to its early movement in the space, Lever has become known as an innovator in the
recruitment technology space. Competition in the space is ramping up quickly, but Lever’s
analytics and professional services add-ons, combined with its future focus on automation and
forecasting, could help the firm maintain a leading position in the market landscape.

Context
Issues around talent sourcing, recruitment and management are no longer just a problem in tech. These
challenges have moved from simply impacting software development and engineering jobs to upending a host
of career markets around the world. As such, the need for tech offerings to help organizations navigate the talent
economy is paramount.

Lever doesn’t simply replace an ATS – it seeks to go beyond that by streamlining the process, expanding a given
company’s reach to passive talent, and increasing the hiring velocity, while also helping customers approach
diversity and inclusion to make real impacts in those areas. The company has roughly 225 employees, and is based
in San Francisco. Lever has customers in 40 countries.

Products
There are three products available in Lever’s portfolio – Lever Hire, Lever Nurture and Lever Talent Intelligence.
Lever Hire is an ATS product that includes end-to-end interview management, user access controls and baseline
reporting. Lever Nurture is a sourcing automation software that helps users manage candidate relationships
through campaigns, communication and reports. Finally, Lever Talent Intelligence is a customizable advanced
reporting tool with additional modules for conversion rates, source effectiveness and more. It also integrates with
other BI tools like Tableau, and provides a Lever Data API for additional customization.

Lever recommends Lever Hire for everyone, because it comes with baseline reporting. Lever Nurture is also
considered a generally applicable product, while Lever Talent Intelligence is where the company sees the biggest
customer segmentation based on their needs. The company also offers a full stack of APIs, including audit APIs,
and a professional services team for help with deployments.
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The product journey starts with a 13-part discovery process that Lever uses to map out how talent-forward an
organization is. Once Lever knows how far along a given company is in the spectrum, it recommends products
to suit its needs. The biggest initial value with Lever Hire, for example, is tracking not only candidates, but all the
details associated with their relationship to the organization – for example, from first touch, whether that’s coffee,
a first call from university, internship to employment. Then, tools like Lever Nurture Recommendations can use a
machine-learning-powered database crawler to identify good prospects and surface them as first-line candidates
for a given role. In this way, Lever operates like a Salesforce for talent relationships.

Pricing is done per employee, based on which of the three Lever Hire plans a customer chooses, and whether they
purchase a license for Lever Nurture. Lever Talent Intelligence and professional services are a custom add-on, and
factor into the pricing as well. Implementation services are a one-time fee, and the implementation team aims to
accomplish implementation in less than 90 days. Lever’s price would be considered premium for the market, but
the speed of implementation helps offset that, and keeps it competitive with other major players in the space.

As the product develops, Lever wants to move beyond automation into real intelligence, which could bring
serious contextual value to customer organizations in the future. The firm is also investing in forecasting
functionality and its R&D, providing a clearer picture of where an organization will be ending in a month or
quarter in regard to headcount spend, and providing a better look at talent spend for the future.

Strategy
Lever’s customer sweet spot is companies that consider talent a driving force. Companies that are experiencing
a lot of growth are also huge wins for Lever, especially in the lower enterprise and midmarket. The company sells
into HR and talent leads, but also targets business and sales leads. Lever is a vertical-agnostic tool.

The company considers Lever a ‘center of gravity’ product, and its long-term strategy is to be a strong ecosystem
player. Tech integration partners are typically revenue partners as well, as are recruitment process outsourcing
partners. However, the company is beginning to see some customers build more in-house tools to handle that
aspect of recruiting.

Financial
Lever has raised $73m in total funding, and its last round was a $40m series C round in 2017. The company did not
disclose its revenue to 451 Research, but we estimate Lever’s ARR to be somewhere between $40m and $50m.

Competition
Competition varies by market. On the lower end of market – specifically targeting SMBs and companies with
fewer than 100 employees – Lever mentioned JazzHR as a competitor. 451 Research would also note Zoho Recruit,
SmartRecruiters and BreezyHR as competitors for this segment.

In the midmarket, Lever mentioned Greenhouse and Jobvite as companies that are seen in competitive situations.
ApplicantStack could also be competitive in this segment. On the high end toward the enterprise, Lever competes
against iCIMS and Taleo, although not always directly or head-to-head based on product offerings.
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SWOT Analysis
ST R E N GT H S
Lever has first-mover advantage in the
next-gen recruiting space, and has created
an accessible tool that can shift customer
thinking around talent. The company has
a broad customer base, clear narrative
and defined paths for growth and product
development.
O P P O RT U N I T I E S
Lever’s focus on machine learning and
intelligence is key to providing contextual
cues around the future of knowledge worker
recruitment for enterprises as they shift
toward a WorkOps model. Additionally, its
focus on forecasting could open up new
integrations with CPM and financial planning
and analysis vendors.
WEAKNESSES
Lever’s products are at a premium price
point, and while they offer much deeper
analytics and value than some others in
the market, it may be difficult to compete
against cheaper startups with fewer
features, or larger talent management suites
that include employee engagement and
retention tools.
T H R E ATS
The biggest threat to Lever would be
a major HCM suite acquiring a direct
competitor and folding their recruitment
analytics and tracking into its end-to-end
pipeline and could include features like
document management and e-signature
without an integration partner.