Startup Spotlight #8: Dover

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Dover is building the first truly modern recruiting agency. We help some of the fastest-growing companies hire the best talent for their open roles.

Recruiting is a $50B industry in the US, all the largest agencies still have incredibly manual processes. Recruiters spend countless hours on administrative work, so they have less time to do what they do best: pitch and close candidates.

We've built a better way. Our advanced ML-powered matching software finds the perfect candidates for a particular role, and our NLP outreach system reaches out to those candidates in a highly personalized way. We're automating the entire recruiting stack, from sourcing to scheduling.

Startup Spotlight: Dover

Problem: Hiring the right people is critical. Founders and hiring managers need to be very involved in the process, but some parts--finding the right candidates on the interview, reaching out to them, and getting them to interview--is tedious and time-consuming.

Market: Dover works with founders of 1-50 person companies and hiring managers at 50-1000 person companies to get them the hires they need. We support roles in all parts of the organization (eng, product, sales, etc) and across all seniorities.

Solution: Just take 10 minutes to describe your role, and Dover will reach out to 50 ideal candidates per week, right from your email account. We evaluate hundreds of data points for every candidate to make sure we're reaching out to the best people, and we customize our outreach to get the highest response rates possible.

Team: Our founders are all repeat entrepreneurs from MIT and Stanford. Prior to Dover, Max ran a profitable eCommerce technology company, Anvisha founded a collaborative knowledge base startup, and George ran his own recruiting agency.

Recent Success:

Kolysh: We've been able to build many of the complexities of recruiting into a real technology product. This allows us to scale our high level of service across more and more customers. Most other recruiting companies simply use recruiters behind the scenes, which leads to longer ramp-up times, higher costs, human error, and other scaling issues. We've done many head-to-head comparisons between Dover and full-time sources and recruiting coordinators, and we outperform every time.

Recent Struggle:

Kolysh: When it comes to hiring, every company's needs and preferences are different. Additionally, we do our best to integrate into the existing workflows at the company. This has made Dover an extremely flexible product, but it also makes it challenging for us to build a one-size-fits-all solution. We've done a pretty good job with this so far, but getting it perfectly right will unlock a new level of growth for us.

Founder Advice:

Kolysh: Your early team will be built largely from your own network, so it's good to focus on growing your personal network even before you start your company. Surround yourself with smart people early and often. Work on side projects with friends to get a sense of working together. And when you're looking to hire beyond your immediate network, get in touch!

(For more on how to leverage your personal network to build your startup, read this F2F Case Study here: Case Study: Paragon CTO Ishmael Samuel Reflects On How He Chose His Cofounder)

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Kolysh: Here are three founders you should check out next!

• Dean Yim, Founder of Loop Support: Customer support as a service, for growing companies. Loop hires, trains, and manages customer support agents.
• Jen Liu, Founder of Uplevel: Uplevel is a concierge that matches you with a personal development coach.
• Steven Glinert, Founder of Kinta Artificial Intelligence: Kinta Artificial Intelligence helps manufacturers increase their throughput, decrease downtime, and automate the production planning process.

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