For decades the job advertisements market and the application/selection process have not evolved, increasingly shaking off the needs of the new generations. Headquartered in Milan, StepsConnect is a recruiting platform that helps companies quickly find qualified candidates.
Expansion plans
The HR tech startup just closed a €1 million investment round from a group of investors formed by 40Jemz Ventures, Eden Ventures by IAG, Maggioli Ventures, Moffu Labs, GĔNĔRAS Corporate, Moonstone Fund, KF-Invest and Enzima12. Also, strategic business angels, including Emiliano Maria Cappuccitti, Gianpaolo Naef, Massimo Cioffi, Dino Caprioni, and Massimo Pagnetti, experts in the HR field, participated in this round.
In addition to this investment, Stepsconnect is preparing for a seed round in the coming months. It eyes to use the funding to accelerate its expansion abroad. Recently, it has been testing and investing in the optimisation of a product that can disrupt the recruiting process.
“StepsConnect is a fresh and more current solution than ever that aims to fill this gap. We are thrilled to support Matteo and his team in this innovative adventure. We continue the search for the next startups to invest in, which solve the usual problems innovatively and improve the efficiency of processes with intelligence and innovation,” said David Erba, 40Jemz Ventur Co-Managing Partner.
How was the idea born?
StepsConnect was founded in 2022 by Matteo Trovò, Anton Morale, and Nicolò Caruzzo. Matteo and Nicolò were colleagues at KPMG, while Anton was a childhood friend of Matteo, known during high school, and met again at the Università Politecnica di Torino.
The idea to create a recruiting platform came from the challenge developed by Nestlè, specifically a pre-interview gamification platform used to classify junior candidates via a business game. The idea took shape and Steps Srl was born in 2020, subsequently adapted and sold in white label to a consultancy company. After this experience, StepsConnect was born.
“The idea of StepsConnect was born in 2022, from interviews and customer scientific investigations carried out with users of our first platform. As a team, we have been working together for several years and our bond is very strong, such as the values that drive us and the shared interest in complex problems. When we started, we knew we wanted to do something big, but amid the pandemic what was most useful to us was developing platforms for clients,” commented Matteo Trovò, CEO of StepsConnect.
“We are riding the wave of digital transformation in the Italian market: HRtech is becoming increasingly important, and the numbers are proving it thanks to the growth it is experiencing today. Over the last ten years, we have realised that HR has never evolved and today our product aims to answer a market that is transforming a vertical, solid, and fast answer,” said Denis Balbo, Head of Sales.
How does this platform work?
StepsConnect offers a solution to the recruiting challenges with its platform. It helps companies’ HR teams quickly find qualified GenZ and Millennial candidates. The platform is based on a matching algorithm between job posts and candidates that improves the quality of applications analysed by recruiters, making job advertisements more attractive, allowing candidates to search for jobs more efficiently, and maintaining the social channel as one of its distinctive elements on the market. All this is done with AI to support talent acquisition.
Candidates can register on the platform for free by entering their information and, where possible, their experiences and skills without having to put precise job title keywords and receive targeted offers specifically for their profile. Furthermore, all job advertisements have a very clear and understandable structure.
StepsConnect specialises in vertical fields such as retail, large-scale distribution, hospitality, and fashion, which have a high staff turnover, and use a multichannel strategy. It works for important companies such as Roadhouse to Mediaset, Gruppo Vegè, Rinascente, and Autoguidovie, and 70,000 candidates in just a year.
