Today we are both excited and a little sad to announce that we have sold our stake in We Select, a leader in digital employer branding, data-driven ads and talent acquisition through social media.
We Select will continue its growth journey with experienced PE fund Procuritas who has acquired a majority of the company while founders Rickard Rydström and Patrik Jankevics will reinvest a significant amount and together hold a large minority.
We Select was founded in 2011 by Rickard and Patrik and was mainly focused on “traditional” recruiting through consultants. However, years of experience and deep understanding of the recruitment market and customers’ need made it possible for We Select to both digitize and automize the process as well as increasing the number of relevant candidates for the job applications. The fact is that We Select finds multiple more relevant candidates to a fraction of the price and time of recruiting companies. That is why large companies with high and recurring recruitment needs such as ICA, Rusta, Karolinska, DHL and others repeatedly use We Select for their employer branding and hiring needs, witnessed by a 170% customer retention rate.
We made an early investment in We Select three years ago in the summer of 2019. At that point the digital transformation had just started - We Select had less than SEK 10m of digital revenue. We invested based on a strong and experienced team who understood the true industry challenges, a highly data-driven and scalable business model driving growth and profitability and a growing market in need for more efficient and modern recruiting. Today We Select has some 230 customers in 12 countries, a growth pace of 100% YoY / SEK 42m in revenues 2021 and passing SEK 50m this spring, healthy EBITDA margins and generates positive cash flows. The transformation was done during Covid and at first the Company was hit hard (as the rest of the industry). But Rickard saw the opportunity to accelerate the planned transformation and he made some tough decisions early on. One of them being letting go of manually assisted recruitment revenue and migrate as much as possible to the digital process.
Thank you to the We Select team Rickard Rydqvist, Patrik Jankevics, Sonja Laurent, Emilia Eriksson and Poja Thami. We want to extend an extra thanks to Andreas Granstedt and Olle Rydqvist, founders of our investee company PE Accounting and early investors in We Select, for introducing us to We Select. Thank you Alexandra Strömberg for joining us on the way. We are also grateful for the financial advice by HDR (Carl-Sebastian Zadig, Emma Aker Stridbeck and Tony Sun) as well as legal advice in both of our transactions and throughout these three investment years by the one and only Tuula Tallavaara.
Together with new majority owner Procuritas we are sure the We Select team will continue its growth journey. Good luck to the whole We Select team and thank you for letting us be part of your journey!
/Your A&D team
