Introducing Welcome: Bringing the offer, closing, and compensation data experience out of the dark ages for HR teams and candidates

We’ve all interviewed for jobs, changed jobs, and hired team members. We’ve all received an offer letter, negotiated, tried to understand the legal jargon, and what our equity is worth. Many of us have been on the other side of the table trying to figure out what to offer a candidate and how to best get them over the finish line. This is after we’ve spent 90–120 days and tens of thousands of dollars recruiting them, only to give them an offer letter and a two sentence congratulations email expecting them to accept within five days.

Candidates are demanding more transparency about compensation, equity, and pay equality, and most don’t understand the value of their equity, or what options mean. As a result, HR teams are working hard to define their compensation brands and how they talk about compensation internally and externally.

HR teams also struggle when figuring out what to pay candidates, how to implement compensation bands, and how the market is changing. This has become an even bigger problem as teams shift remote. The challenge with today’s compensation data services is that they are expensive, self-reported (inaccurate), and are not real-time (often lagging the market by 6–8 months).

Today’s HR teams need help improving their hiring brands, personalizing the closing experience, collaborating on the closing process, better explaining total compensation to candidates (cash, equity, benefits, and perks), and having access to real-time compensation and equity data that’s integrated with their entire people management process.

We like to say that it takes a village to close a candidate. It’s not just the hiring manager or recruiting lead. It’s the entire team. Today’s closing experience has been the same for decades and everyone has accepted the status quo. HR teams and candidates deserve better, and that’s why we built Welcome.

At Welcome, our mission is to help teams build lasting relationships with candidates to improve close and retention rates. With that in mind, we created Welcome to help teams elevate their hiring brands, easily explain total compensation through our digital offer experience, and integrate our real-time compensation data to help teams know what to pay.

Today, we’re announcing the launch of our private alpha and our $1.4mm pre-seed round led by Ludlow Ventures. Our investors also include Weekend Fund, Global Founders Capital, Shrug Capital, Basement Fund, Elizabeth Weil (ex a16z, 137 ventures), Kevin Weil (co-creator of Libra at Facebook), Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg (Flatiron Health), Ben Porterfield and Keenan Rice (Looker), Bryan Mahoney and Henry Davis (ex Glossier) Armando Mann (ex Relate IQ, Salesforce), and Jordan Bettman (Radian Capital, ex Bain Capital Ventures). You can read more on TechCrunch here: https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/19/welcome-raises-1-4m-to-streamline-the-hiring-process/.

We’re just getting started, and can’t wait to get our product into more hands over the coming months. If you’re hiring and growing your team, please sign up to learn more. If you’re interested in joining us and building something special, get in touch or view our open roles.