Teal, a platform that looks to help people land jobs that they love, has closed a $5 million seed round, which was led by Flybridge Capital, with participation from Lerer Hippeau, Corigin Ventures, Aleph, Oceans Ventures, Hight Output, AVG Basecamp, and Kairos Angels.
Teal launched in November of 2019 with a system that did all of the heavy lifting for people seeking jobs, including resume consultations, searching listings, and sending application information to the right people. Essentially, Teal handled everything but the interview.
Since launch, the company has made a slight pivot to a product that’s more scalable, called Career Assist.
Fano explained that, with the original product (called Career Agent), there was a group of people who were very clear on what they wanted and saw great success on the platform. But there was also a group of people who were unsure about their career path that Teal was spending a tremendous amount of time and energy on, and they still weren’t seeing success.
“There was something kind of flawed in this model in that the people that want us the most and will pay us for the longest are going to be the least satisfied,” said Fano, adding that Career Agent was built more for job-hopping than helping people who were unemployed find a job. “So we decided to take all the learnings we’ve gotten through Career Agent and understand where things repeat and where there are inefficiencies that don’t get identified on an individual basis. When you do that for many people, you can start to identify those patterns.”
Career Assist is a curriculum that allows cohorts (of 20-30 people) to learn the best possible process for finding and landing a job they want. It includes a four-week workshop (eight classes in total) guided by experts who lead live sessions around everything from writing a resume to how to send in that resume (to the right person) to interview skills.
According to cofounder and CEO Dave Fano, applying for a job through a website is one of the worst things you can do. Instead, applicants should find the head of recruiting or HR and send them a direct email. There are also plenty of tactics, gleaned from the sales playbook, that increase an applicant’s chances of hearing back on an email.
Teal looks not only to give job-seekers a better, more interactive playbook for landing a job, but also pairs its members with other members who are going through the same thing, to offer emotional support and empathy during a time where people desperately need it.
Career Assist was originally launched for free, but has since moved to a paid model, costing users $149 for full access to the four-week program. Since April, more than 200 people have landed new jobs after going through the course.
Fano, a serial entrepreneur who sold his first company, CASE, to WeWork, has a much broader vision for Teal than getting a job. There are many situations over the course of a person’s career where they can benefit from guidance and expertise, such as negotiating contracts, asking for a promotion or a raise, or resigning.
Teal wants to stay with workers throughout the entirety of their career to help them navigate these more challenging situations.
Teal plans on using the funding to continue growing the team, which is currently at 12 people, with a 50/50 split between men and women.
Fano says that one of the greatest challenges for the company is also one of its biggest opportunities. He explained that most people think they need an individual, bespoke career coach because of the general complexity of individual careers.
Fano believes that by combining resources that exist with data from its existing user base, Teal can cover a broader set of situations and circumstances for people than an individual coach may be able to while still being able to give specific advice from this collective data set.
“Building up that data set is one of the bigger challenges, and that’s why these things don’t exist,” said Fano. “But that’s also why we’re taking the approach that we are, focusing on things that don’t scale, and so far we’ve seen that people are very willing to interact with us because we’ve shown we’ve got their best interest at heart.”
He added that the company has no interest in becoming a B2B tool that sells into the HR department, but rather wants to focus on the end-consumer.
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