Technology

Posted on April 10, 2019 by staff

Tech recruitment platform expands into Manchester

Technology

A disruptive tech recruitment platform that uses AI to match jobseekers with vacancies is expanding into Manchester.

London-based start-up Tempo was launched in May 2017 by entrepreneurs Ben Chatfield and Ollie Povey and uses video profiles to reduce the need for phone screenings and interviews, with job offers also being made within the platform.

Tempo has already raised £2m and 40,000 people have posted their CVs on the platform for free. They only use first names and 2,000 employers use the tech firm.

So far Tempo has placed 1,000 people into jobs, only getting paid on a successful placement. The cost is £2,500 for a permanent post and 20 per cent of a temporary placement’s salary.

“We use tech like video and machine learning to connect job seekers and employers quickly, easily and cost effectively.”

After spending eight years working in recruitment, Chatfield said the traditional recruitment model was broken and wasn’t exploiting tech fully so he launched Tempo.

Tempo currently has 30 staff in London with plans to make another 15 hires by the end of the year. Turnover is expected to be £3-4m this year.

Chatfield told BusinessCloud: “We’ve reduced average time to hire from 30 days down to three while simultaneously reducing costs by 65 per cent on average.

“Recruitment agencies on the whole have been very poor at adopting technology, it’s a very large and fragmented market and we think tech can be used on all the time-consuming bits of the process. It can really transform the process in terms of speed.”

Chatfield said they were looking to employ 10 staff in a new Manchester office by the end of the year.

He said: “Manchester has got an extremely vibrant digital economy, a thriving tech scene. The sorts of businesses that we’ve worked with in London have been anyone from the likes of Monzo, Uber, Bulb Energy, Hostmaker and others and we’ve also got clients like Auto Trader, who have a presence in Manchester already, so it seems like a natural  next step.”

Chatfield said Tempo is “sector agnostic” in terms of companies it works with but said clients tend to be fast-growing.