5Y News | 5Y Capital Portfolio Company "Nowcoder" Closes $50 Million Series B Funding
Powering the full lifecycle of campus recruiting — from sourcing to onboarding.
Nowcoder, a leading campus recruitment platform in China, announced on February 24 that it has raised $50 million in its Series B round. The round was jointly led by HSG, Shunwei Capital, 5Y Capital, Tiger Global Management, and Shenqi Capital (58.com's industrial fund), with YiBai Capital serving as the exclusive financial advisor.
Liu Kai, partner at 5Y Capital, said: "Congratulations to Nowcoder for closing its Series B round against the headwinds. Nowcoder is, in my view, the most promising startup among China's online recruitment platforms. The company has built deeply technical platforms serving both recruiters and job seekers, with powerful two-sided network effects. I look forward to seeing the company deliver even stronger performance going forward."
With a proven business model, high-quality student resources and word-of-mouth from its community, and recognition from over 1,500 well-known enterprises, Nowcoder has won the backing of top global investors despite the funding winter — further cementing its leadership position in the vertical of campus recruitment.
As China's strategies of revitalizing the country through science and education and developing a strong talent pool continue to deepen, top-tier talent has become an increasingly critical target for corporate campus recruiting. Meanwhile, Gen Z job seekers are entering the workforce with a markedly different profile. This has amplified Nowcoder's advantages in campus recruitment, given its focus on tech talent.
At the Nowcoder Youth Talent Recruitment Summit, Ye Xiangyu, founder and CEO of Nowcoder, said the new funding would be used to scale market expansion and enhance service capabilities. On the C side, the company will continue to deepen its "community + tools + content" model, accompanying students throughout their entire job-search lifecycle and empowering more tech talent in their career pursuits. On the B side, based on deep insights into the new generation of job seekers, Nowcoder will continuously upgrade its products and services to help enterprises recruit efficiently on campus.
Going forward, by precisely and efficiently connecting job seekers with employers, Nowcoder aims to continuously expand its two-sided network effects and accelerate the flywheel of its B+C growth engine.
As of January 2023, Nowcoder's community had surpassed 8 million users, with master's degree holders and above accounting for over 53%. It is the preferred job-search platform for students from Project 985/211 universities and overseas institutions, covering over 78% of tech-major graduating students.
As the only campus recruitment platform in China with a job-search learning and companion community, Nowcoder pioneered the "community + tools + content" model to support student job searches. On Nowcoder, students don't just "browse positions, submit resumes, and leave" — they gather in the community to share interview experiences, practice problems using the question bank, discuss offer decisions, and spontaneously create and consume content. As a result, Nowcoder's user engagement frequency and retention time far exceed comparable platforms — with an average active job-search period of 8 months per year and average daily time spent of 51 minutes per user.
With Nowcoder's support, numerous students have secured SP-level offers from leading tech companies such as Huawei, ByteDance, Alibaba, NIO, and China Merchants Bank. They actively share their success stories in the Nowcoder community, passing down knowledge from one cohort of "Nowcoder friends" to the next, ultimately fostering a co-created, shared culture of job-search learning and growth.
Driven by its strong reputation among high-value students, over 80% of Nowcoder's C-side user growth comes from peer referrals. In 2022 alone, Nowcoder added more than 2.5 million registered users. That same year, Nowcoder acquired Zhiye Resume, a professional resume-building tool, enhancing its resume optimization and coaching services and further strengthening its capabilities as a "one-stop job-search companion community."
The concentration of highly active, high-quality talent in the Nowcoder community has attracted significant interest from tech enterprises, which proactively approach Nowcoder for employer branding, resume sourcing, talent screening, and other campus recruitment services. During peak recruiting season, premium ad placements in the Nowcoder community must be booked 2-3 months in advance.
Nourished by the naturally fertile ground of UGC in its community, Nowcoder is able to detect job-seeking and recruiting trends at the earliest opportunity. In recent years, enterprises have increasingly focused their campus recruiting on competing for tech talent and precision hiring. Accordingly, rather than expanding indiscriminately on either the C or B side, Nowcoder has consistently stayed focused on the high-tech sector: on the C side, heavily attracting top-tier software, hardware, mechanical engineering, and other STEM students; on the B side, concentrating on serving mid-to-large tech companies with high "software content" in their recruiting positions.
Currently, virtually all top-tier internet companies choose Nowcoder for campus recruiting. Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, JD.com, Baidu, and Meituan are all long-term partners.
In the intelligent manufacturing and semiconductor hardware industries, where demands on student quality and comprehensive competence are particularly high, companies also turn to Nowcoder first when recruiting tech talent. Bob, global recruiting lead at consumer electronics benchmark company Anker, noted: "As a platform capable of efficiently acquiring high-quality talent, Nowcoder has helped us significantly improve talent reach and delivered pleasantly surprising recruiting outcomes."
As digital technology industries have evolved, Nowcoder has also gained increasing favor from fintech enterprises — 65% of the top 20 fintech companies are Nowcoder clients. A campus recruiting HR lead at China Merchants Bank headquarters offered this assessment: "Based on our past research, Nowcoder is a highly popular recruiting platform among STEM students and an important promotional channel for our training camps. The Nowcoder community brings together a large pool of outstanding fintech talent. In our collaboration with Nowcoder, we've been impressed by their deep talent insights and continuous innovation in campus recruiting approaches."
Leveraging China's leading student job-search and exchange community, Nowcoder has been a pioneer in advocating for "precision campus recruiting based on high-quality talent insights," leading campus recruitment into an era of deeper talent understanding.
Nowcoder has identified three emerging characteristics of Gen Z job seekers: emphasis on security, non-consensus thinking, and focus on experience. Specifically, they place exceptional importance on offer reliability and job stability; they are more diverse in their choices of industry, career path, and company — for instance, top talent now considers opportunities in new energy vehicles and hard tech alongside traditional internet giants; and they care more about professionalism, friendliness, and fairness at every stage of the job-search process, from resume submission to interviews.
These characteristics demand that enterprises adapt and innovate their campus recruiting approaches. To this end, Nowcoder has comprehensively upgraded its products and services across employer branding, resume sourcing, and talent screening, launching a new-generation campus recruitment solution.
First, in employer branding, Nowcoder has moved beyond traditional hard-advertising models. Based on student insight reports that diagnose corporate employer brand health, it employs a "seed planting" approach to influence the four critical stages of students' job-search journeys — interest, application, screening, and decision — integrating different products to build a full-funnel marketing matrix that shapes student perceptions and decisions over the long term.
Second, in resume sourcing, as the number of college graduates repeatedly hits record highs, enterprises are placing greater emphasis on precision recruiting. Nowcoder's approach to resume sourcing prioritizes quality over quantity, helping enterprises precisely align recruiting channels, scenarios, and methods with their talent needs.
Finally, in talent screening, Nowcoder has pioneered the upgrade from "assessment tools" to "assessment solutions." Data analysis by Nowcoder reveals that the interview pass rate gap between low and high scorers on written tests is nearly 4.3x — written test scores are far more precise filters than academic credentials or university tier. Accordingly, Nowcoder has deeply cultivated its written test content, covering 13+ question types, 1,500+ professional knowledge points, and 29+ role-specific skill assessments, while providing customized test assembly strategies tailored to enterprise positions — far exceeding other assessment products on the market. The goal is to deliver a more stable, professional, and fair assessment experience for students.
"The fastest path is the one without shortcuts! Nowcoder remains committed to going deep and doing campus recruiting well, with priority focus on the high-tech sector," Ye Xiangyu explained. "Campus recruiting is closely tied to employment and people's livelihoods. The mutual matching and mutual success of outstanding new graduates and future-leading enterprises can contribute to the country's long-term development. Nowcoder will continue to support the full lifecycle of campus recruiting, working together with students, enterprises, universities, government, associations, and media to do this well."
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