Startup Characteristics
Seven Lanes is a curated job marketplace for Europe’s best students and graduates. Focusing on top-tier internship and full-time roles, Seven Lanes connects outstanding young professionals with great companies at scale. Their talent advocates and account managers are dedicated to provide candidates and employers with objective guidance and an unparalleled user experience along the full recruitment process from the first contact all the way to the successful hire. Both sides request access to Seven Lanes and are then screened by its curation team. Candidates enter precisely their preferences after which a limited amount of hand-picked positions are presented to them by a sophisticated algorithm. Moreover, employers can actively engage with talent they find in the Seven Lanes talent pool. Only if mutual interest exists, both sides can easily get in contact to proceed to an interview. The business model is a success-fee based pricing scheme where companies only pay if they make a hire. Seven Lanes firstly adopts the idea of curation to the job search to meet the high demands of Europe’s best students which follows the well-established trend of curated services like Foodora, Outfittery or Carzada.
Personal Characteristics
Seven Lanes was founded in June, 2016, by five friends right after graduation. While Alex, Fabian, Maxim, and Daniel studied business administration at WHU, Karim is a former student of the University of Mannheim. As students, they had all faced the daunting task of trying to land a top-tier internship or full-time position at a great company. They lamented that the options available – online postings, career fairs, and job boards – were akin to "shopping for a house with a phone book.” During the course of numerous conversation, they struck upon the idea for Seven Lanes: a marketplace that matched the most promising students and graduates in a way that was fast, efficient, and candidate-centric.
Business Development and Challenges
Seven Lanes has received a six-digit pre-seed funding in early 2016 from serial entrepreneur and highly respected business angel Stephan Schubert. The team immediately set up their office in Berlin, Kreuzberg, and hired a great tech and business development team to successfully test their business idea’s underlying hypotheses. Having launched their final platform and closed a significant seed financing round in October, Seven Lanes is now ready to disrupt the European recruitment market.
