Hiring Hub was born from the founder’s own frustration of finding and working with recruitment agencies.
His experience was poor. The big brands delivered a slow, expensive and commoditised service, while the boutique agencies were hard to find, and it was even harder to judge their quality. Furthermore, managing them became a time-consuming nightmare.
He didn’t blame the individual recruiters — many of whom he valued, particularly the smaller, specialist ones — and instead felt that the “system” of recruitment was broken, not the people working within it.
Around this time, the recruitment agency market in the UK was fragmenting rapidly. The catalyst? LinkedIn.
In the old days, recruiters had a hold on the market because they had a little black book of candidates on their books that were hard for anyone else to access. But then along came LinkedIn and suddenly it was easy for recruiters to find candidates, as they were all online, so many consultants that had worked at larger recruitment agencies for years began to leave and setup on their own, often specialising within a niche they understood and were well networked.
The shift was dramatic. In 2010 there was some 3,000 recruitment agencies in the UK with fewer than 10 employees. There’s now more than 14,000 and that number is growing faster than we can keep up. To read more about this shift, please read our blog ‘The changing of the guard’.
However, finding the right recruitment agency — the one you trust to understand your business, your vacancy, and your industry so they can source great candidates that match your brief — has only got harder as the supply chain has. fragmented. Why?
- Searching for a specialist recruitment agency on Google is not convenient: it takes time to go through a list of websites.
- Determining who the best recruitment agencies are is difficult; there’s no easy way to compare them to identify the ones that can find you the best candidates.
- If you do find one, or three, they’ll all want to meet you, take a brief, then and negotiate fees and terms, all of which will be different. This zaps your time, slows your candidate search and, let’s be honest, we’re British and it’s all a bit awkward.
So he built Hiring Hub. A marketplace, it helps employers find and work with brilliant, specialist recruitment agencies.
Using it is free, and very simple: you list your vacancy and our friendly team will take your brief; understanding who you are as a company, what this particular job entails, and exactly what you’re looking for in a candidate.
For transparency, Hiring Hub’s terms are universal and protect everyone (you can find them here), and for clarity, when listing your vacancy you set the fee you’d be willing to pay a recruitment agency upfront. You only pay this fee if you hire.
Within minutes of your brief going live, specialist recruitment agencies will be alerted of your vacancy (but don’t worry, at this stage your details are anonymous so there’s no cold calls).
Recruiters that want to work on your role will send an engagement request. You can decide who to engage with based on their historic performance on the marketplace and/or reviews from other employers. If they’re new to the marketplace, your dedicated Hiring Hub Account Manager may make a recommendation too.
The recruitment agencies you approve will start their candidate search immediately. Submitting their best candidates as quickly as possible, usually within 24 hours. It’s important you move fast too, and provide feedback on their candidates via Hiring Hub to keep momentum in the search.
You can manage the recruitment process online. Messaging agencies, scheduling interviews, and sending offers, etc. Jobs on Hiring Hub get filled fast, typically in less than 20 days (average time-to-hire in Q4 2018 on HH was 19 days).
If you hire a candidate you pay the fee you originally set when listing your job (we’ll invoice you on the candidate’s start date) and that’s all you’ll ever pay, there’s no hidden costs. And don’t worry, if you don’t hire anyone, it won’t cost you a penny.
So that’s it: super simple. A marketplace built to be transparent, convenient, and fast to take the hassle out of finding and working with multiple recruitment agencies, ultimately to help you find great candidates and fill jobs faster.
To learn more about Hiring Hub and see how simple it is to use, schedule a demo or read our Trustpilot reviews from customers, who rate our recruitment marketplace five stars.
