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Today’s founder turned her own pain point in the recruitment industry into the foundations of a marketplace startup.

But before we get to Recfindr:

• The UK risks becoming an “incubator economy” for startups that move onto better opportunities elsewhere, a parliamentary committee has warned.

• Atelerix, a Newcastle University spinout rethinking the storage and transportation of biosamples, has raised £750,000 from ACF Investors and o2h Ventures. They’re “inspired by hedgehogs”, as EU Startups put it.

– Martin

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Recfindr wants businesses to think better of recruitment agencies

Recruitment agencies in general have a bad reputation. 

The bad ones can’t necessarily find the best candidates for a specific role, charge fees that don’t match the quality of their work, and can be a poor representative of their clients’ businesses.

But maybe if something greased the wheels of the relationship between recruitment agencies and their clients, the situation could be better for everyone.

Recfindr hopes to be that something. The London-based startup has its roots in founder Alexandra Chirica’s experience running a specialist recruitment agency focused on compliance and anti financial crime related roles.

Chirica says all her work came through referrals, because she didn’t have the budget for impactful search ads and SEO. And when she worked with big companies, she found their supplier onboarding processes were overly cumbersome for a small agency. 

Surely, she thought, there must be a better way for businesses to work with small, specialist recruitment agencies who, at least in theory, should be better than big agencies at filling certain types of roles.  

That ‘something better’, Chirica believes, is Recfindr. The idea is to create, as she explains, a “preferred suppliers list’ of high-quality and relevant specialist recruitment agencies, so businesses can find the right expert to fill a certain role, and track the effectiveness of the various agencies they work with.

“We launched a very basic marketplace last year to just test the theory of whether hiring managers and TAs [talent acquisition specialists] wanted to match with specialist recruiters, and they did,” Chirica says.

“Then we dug into the problem a lot more, and we realised that there's so much recruitment tech being built for recruiters to bombard clients, and there's a lot of HR tech being built for employers to avoid recruitment agencies completely. 

“So the massive gap in the middle where no-one is actually making the customer journey better. Recruitment is still a billion-pound industry, recruiters are still getting used, and it's still an industry that's doing very well. So why are we not fixing the customer journey? Why are we allowing it to be painful? And that fascinated me.”

How it works

In its upcoming form, Recfindr will work via integrations with applicant tracking software (ATS) such as Workable or Greenhouse.

If you’re hiring for a role, all recruiters on your preferred list (recruiters who are already set up as suppliers for your business) show up in Recfindr and can be assigned open roles to fill. They can then send CVs and applications into your ATS.

Recfindr records the performance of each recruiter, helping businesses choose the right ones to work with next time. 

“If a recruitment agency is sending you 24 CVs and none of them make it to the interview stage, there's a problem there. There's a bottleneck. You can address it very quickly… Either they don't understand the job spec or they should have been informed better. So they can very quickly get on top of that,” Chirica explains.

“On the other end, if they're sending three CVs and all three of them make it to the interview stage, that's a brilliant statistic to have. The quality is there.

“So businesses can then download a report and they can take it to their head of people or head of HR, and then refresh their preferred supplier list as and when needed, to a point that you've got a very tight-knit list that you know you can use.”

At present, Recfindr is designed to work with the existing recruitment agencies that a business has relationships with. Over time, Chirica sees this evolving into a marketplace of vetted recruitment agencies, complete with performance data, but she’s taking her time with implementing this.

“We didn't want to fall into this chicken and egg situation where we're trying to manage both [sides of the marketplace] at the same time. So we want to focus on the employer first. Let's maximise on that entirely and allow that marketplace to develop naturally. 

“But the use case [eventually] is recruiters being able to use Recfindr as a way to show their credibility to future clients, because they can say ‘look at my metrics, look at my data. I'm not just a cowboy recruiter. I can show you my KPIs to prove my credibility.’”

The story so far

After identifying the problem, Chirica bootstrapped Recfindr’s earliest stages through funds from her recruitment agency.  

“I had the funds to start it without needing a CTO co-founder. So then it got to a point where I was a year and a half, two years in, where it almost got too late for me to get a CTO co-founder.

“So then I got myself in a tricky situation where I'm now a solo female founder, and statistically not very good when it comes to being VC backed or even getting investment. The stats were completely against me. And I thought, ‘okay, great, let's manage this one’.”

Chirica says that taking a step-by-step approach, informed by conversations with others who had been through the same thing, helped navigate this tricky part of Recfindr’s development.

According to Chirica, Recfindr had just shy of 200 users of its MVP, which has helped inform the path forward for the product. A new version of the product should be ready in around a month’s time, she says.

“We’ve finally got to hire our own developers internally, and we're also getting pilots on board from businesses using the people that we have from last year as our early adopters, to just test out the new platform, get their feedback on the features that should get built first and what's going to be the most useful thing for them.”

Next up, a full version of the product is on the roadmap to launch in the summer, which will integrate with recruiters’ existing software packages. Businesses will pay to use the software as an improvement to their recruitment processes

Then from the end of the year, Recfindr plans to start building out its marketplace of recruiters based on the data from early users. From there, the startup aims to be able to charge recruitment agencies for inclusion, too.

Funding

As we mentioned in PreSeed Now a couple of weeks ago, Recfindr has raised a £300,000 pre-seed round led by SFC Capital, alongside angels including Ezequiel Canestrari, the European COO of Clearbank, who backed the company after he used the product.

This was the startup’s first external funding, and as Chirica explains, it was a learning process:

“I started funding it myself initially, and then we had so many findings and learnings after the MVP last year that we thought it was the time to go for proper funding to get this off the ground. 

“I felt I didn't know what I was getting myself into. No-one ever told me about funding or what it means to find angels, for instance, or anything like that. So it was very much a shot in the dark and messaging people. It's very difficult to know who's a high-net-worth individual, to know if they've got spare cash, learning about SEIS and EIS and all of this fun and wonderful stuff that you have to figure out. 

“And then I got introduced to SFC, went through the process with them, and came out to the other end, alive.”

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