By 2012, Sarah Nahm, a former Googler who had worked as a speechwriter for Marissa Mayer and a designer on the Chrome team, knew she was ready for something different.
There was no "lightning strike" moment of inspiration, Nahm tells Business Insider. She and two colleagues knew they wanted to start a company together. They all had an interest in recruitment and human resources. They just didn't know exactly what they would do.
Over the course of nine months, the Nahm and her partners worked their networks and embedded within tech companies including Twitter, trying to figure out what problem they could solve.
To Nahm's surprise, it turned out that she was in the right place at the right time. At all of these companies, they found the same frustrations. The headaches weren't over anything technical. Instead, the thing these high-growth Silicon Valley companies had a tough time solving was hiring. They wanted the best programmers and the best talent, but the market was just too competitive.
"You'd expect it to be 'big data' this or 'machine learning' that, but it's human," Nahm says.
And so she and her two partners formed Lever. The software startup, under Nahm's command as CEO, is designed to help with the hiring headaches she saw bubbling up back in 2012.
And investors like what they're seeing from the company. On Thursday, Lever plans to officially announce that it's raised $30 million in a Series C venture round. That brings the total amount its raised from venture investors to $62 million.
It seems to be working. Lever counts over 1,000 customers, including Netflix and Cirque Du Soleil, according to Nahm. Lever itself now has over 100 employees.
Nahm says the big question for Lever now is: "How can we connect human potential to meaningful work?
Tools for a changing time
Lever's launch and growth have come as the very idea of employment is changing, for better or for worse.
Millennials, especially, have earned a reputation for "job-hopping," jumping from position to position and company to company every year or two as they pursue their own non-linear paths to success.
In Silicon Valley and beyond, there's a veritable talent war for top-tier engineers. And as software continues to eat the world, even blue-collar jobs like farm work are requiring a growing array of computer skills.
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