HuntClub

Hunt Club, an executive tech-enabled talent firm and SaaS provider, set out to build a new and better hiring experience for fast-growing tech and venture backed companies using the power of relationships and referrals. To do this, the firm tapped into a network of over 13,000 connected industry experts, leveraging their extended networks to create a pool of over 6 million high-quality candidates. The firm uses this pool of talent to fuel its executive search business, helping high-growth companies identify the best potential leaders to grow and scale their businesses. More recently, the firm has expanded its offering with a venture enablement SaaS platform, which allows venture capital firms to use this same technology to leverage their existing social capital to win more competitive investments opportunities and to find top talent for their portfolio companies.

Hunt Club ingests relationship data from their network of expert data. However, some of the data sources they draw upon provide limited or incomplete profiles. Hunt Club needed to identify a data partner who could help them to enrich those profiles in order to create the most complete and fully contextualized picture of each candidate possible. By enhancing candidate records with critical professional information like work experience, skills, and educational background along with expert referrals, Hunt Club would be able to offer both its executive search clients and its venture enablement platform users a more complete and informed candidate database.

To succeed, Hunt Club needed to perform look-ups and leverage data in real-time. By transitioning from a data license to the PDL Enrichment API, the firm was more readily able to move toward retrieving matching data on the fly. This allowed Hunt Club’s team of full stack engineers to work with the data more easily upfront in a way that scaled with their business, rather than having to stand up and rapidly grow a data engineering team to handle the ETL processes needed to bring bulk data into their system. PDL’s developer-first focus allowed the Hunt Club team to seamlessly transition from receiving bulk data via a data license to exclusively building off of the Enrichment API and gradually increasing the number of available API calls as their business grew.

Hunt Club selected People Data Labs as a data partner to help it provide these more robust profiles and to build out their social graph. By leveraging PDL’s data license and the Enrichment API, Hunt Club was able to efficiently tap into PDL’s more than three billion professional profiles. This allowed them to concretely identify candidates sourced from their proprietary expert network and to enrich their records with fresh, accurate professional information in a way that can scale with their internal business and with their growing pool of SaaS clients. The company has since transitioned to using solely the Enrichment API, allowing them to conduct more focused queries in real time.

Speed, flexibility, and scale: Leveraging PDL’s Enrichment API allows Hunt Club to scale and focus on building their core product more quickly without having to first build out a full data engineering team to support these activities. The flexible nature of the Enrichment API offered a simpler solution for Hunt Club’s fast growing business without sacrificing quality, accuracy, or cost.

Superior matching logic: Leveraging PDL’s Enrichment API allows Hunt Club to tap into PDL’s proprietary matching logic. Instead of needing to replicate PDL’s data science efforts on top of a flat file, Hunt Club focused on what they do best – building a powerful referral platform for their clients.

More referrals: Hunt Club’s technology relies on referrals. When a user in the expert network has a connection in their social graph that matches specific employment history criteria, Hunt Club sends an automated email to that member of the expert network requesting a referral. Emails are only generated when Hunt Club has a high degree of confidence that the record is a true match, meaning that accuracy and recency of both work history and contact information are essential for this process to work in real time. Since leveraging PDL’s highly accurate, up-to-date professional data to enrich and match employment history, Hunt Club has seen a noted uptick in the number of referrals generated through this process.

20% increase in match rate: Accuracy is key for Hunt Club. Given a set of parameters, Hunt Club’s tools must match with confidence on an individual’s profile in order to initiate the referral process. Since working with PDL, the firm’s match rate has increased by roughly 20% across all of its internal and SaaS tools.

Fewer mismatches: In a relationship-sensitive business like executive search, mismatches can be disastrous. While Hunt Club had relatively few mismatches in the past, each one presented the possibility of providing a negative partnership experience. Since onboarding PDL data in 2018, mismatches have steadily declined year-over-year. In 2021, the company saw zero mismatches.

More confidence transparency: While other providers only share results in which they are highly confident, PDL offers both high confidence matches as well as access to matches with lower confidence scores which can provide valuable additional context and identity clues. For Hunt Club, this additional data is a critical piece of the puzzle, allowing Hunt Club’s services team to piece together individual candidate identities even on the rare occasion when PDL cannot provide a highly confident match. Because PDL also only charges when a match meets the customers desired confidence threshold, it was easy to align these incentives.