Finding a job is tough. In fact, trying to get a job you love, or your dream job, can often feel like an impossible task. That’s why US startup Hired has crossed the Atlantic – it’s hoping to help UK employers and prospective employees find their perfect fit.
Instead of putting both parties through the tiresome application and interview process most businesses rely on, Hired guides applicants towards the jobs they’d love whilst giving employers a hand-picked pool of prospective candidates. Essentially, Hired wants to take away the pain of job hunting.
To understand more about where Hired came from and why it’s decided to make the jump to the UK marketplace, I caught up with Hired UK’s general manager Sophie Adelman.
Where did the idea for Hired come from?
In April of 2012, our co-founders Matt, Allan and Doug met for drinks at a popular pub in San Francisco. As serial entrepreneurs, they’d all faced the daunting task of trying to attract and hire great talent to their previous companies. They lamented that the options available – online postings, expensive recruiting agencies and job boards – were akin to shopping for a house with a phone book.
During the course of the conversation, they struck upon the idea for Hired: a marketplace that matched the best people and companies in a way that was fast, efficient and candidate-centric. The very next day, Doug purchased the domain name and the three of them started building the company.
What is the big problem that Hired can solve?
Sophie Adelman – GM, Hired UK
Seventy percent of people report feeling unengaged at work, and yet, very few of them will take steps to leave in the next year. Why? Because the process of finding a job is so painful that most people would rather stick it out in their current position than go through the tedium of finding something new.
For most candidates, a job search requires a major investment of time researching companies and roles, reaching out to professional contacts and relying on recruiting agencies who don’t always have their best interests at heart. Similarly, the options currently available to employers who are looking to hire – LinkedIn, external recruiters and job boards – are either costly, inefficient or both.
The bottom line is that the hiring market is market is deeply flawed and needs to be fixed, because the stakes are incredibly high on both sides. For businesses, the inability to hire top talent can have serious negative effects on revenue, time-to-market and overall growth. Given the amount of time that most of us spend at the office, the decision of where to work is an incredibly important one, and we deserve better options for discovering a career we love.
Our goal is to fix this problem by changing the way people and companies make such an incredibly important decision by helping all knowledge workers find jobs they love, while being the go to place for companies to find amazing talent.
Since you launched Hired UK, what’s the biggest challenge you’ve overcome?
In a marketplace business, it is always challenging to balance the supply/demand dynamic and this would be the biggest hurdle we have faced in the UK. However, by understanding precisely what our clients need, and rapidly feeding that back to our marketing team – who are focused on raising Hired’s profile in the developer community so we can source the right candidates at the right time – has been crucial to driving our marketplace.
Another challenge is having Hired HQ situated across the pond in San Francisco. Everyone at Hired is very aware that communicating within a global organisation is challenging, so we put a lot of thought, time and effort implementing process to try and make this as easy as possible. For example, we organise multiple executive team visits to European offices, use Google Hangouts and Bluejeans for video call meetings and Slack and G-chat to communicate. However the time difference is always going to make things slightly difficult!
Finally, hiring great people for my own team initially proved challenging! We’ve grown from a one-person team 20 months ago to 18 people, and are currently in the process of hiring several more people in both our client and talent teams.
Once we launched our sales category, it really made my life easier as I could use the Hired platform to source great candidates! However, before that, I really felt my clients’ pain as I had to rely on my personal network, job boards and inbound applications to find people. Without amazing, talented team members, it’s much harder to have an impact and I feel very fortunate to have such an incredible team of passionate, smart, driven people around me.
Where do you see Hired in five years’ time?
In five years, we want to be in 75 markets globally and have expanded into at least six different job categories. For the UK specifically, we expect to be an established and thriving office that is the hub of all our European operations. This ambition is driven by our mission to get everyone a job they love and help organisations in finding the best talent. Essentially, Hired aims to be the de facto place in-demand candidates and exciting companies go to get connected.
If there’s one thing you wish you’d know before you started Hired, what would it be?
How supportive and vibrant the UK start-up and tech community is. There is a real attitude of ‘paying it forward’ in the UK tech scene and people are always willing to offer their time and advice to help you think and work through a problem. I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to meet and work with so many incredible, like-minded individuals (clients, candidates and others) who are all driven by a mission and the desire to change lives.
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