Looking for a job can be a time-consuming, thankless slog – but it need not be thanks to a technology disrupter.
Michael Cropper founded Tendo Jobs in Blackburn after looking at both sides of the divide and concluding that there was no natural meeting point for recruiters and jobseekers.
“The recruitment sector is saying there’s not enough talent in the market; on the other hand, you’ve got 1.6 million people looking for jobs every month online,” he told BusinessCloud.
“So the issue is that connection point in between, where you need to bring those two people together.”
One of the most costly investments a company can make is in attempting to find the right people for available roles.
Recruitment agencies can make between 15 and 25 per cent of a new employee’s annual salary with a successful appointment, which effectively reduces the level of remuneration on offer to applicants as firms factor the cost in.
That in turn leads to a lower quality of candidate for positions.
And juicy roles can be lost in a sea of similar-sounding positions on websites such as Monster or Jobsite.
Andy Kent, CEO of Liverpool-based Angel Solutions, told BusinessCloud recently that recruitment agencies are worse than football agents.
“A high percentage of jobs are from the recruitment agencies on big websites. They don’t typically tell you who the recruiting company are, what the salary is and where they are based. You’re stabbing in the dark and seeing what happens,” said Cropper.
Tendo Jobs uses tech to simplify the process for all parties. Jobseekers have a personalised jobs feed, which aggregates information so they don’t have to repeatedly enter the same criteria.
On the employers’ side, an algorithm shortlists the most appropriate candidates for a role from their CVs: “It’s like being on the first page of Google,” is how Cropper put it.
The firm is only four months old and is still building up its product, yet has already had 25,000 page views.
“We are completely revenue-less at the minute. We’ve created a different subscription-plan model for businesses of all sizes: we want to make the entire process as affordable as possible,” he said.
“It’s free to use for up to three jobs and past that point it’s ridiculously cheap.
“When we get the numbers coming through, we’ll start making the revenue.
“Within three to five years I expect Tendo Jobs to be the leading platform for both employers and job hunters.”