Our Investment in Match2

At Acadian Ventures, we look for founders and teams who don’t just understand the broken mechanics of the talent ecosystem — but who have the earned scars and vision to rewire it. That’s what we found in Doug Berg, Darren Simons, and Elaine Orler, the powerhouse team behind Match2.

If you’ve been anywhere near recruiting technology over the last 20 years, you’ve probably crossed paths with Doug — whether through his work at Jobs2web, tech-focused startups, or his uncanny ability to see around corners in talent innovation. Darren has been buying and building talent strategies for most of the top staffing agencies and RPO’s across the industry and has a vast network and understanding of how the best organizations hire talent.  Elaine, meanwhile, has spent decades helping global enterprises architect and benchmark talent acquisition processes. She’s a rare combination: visionary thinker and system-scale operator.Together, they are aiming to do something both obvious and radical: solving the candidate black hole problem at scale.

The Problem: Fractured Journeys, Silent & Non-Interactive Career Sites

The modern job search experience is still a maze. Candidates hop from career site to career site, set up dozens of fragmented profiles, endure clunky applications, and rarely hear back. Employers spend fortunes driving traffic to career sites — only to lose 95% of visitors before they apply. Worse, most companies have no way to know who’s genuinely interested in working for them unless there’s a live job posting, and are blind to where and why they lost the chance to hire most of their applicants. It’s like running an e-commerce store where customers can’t save items to their cart unless they’re ready to buy — and the store forgets who they are when they return.  Even worse, the store of most ATS systems makes you re-create your account every time, enter all of your shipping and credit card information, and doesn't tell you when your products might show up.

The Match2 Thesis

Match2 introduces what the team calls a Universal Candidate Experience — a layer that threads through the hiring platforms to instantly recognize and personalize the experience for any known job seeker visiting a career site. It enables candidates to “Favorite” employers before they apply, offers instant job matching based on the candidates profile, an interactive application process that informs and optimizes every apply (also eliminating fake apply’s) which delivers an “intelligent application” to recruiters saving them exhaustive review time, and then helps create an interactive data exchange between candidates and company so that they can interact during the application phase and stay in touch during their entire career. On the employer side, Match2 creates what we see as a Direct Talent Network — a kind of “private LinkedIn” where companies can build persistent relationships with potential candidates, even when roles aren’t open. It powers a two-way street: candidates can update their profile and job search status, while employers gain visibility into who is still active, who’s accepted another offer, and who might be the perfect match for a role that hasn’t been posted yet. This isn’t just a feature. It’s a structural improvement that adds a network effect across the entire talent ecosystem.  Think how much better it is to use Facebook Marketplace than Craigslist when trying to find and interact between buyers and sellers.

Why We’re Excited

We believe Match2 can become a critical connective layer across the hiring tech stack. It’s interoperable, modular, and purpose-built for the messiness of real-world hiring systems. It’s already gaining traction with leading recruitment marketing platforms and talent acquisition teams who are hungry to fix their top-of-funnel experience and to transform their linear “apply or goodbye” career sites into “social engagement & enrichment” experiences on both sides — not just with another tool, but with a networked approach. Doug, Darren and Elaine are not new to this rodeo. They’ve earned trust from customers, investors, and technologists. But more importantly, they’ve earned credibility through listening — to job seekers, recruiters, sourcers, talent acquisition teams, and have deep trusted relationships with most of the hiring platforms in the market and everyone in between.

We’re proud to back Match2 as they help shift the recruiting world from “post and pray” to “connect and convert.” Let’s build something better for candidates and employers alike.