In today’s tech industry, if you ask a startup founder to describe the biggest hurdles that stand between them and total world domination (or at least market penetration), it won’t be long before they begin grumbling about recruiting and the challenging process of hiring top-tier technical talent.

The demand is there, and it’s transparent. Every company is looking for great talent, job boards are littered with their listings. But, in recruiting, the supply side of the equation remains opaque. Recruiters still really have no idea whether or not someone is looking for a job — which may potentially explain the recruiting spam in your inbox. With so many companies having experienced this problem first hand, serial entrepreneur Jon Bischke and Squirl co-founder John McGrath co-founded Entelo to help mitigate your recruiting pains.

Launched in October last year, Entelo aims to assist companies of all sizes recruit technical talent by way of software that enables HR departments, recruiters and the like to leverage social data to search for and identify great candidates, even if they’re “passive,” meaning they have jobs but just may be looking for new opportunities.

Since October, Bischke tells us, the startup has seen more than 80 corporate customers adopt its recruiting software, including familiar names like Box, Groupon, Square and Yelp. To meet this demand, expand its team and expand its predictive analytics engine, Entelo is announcing today that it’s raised $3.5 million in a Series A financing round led by Battery Ventures and with participation from Menlo Ventures.

Entelo’s pitch to customers begins, of course, with the fact that it’s a card-carrying member of a new generation of startups hopping on the sexy bandwagon that is Big Data and data mining (“sexy” being a relative term, mind you). Who isn’t mining Big Data these days? All the cool kids are doing it: Waze, Google, Foursquare, Amazon, Yelp, Square, and so on.

Bischke and McGrath want to put a new spin on TalentBin and Gild and the like by allowing companies to join it in mining the Internetwebs for the best prospective talent. Said another way: Entelo has built a database of 10 million-plus potential job candidates, tracking the activity and status of each, like, say, their contributions to Github and StackOverflow, their location on Twitter or tweaks to their LinkedIn profile.

What differentiates Entelo, according to the co-founders, is that it’s essentially creating a more complete or robust resume than one would typically find on LinkedIn or Facebook. The data on our skills, job titles, achievements and projects is fragmented across a handful of sites, platforms and profiles. By pulling from those that are most relevant to highly-regarded technical talent, Entelo is betting that the resulting profile will hold more value to recruiters than the alternative.

Not only that, but the deeper its Big Data goes and the more it hones its predictive analytics, the more it understands the signals and footprints that developers who have just changed jobs or are clearly looking for jobs leave on the Web. And, as it goes, the more it understands those signals, the better it can predict which of those top-tier Facebook engineers are getting antsy.

Entelo not only wants to help companies identify passive candidates, but passive candidates that are more likely to be (actually) receptive to their recruiting efforts. The other potential use case Bischke says he’d like to see Entelo applied is in the huge back-log of resumes and applications companies keep on past candidates. While some of them were declined for a good reason, a number of them were probably great candidates, they just didn’t fit the bill for whatever reason.

Maybe that’s because they didn’t have enough experience. But, two years later, Bischke wants Entelo to be able to tell companies, “hey, you’d be an idiot if you didn’t take a second look at this woman.” Well, it probably won’t call them an idiot, but you get what I’m saying.

For more, find Entelo at home here.

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