Our mission is to make people feel good about recruitment agencies. We accept that many view recruitment agencies as a necessary evil, but have always felt this was unfair; that it was the system recruitment agencies worked within that was flawed – incentivising short-term thinking and driving bad behaviour – not the individuals that worked within it.
When we started, we wanted to shine a light on good recruitment agencies. Champion them, and celebrate the contribution they make. Both to the businesses they help find great candidates, and those individual candidates, whom they find new homes to put their energy and skills to work.
We launched Hiring Hub in 2011 when the UK’s recruitment agency market was beginning to fragment at pace. Our mission had manifested in the form of an online marketplace. We wanted it to act as a gateway, conveniently connecting companies to the country’s swelling community of small, independent, specialist recruitment agencies.
Small and independent was important to us. We felt the big, global, corporate recruiters like Michael Page and Hays delivered a slow, rigid, commoditised service that had, in part, led to recruiters being viewed a “necessary evil.” We believed that small, owner-managed recruitment agencies were more attentive than the big brands. They cared more.
The online marketplace was our take on a new “system” for recruitment. It would be meritocracy, where data and reviews would engender trust and help independent recruitment agencies develop their reputation. All within an environment where, for clarity, terms of business would be universal and fees declared upfront for transparency. In our world there would be no ambiguity. No haggling. No nasty surprises.
Employers could use Hiring Hub to easily find and work with brilliant, motivated, specialist recruitment agencies, while those agencies would get access to qualified vacancies at fantastic companies, so they could grow their income but spend less time fighting to win new business, and more time headhunting, advising, nurturing and coaching candidates.
We were Robin Hood for recruitment: we’d take the jobs from the big guys and redistribute them to a growing network of specialist, independent recruitment agencies. We wanted to democratise the recruitment agency landscape and our intent was pure – we would help small recruitment agencies thrive.
Years later our mission has remained the same and, as the market continues to fragment (when we started back in 2011 there were some 3,000 recruitment agencies in the UK with fewer than ten employees, now in 2018 there’s c.12,000), the opportunity for Hiring Hub to build something significant and achieve its goals has grown. (Read this blog on the fast-changing landscape of the UK’s recruitment industry.)
Indeed, small recruitment agencies now represent over 80% of the supply chain so employers can’t ignore them. However, because there’s so many, finding and choosing recruiters is difficult for employers – there’s no trusted quality score or performance measure – and winning business difficult for small, specialist agencies.
Enter Hiring Hub.
Here I hope to clarify Hiring Hub’s vision. My intent is to give colleagues, customers, investors, partners and suppliers an account of where we are going, how we view the market today and what we think will change over the next decade or so as automation, voice, and AI collide to push the industry forwards.
A vision is the ability to think about, or plan the future with imagination or wisdom; the act or power of anticipating that which will or may come to be. Hiring Hub’s vision is to create a convenient, intelligent platform through which jobs are filled quickly with the best-fit candidate by trusted, expert recruiters.
We imagine a world where ALL independent, specialist recruitment agencies can be found on an online marketplace – with their ratings and reviews – so employers can easily identify those most likely to fill their job in an instant. The right agency in the right moment.
How we do that, at scale, will change as our marketplace grows. Today we interpret quite basic data – an agency’s interview rate, how many jobs they’ve filled in that sector, how many jobs they’ve filled versus total engagements – married to customer reviews. As the system matures and more data passes through it, that recommendation engine will become more intelligent: we believe we can consolidate and map the entire recruitment agency supply chain, and this can be useful for employers, recruiters, and candidates.
In our version of the future, finding the right recruitment agency, or two, will be as easy as ordering a pizza on JustEat, or finding a two-bed flat in Clapham on Rightmove.
Likewise, sourcing live market data on salaries, fees, the availability of candidates and skills in your region, building a great job brief, communicating with agencies and your in-house team, scheduling interviews, screening, analysing candidate fit… These things will be aggregated, intelligent, and automated. And you’ll have power of >12,000 specialist recruiters at your fingertips.
Clearly, tech will play a huge part in that. However, we view it as our enabler not our core. We want to build technology so good that you don’t stop to consider it – an experience that just works. One you take for granted.
Atop that tech we’ll add a layer of customer support and service because recruitment is a people business. The original people business, in fact. Sure, we accept that in many sectors it has become an impersonal numbers game where all its protagonists – employers, recruiters and candidates – are disillusioned.
But this we think is the opportunity, this is where we can play. How we can begin to make people feel good about recruitment agencies…
From day one, our intent has ALWAYS been to find ways of using technology to facilitate better relationships between employers and recruitment agencies. Not to circumnavigate the service recruiters provide.
No, we extol the value of recruitment agencies and, through Hiring Hub, we’re betting on them (we’ve written about that here). We simply don’t believe tech will replace them. It will, though, alter what tasks they’re asked to undertake and change both how they operate and behave.
This comes back to: “it’s not the people that are bad, but the system that is broken.” Build a new ecosystem for recruitment that’s transparent so everyone knows where they stand, that simplifies or automates some of the admin and process, and rewards good service and the right behaviour, and recruiters – an agile and entrepreneurial bunch – will adapt. Ditto employers.
All of a sudden it hits a critical mass and everyone stops to consider what their stats may look like within that new environment, what reviews they might collect after a transaction. eBay style.
We see a future where recruitment consultants no longer have to spend 50% of their time trying to win new business, so instead become more like personal shoppers or career coaches for high quality candidates. Every white-collar professional will have one or two ‘go to’ consultants that they trust (those that don’t will be able to find them on Hiring Hub and read reviews from other candidates…).
This is one of the human-to-human relationships that’s critical to people “feeling good” about recruiters. But we, and/or tech, can do much of the rest: source the job opportunities, take quality briefs, make sure they land in the right agencies’ laps in the right moment, help those agencies identify and screen candidates, accelerate and facilitate conversations with employers, determine a candidate’s aptitude and cultural fit, provide a virtual assistant to schedule a meeting, send and receive offers, contracts, invoicing and payments…
Tech + humans. Done right, and the humans to do the stuff they’re best at. The thing that tech just cannot do: build relationships based on trust and shared values.
On that last point – building relationships based on trust and shared values – we feel it’s important that, while we measure and publish recruitment agency performance, we should explore what makes a good employer, and measure and report that, too. For any relationship to be strong, trust must be reciprocated.
This will represent an opportunity for progressive employers to demonstrate their commitment to working with Hiring Hub and its community of recruitment agencies in partnership to improve the industry’s reputation, while identifying the best talent for their organisations and becoming an employer of choice. Win-win-win.
We’re developing a platform where employers can showcase what makes them, them, shares their values and explains why their people choose to work for them. All to help recruiters find the right candidates, first time, while affording companies a window through which others can view their culture and brand.
So the future looks like this: more small, independent recruitment agencies than ever before (we believe we’ll grow the market) working with the best employers within an intelligent, transparent ecosystem that, intrinsically through its model, works fast and efficiently while encouraging all parties to behave with respect and align around a single goal – finding the right candidate for the right role in the right moment.
Beyond this vision we have a series of goals. Unlike the one above, which is a constant, goals are often short- to mid-term in their nature and influenced by a number of drivers, like our current resources, our product roadmap and ability to deliver it, and our investment strategy. Forgive the cliché, but we can’t build Rome in a day. Hence, I plan to share our goals and chunks of our roadmap over the coming months so those that wish to, can follow Hiring Hub’s progress as we seek to make youfeel good about recruitment agencies…
Here’s to a better future where Recruiting as a Service (RaaS!) is universally valued and respected within the business community, and the best agencies – whatever their size – can flourish within an open, trusted, meritocracy.
Hiring Hub’s Core beliefs:
- Recruitment agencies are going nowhere and while technology will alter how they work, it won’t ever replace them
- Small, independent agencies are more agile, care more, and deliver a better service than the big, global recruitment brands
- The agency market will continue to fragment at pace, and Hiring Hub will be a positive catalyst in this movement
- As the market fragments, this new breed of recruitment agency will become even more specialised and niche within their sector
- Tech can do both the heavy lifting and intelligent stuff, leaving humans to build trust and relationships
- Employers must invest in their relationship with recruitment agencies, their employer proposition and brand
- There’s value in the data: we can share real time market information to help people make informed decisions on facts not instinct
- Workplaces are becoming more flexible and mobile; products and services must reflect this shift
- It’s coming home
Want to learn more? Go to Hiring Hub’s homepage.
