HR platform Rekruta snaps up funding from East Ventures

Recruiting can be a nightmare for companies. It’s time-consuming and often sucks the energy out of your human resource team, if you even have one. That’s why some outsource this function to third parties to save time and cut costs. But there’s a risk: not being hands-on may result in bad hires, screwing up your company all the same.

A Jakarta-based startup called Rekruta, which just obtained an undisclosed amount of seed funding from East Ventures, aims to make hiring a breeze for companies. It built a full suite that’s meant to help businesses manage their roster of job candidates by automating most of the hiring process.

Rekruta’s product has email syncing and Chrome extension options that allow you to source candidates and automatically respond to every submitted application. It also lets you post job openings simultaneously on social media and job boards in Indonesia, and schedule interviews in multiple calendars.

But its best feature yet is the ability of the HR and other departments of a company to collaborate in real-time on the system. Rekruta makes sure that managers are on the same page by automatically generating and sending a full profile summary of a candidate’s journey and feedback via email.

There are over 44,000 medium to large firms in Indonesia, so the potential for Rekruta is huge.

The startup has landed several clients, including online-to-offline ecommerce company Kudo. It’s a SaaS-based model so it’s charging fees based on usage, but cofounder and CEO Silvia Pratama declined to disclose the rates.

“Considering that there are more than 44,000 medium to big enterprises in Indonesia, the potential and opportunities for Indonesia’s HR SaaS market are tremendous. HR is already a billion-­dollar industry globally, with room for growth,” she says.

She adds, “We project that Rekruta will attract more than 100 medium to big enterprises as paying clients.”

To keep sensitive HR data secure, Rekruta claims it’s supported by robust tech that has become the standard for most Silicon Valley companies. The company’s physical infrastructure is managed by Amazon, according to Silvia. “Our cloud application platform protects clients from threats because it is embedded with a range of security controls.”

Rekruta was co­founded by Silvia and CTO Yanuar Wibisono, who have both honed their IT skills in the US.

At UC Berkeley, Silvia worked as an assistant project manager in a US$15 million collaborative venture between Parsons Brinckerhoff and the San Francisco International Airport. For his part, Yanuar is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and worked for more than six years as a software engineer for big­ tech companies like Quora and Wolfram Alpha.

East Ventures managing partner Willson Cuaca explains the VC decided to add Rekruta to its portfolio because it sees promise in the angle from which the startup tackles recruiting.

“Rekruta is helping companies from the demand ­side when it comes to managing human resource problems,” says Cuaca.