Recruiting Startup of the Year Nominee: Recruiterly

Are you an experienced recruiter looking for a great employer? Are you a great employer looking for an experienced recruiter? In either case, Recruiterly could be the one-stop platform for you.

Meet the companies vying for the title of Recruiting Startup Of The Year (RSOTY) at Hiring Success 18, in San Francisco, March 12-14. Your vote determines which six are flying to California to pitch their ideas to 1000+ Talent Acquisition leaders and puts them in the running for the grand prize.

One of these six will be selected by a group of C-Suite experts and industry analysts for the ultimate prize of a Gold Sponsorship to Hiring Success 19, worth $10,000, which includes a branded booth and dedicated demo-room for potential customers to interact with their product.

Recruiterly co-founders Matt Gibbs and Jamie Robshaw moved into the HR startup space with a goal: change the perception of recruiters in the industry. They felt that the traditional platforms did not give recruiters enough space and freedom to espouse their skills, develop their brand and effectively sell themselves to potential clients. Faced with this, they pooled their years of global recruiting experience into creating a new platform that could help put real human recruiters back on the agenda in a positive way. In the run up to the Recruiting Startup of the Year contest at this year’s Hiring Success 18, Matt and Jamie took the time to flesh out their concept with us.

What’s your company’s elevator pitch?

Recruiterly is the world’s first recruiter branding and reputation management tool. Build your influence and personal brand in your industry and have the top employers come to you.

What gave you the idea for your startup?

Jamie and I got together about 18 months ago and started coming up with concepts for products that we could build to help recruiters and ultimately improve the perception of the recruitment industry, which continues to take a battering (just watch the LinkedIn feed for a few hours!). The only way we thought we could effectively do this at scale was to introduce a level of credibility and accountability. Essentially, we want to provide a platform where deserving recruiting experts get the recognition they deserve and in return, become busier!

Is there a particular experience you could point to?

There are so many examples of great recruiters with a passion for the industry burning out due to constantly fighting against poor industry perceptions. Often recruiters are treated as the last resort, or worse – due to the actions of others, that have provided that hiring manager or candidate a previous bad experience. To increase the overall quality of the industry we need to stop this happening, provide better education and training and promote, and recognize the experts – raising the bar industry wide.

Of all industries to tackle, why recruiting?

Because it needs it. Jamie and I have over 20 years combined experience and there has been very little improvement in the way things are done. Most technology over the last few years has been more focused on replacing the recruiter, while the industry continues to grow. We believe in the value great recruiters provide to both candidates and employers and so are focused on building tools to help the recruiters perform even better. If we achieve that, then employers and candidates will both enjoy an improved experience with expert professionals.

How do you envision your idea changing the talent acquisition landscape?

Our core mission is to improve the perception of the recruiting industry. To do this, we need to provide tools that enable the best recruiters to stand out and become even more successful, while the recruiters who harm the industry’s reputation get less and less work. If we achieve this, globally, we will fundamentally change the way the world looks at recruiters. Our unique, media rich profiles, branding and content tools and our reputation management system will facilitate this transition.

In providing a platform for expert recruiters, it equally made sense for us to build a simple and powerful collaboration tool between the employer and the recruiter. Now, employers can use our job marketplace to jump in and globally distribute their requirements within minutes. We’ll match whatever requirements you have with a verified recruiter, who has a proven track record and the right experience  – making the decision on the best recruiter super easy. All recruiter profiles are public so you can check them out in detail before even considering working with them. Our tool then facilitates communication between all hiring and recruiting stakeholders on one simple screen. We massively reduce the time-to-hire and the common frustrations in the process. Multiple jobs, multiple recruiters per job, multiple candidates per recruiter and everyone wanting updates, feedback and progress? We replace all of this with one simple tool.

The final core feature of the platform is to improve the common issue of inter and intra-office communication and collaboration within recruitment companies. Our private social-community tool facilitates instantaneous, socially driven company communication, interactions, sharing and collaboration.

What does ‘hiring success’ mean to you?

This is simple. When a company’s priorities, mission, ethics, motivations and ambition are in complete alignment with that of the candidate (the new hire), we have a perfect match or ‘hiring success’. This perfect match results in improved performance and culture for the company and an improved work and personal life for the candidate. It’s a positive feedback loop. Happy, motivated and appreciated staff will work harder for the company, and in turn, the company performs better, allowing them to continue to improve the working environment for employees.  

Identifying this is obvious and simple – achieving this consistently is something very few companies accomplish. Those that do typically have a significant competitive advantage and outperform the others over the long-term.

What is your favorite interview question and why?

A favourite ‘type’ of question is one that challenges the industry without bias and is asked with the entire purpose of working towards a better solution. One question we recently asked a series of some of the top global recruitment industry influencers was to call ‘bullshit’ on one myth in recruitment. That evoked some great responses and lead to some very interesting discussions. There are so many strong feelings about the misconceptions in the industry…on both sides of the fence!