'Some companies are very, very ready to hire': This VC-created job board highlights key trends among the startups still looking to add employees
- Silicon Valley startups have been slammed by layoffs over the past month, as the coronavirus pandemic has squeezed business and threatened to dry up funding.
- But close to 180 startups have sent in Google Form responses to join a job board of startups actively hiring amid the coronavirus pandemic, a Google Sheet created by Jai Sajnani, a tech investor at New Enterprise Associates.
- "Some companies are very, very ready to hire," Sajnani told Business Insider in an interview, adding that companies who'd recently raised funding and were still in the early stages of product development were looking to attract talent.
- On the last sheet of the database, Sajnani's included links to other job listings cropping up, like the list of available positions posted by women's networking company Elpha and a list of virtual internship postings.
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Silicon Valley startups have been slammed by layoffs over the past month, as the coronavirus pandemic has squeezed business and threatened to dry up funding. And a recent survey conducted by NFX showed that more than 50% of startups have implemented freezes on hiring.
But it's not all bad news for job-hunters - some startups are still hiring amid the pandemic, according to Jai Sajnani, a principal at venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates.
A little less than two weeks ago, Sajnani sent out a call for startups still looking to hire amid the coronavirus pandemic and received a flurry of responses from startups, which he's aggregated into a database of job postings, broken down by the companies hiring and the types roles they're hiring for, like sales & marketing or engineering.
Sajnani's not the only one looking to help those displaced from layoffs. Y Combinator has updated its job board, and women's networking company Elpha has a list of available positions at various tech companies.
Sajnani's own database includes links to additional resources, and even includes links to virtual internships.
Perhaps most importantly, startups that are still in a position to hire are responding enthusiastically to calls like his.
"We've put together just over 160 responses from different players, which is just awesome," Sajnani told Business Insider on Friday, less than two weeks after the list had been put together. He even laughed that there were some cases where multiple employees from the same company had sent in entries on the Google Form he's using to collect information (As of Monday morning, the number of entries has risen to 177). "Some companies are very, very ready to hire."
Early trends
Curious about what startups would be looking to add people amid the pandemic, Business Insider asked Sajnani whether he'd seen any specific types of startups looking to hire. As it turns out, he'd already crunched the data.
First off, it's important to note that most startups are only open to hiring a few new positions: "About 50% of them have 1-5 roles available; just 11% are hiring 20+ new workers. So those are the two bounds," Sajnani said.
Enterprise startups lead the hiring push - 50% of the list is made up of enterprise tech companies, 30% are consumer tech companies, and just 15% are healthcare companies. The rest are all under different buckets, Sajnani says.
And so far, these startups are "skewed toward the earlier stages of funding." About 40% of the startups are in the seed or pre-seed funding stages, about 30% are in the Series A stage - and only 8% are in the Series E stage or beyond.
It's an interesting contrast to the market for seed-stage funding, which is projected to drop 22% according to the research firm CB Insights.
But VCs like Semil Shah, a partner at both Lightspeed Venture Partners and Haystack, his own institutional seed-stage fund, also have previously observed that now may be a good time for founders to focus on building products.
"For entrepreneurs, it's a great time to build products, hunker down, be lean and mean," Shah told Business Insider in an interview in March, even as he observed that VCs would be slowing down funding.
NEA's Sajnani offered a similar piece of reasoning to explain why some startups were still continuing to hire.
"These may be companies who already were heads-down in the product development phase and weren't in-market yet," Sajnani said. "And they're still looking to bring on additional talent to help them on that path, on that mission."