Jibe & the Reinvention of Hiring

A quiet layer between you and your next job

If you applied for a job at a large American company sometime in the last decade, there is a reasonable chance you passed through software you never saw the name of. That was, for years, the point. Jibe built the front door of enterprise hiring - the career site, the search result, the mobile application form - and then made itself invisible behind the logos of its customers.

Jibe at a glance

Recruiting, treated like marketing

Jibe's central insight was that a job application is a conversion funnel. Candidates behave like consumers: they search, they compare, they abandon a slow page, and they respond to relevance. So the company built tools that borrowed from digital marketing and pointed them at talent acquisition.

The flagship offering was the Jibe Recruiting Cloud, a platform that let employers source, nurture, and market to candidates across the hiring journey. Around it sat a family of products, each aimed at a specific point of friction.

Built for the employers hardest to move

Jibe sold to enterprise talent-acquisition teams - the recruiters and HR technologists inside very large organizations, where legacy applicant tracking systems and human capital management suites made even small candidate-experience improvements difficult. Its named customers included Johnson & Johnson, Siemens, and Comcast, who used Jibe to drive the front-end of their candidate experience.

Reporting has also linked Jibe's technology to large employers such as Walmart, Wells Fargo, Macy's, AT&T, General Motors, Accenture and UPS.

The problem it solved

Large employers lost qualified candidates before an application was ever completed - to slow, desktop-bound career pages, poor search visibility, and no way to nurture people who weren't ready to apply. Jibe closed those gaps: it made applications mobile, made career sites discoverable on Google, gave recruiters a CRM to keep candidates warm, and gave leaders analytics to see where the funnel leaked.

Nine years, roughly $37 million

Jibe's funding tracked its ambition to move upmarket into the Fortune 1000. The company raised approximately $36.9 million in total, drawing investors including SAP Ventures, Polaris Partners, Lerer Hippeau and Zelkova Ventures.

The 2014 Series C - the company's Series C round - was pitched openly as a bet to "transform the hiring market." It gave Jibe the runway to deepen its enterprise product and expand its customer base among the largest employers in the country.

The layer, not the replacement

iCIMS acquires Jibe, June 2019

In June 2019, iCIMS - the Holmdel, New Jersey-based applicant tracking leader founded in 2000 - acquired Jibe for an undisclosed sum, with Piper Jaffray serving as Jibe's exclusive advisor. The deal came at a moment when iCIMS, majority-owned by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, was assembling an end-to-end talent-acquisition platform.

Jibe became the foundation of iCIMS' recruitment marketing solution, Attract - available as part of the iCIMS Talent Cloud or as a front-end to other ATS and HCM systems. Its career sites, CRM, machine-learning matching and analytics filled a strategic gap in iCIMS' portfolio, complementing capabilities like the chat and text recruiting it had gained through TextRecruit.

From DemoPit to Talent Cloud

What people ask about Jibe