When we started Hiring Hub, back in 2011, we did so with a big mission: we wanted to make people feel good about recruitment. Today, we’ve taken another small step towards achieving that goal and are proud to announce that we’ve closed a £1.4m investment round, led by Maven Capital Partners, who joined our existing investors, VentureFounders, in supporting the next stage of our journey.
This is a strong endorsement of Hiring Hub’s purpose and team, and we’re ridiculously excited about the opportunities the investment will unlock, both for our company and the thousands of independent recruitment agencies in the UK that we champion. So what does this mean for us/you, exactly, and the future of the recruitment industry?
Recruitment is the original people business. Yet, these days, it feels impersonal. The big recruitment agency brands that dominate the market deliver a slow, expensive, commoditised service that has led to agencies being viewed at best as a necessary evil. Thus, an industry built on understanding and trust has become transactional. Simply a numbers game.
To counter this, in recent years there’s been a seismic shift in the market. Since 2010 we’ve seen a threefold increase in the number of small, independent recruitment agencies in the UK; up from some 3000 to more than 11,000 with fewer than 10 employees. Having witnessed their industry’s reputation get dragged through the mud, the majority of these new businesses start with a simple ambition: do recruitment better.
We believe these independents – who now represent over 80% of the supply chain in Britain – care more, and can deliver a better quality of service. Hence, we’re betting they are the future of the industry. However, they face a fundamental problem: because there’s so many of them (and this segment is growing at some 20% yoy), it’s a really noisy space and it’s difficult for employers to navigate the market.
So they don’t. They stick with the same three or five suppliers they’ve always used, despite being unhappy with the status quo, thinking there’s no genuine alternative. Hiring Hub aims to be that alternative. By championing these small, independent recruitment agencies and giving them a platform where they can use their advantages over the bigger recruitment firms.
A simple marketplace, Hiring Hub brings together employers and independent recruitment agencies, using data and customer reviews to help employers find and work with great, trusted, small businesses through one supplier, while managing their recruitment process in one place online. Like all great ideas, it’s not rocket science. But it works. Helping our customers hire better candidates, faster.
This investment will allow us to expand our (brilliant) team and further develop our marketplace platform to improve the customer experience for everyone. We have big plans, and everything we do will centre on enabling more honest, transparent relationships between employers and agencies, and making both parties feel good about recruitment. 🙂
