By Allan Maurer
UPDATED: RESTON, VA—VisualCV Inc. has raised $5 million from Heidrick & Struggles, Vahalla Partners and seed round investors. At the same time the company launched its VisualCV.com site, which allows job seekers to build, manage and securely share an online career portfolio.
The 20-employee company says VisualCV.com is the first website to allow professionals to do this all in one place, with unmatched privacy and control, and for free.
CEO and co-founder Clint Heiden tells Techjournal South the company “is hiring and we definitely accept Visualcvs.”
He adds that the site is a place where job-seekers and recruiters can come in and do everything in one place and “tailor the CV toward your audience. You can control who has access and track who actually comes in to take a look.”
Phillip Merrick, co-founder and chair tells TJS that a chief diffentiator between Visualcv and other job sites is that it offers the passive job-seeker happy in his or her current position a private and secure method of posting a resume and supporting materials.
Moreover, he says, “You can let the system know you want to be considered if a job posting comes up from company xyz that you find interesting. So we can reach the passive job-seeker, which is very important to recruiters.”
During beta testing, Heiden says, “We wanted both employers and candidates to find the process easier and saved up to 90 percent of the time involved in initial interview processes.”
Private showings during the beta testing led to the investment from recruiter Heidrick & Struggles. “Their currency is resumes and we’re going to replace the resume,” says Merrick.
Commenting on the funding, Kevin Kelly, CEO of Heidrick & Struggles said, “The founders of Visual CV are world class software entrepreneurs.”
Gene Riechers, Partner, Valhalla Partners, added, “We invested in VisualCV because we know that they will fundamentally change the way people look for jobs and manage their careers.”
The company points out that traditional resumes have many limitations: they become stale and out of date, lack detailed qualifying information, do not showcase work samples or achievements, provide no tracking capability, do not let professionals stand out, often sit on resume sites drawing unwanted solicitations, or go unnoticed at the bottom of an inbox.
VisualCV lets users add photos, a portfolio of work samples, create multiple versions for different audiences, add charts and graphs, showcase previous employers, with “guaranteed privacy” and the ability to share results with employers, colleagues, customers, partners, and friends.
Heiden is a well-known leader in the recruiting and technology industry. Heiden co-founded The Heiden Group in 2004, a successful recruiting firm, after spending 15 years building and leading sales teams for companies such as UUNET and Cable & Wireless resulting in $8billion in revenues.
Merrick is the former Chairman and CEO of webMethods, Inc., a vendor of business integration software, which he co-founded in 1996. webMethods, Inc. was the most successful software IPO to date in February of 2000.
On the Web: www.visualcv.com
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