Since its start a decade ago, the CEO of Appcast in Lebanon says the company, which provides programmatic recruitment advertising technology and services, is positioned to scale across the U.S. and globally. “There is a group of us in the Upper Valley that have built our careers in recruiting technology, and Appcast is the fourth business that we’ve built, grown, and sold,” says Founder and CEO Chris Forman, adding that he and partners Dzmitry Nikitsin and Tim McKegney were able to take advantage of a big shift in the job ad market.
Appcast was started by an experienced team that really understood the industry, had great timing, and great funders—notably PJC (formerly known as Point Judith) in Boston and Baird Venture Partners of Chicago, Forman says. “We wanted to make software that helps big companies buy and manage performance-based job ads effectively,” he says.
Within five years of its founding in Lebanon, The StepStone Group, a subsidiary of Axel Springer, a German multinational mass and online media company, acquired a majority stake in Appcast. Since then, the company has continued to grow. In 2022, Appcast, which kept its name and brand after the acquisition, launched Recruitonomics, an online hub of market data and recruiting insights. Last year, the company started Appcast Labs, acquired Bayard Advertising, and grew to more than 500 employees.
“We are majority owned now, but next year we will be completely owned by the StepStone Group, which is a German job classified business, next year,” Forman says. “They’re the third largest jobs business in the world after LinkedIn and Indeed. We’re their U.S. business.”
As Forman hands over the CEO duties on Jan. 1 to COO Matt Molinari, he says the focus is on scaling the business. “Appcast has barely penetrated the U.S. market and not really penetrated the global market,” he says. “I think if the first decade was building the category, scaling the business to deliver world class services to world class companies is the next generation. That’s one part of it. The other part of it is to continue to innovate.” He cites the work of the newly formed Appcast Labs, which uses AI on job applicant tracking systems to make it easier for candidates to find the jobs they want. “Even though we’ve been around for 10 years, we’ve got a lot of growth to go,” he says.