With seed funding under $1 million and a cozy office at Durham’s American Underground at Main , Highergrid plans to change the recruitment industry.

The company, founded in April 2015, took its software to market in February, says CEO Joel McLean. The four-employee company says companies that use it software can attract higher quality talent.

McLean explains that its tools, which include a custom-made career site platform, result in a high conversion rate.

“We reinvent the career site, the place where people post their job descriptions. We take the old job description and turn it into an attractive high converting landing page,” McLean says.

“We also have an analytics platform that tells recruiters where the high quality talent is coming from.” That helps shape recruitment marketing.

Two models

Recruiters can pay Highergrid per interview, but larger companies can integrate it into their recruitment process in a subscription model.

. “The per interview model is more or less a software as a service. We integrate directly with the tools they use right now,” McLean says.”For for companies hiring under 20 people a month, the per interview model is recommended.

McLean points out that the companies product is data driven. “That comes from my background,” he says. “My career was in what is called talent sourcing – actually going out and finding people to apply for jobs, managing the career site, and marketing.”

“As I got father along with that I started implementing better ways to get data on what was actually happening. It’s not uncommon for recruiters to have very little data about what’s happening on their career site.”

McLean realized that converting high quality talent was not a matter of hiring more people to go out and look for more job applicants, when they were only converting 5 percent. I realize most of our problems were a marketing problem.” So he began to look for ways to do better.

McLean says his company software can increase conversion rates to at least 15 percent – three times that 25 percent industry standard.

Out with the old

Most recruiters today are still using the same model they didn’t 2002, he notes. Today he says “you really want to be able to take advantage of recruiting on Facebook and with display advertising, but they can’t because they still using the old job board model.”

Companies can go beyond the old model and start advertising to job applicants they want to be marketing to and without the applicants actually having to go to a job search site.

A 2015 study, McLean notes, said 75 percent of workers in the United States are open to a new job, but only 25 percent are looking. I agree can help recruiters get the attention of all the job seekers not just the 25 percent actively looking..

“We reach a better audience at a higher scale than traditional recruiting”, he says.

Highergrid offers a free data-driven analysis of recruiter talent attraction processes.

On the web: http://www.Hiregrid.io/