Jobs platform Stride has been acquired by Liquid Friday, a provider of umbrella and contract support services.
Liquid Friday will incorporate Stride’s proprietary end-to-end technology into a new solution to better serve the contract market.
Stride, formerly JobLab, connected graduates with jobs at fast-growing startups across the United Kingdom. Unique in being a candidate-first tech platform—the first to pay job seekers to look for work—it led its industry at the time the pandemic reached the UK.
Using machine-learning, personality matching, and video screening, Stride’s mission has been to shift the power balance from employer to hopeful employee. It was used by more than 50,000 job seekers, bridging the gap between ambitious talent and ambitious companies.
After a highly successful fundraising round on Crowdcube late in 2019, Stride hired an experienced executive team and underwent a rebrand in early 2020. The pandemic hit soon afterwards, and there were hiring freezes in March both in sales and graduate roles, the principal positions Stride users filled.
Liquid Friday, which aims to make life easier, safer and more rewarding for contractors, approached Stride in the belief that its core technology could help it to provide a better experience for its clients and customers.
Liquid Friday acquired the platform and IP from Stride in May 2021.
Aidan Cramer, Co-founder and CEO of Stride, said: “We are thrilled that our platform has been acquired by a great company like Liquid Friday. We’re fully on-board with their vision to improve the hiring experience for contract workers and we’re excited to be joining their team.
“We are extremely proud of our team for the character they showed throughout the crisis to help us reach this outcome, and for their work to support a chronically underserved group of workers.
“We celebrate the fact that the platform will live on, albeit in a different form.”
Colin Gunnell of Liquid Friday said: ‘“The acquisition of Stride strategically aligns with our ongoing evolution to provide innovative, technology-based solutions to support recruitment agencies.
“Stride represents an opportunity to further support our recruitment agency client base and evolve a solution that enables them to rapidly scale their business and proposition through technology automation and AI.”
Graduates were one of the groups most badly affected by the pandemic last year.
In September 2020, research by the jobs website Milkround showed that just 18 percent of graduates were able to secure jobs, compared to the 60 percent average.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies had also predicted that graduates would be hit especially hard by the pandemic, judging by the struggles graduates had faced during previous recessions.