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Fun fact: in my teens and early 20s I never thought I’d become a professional writer. I knew I was pretty good at it, but in my youth I just assumed everyone could write so how could I possibly turn it into a career?

UrFuture wants to provide today’s young people with a solution to the problem I had back then—figuring out a path forward when you don’t know what to do, and then getting the right first job.

Read on to find out how they’re working with well-known employers to do it.

But first:

• Do you want headshots for your startup? Can you attend a photo shoot in London? Want to do some good for mental health care in Ukraine at the same time?

• Dan Taylor, an excellent professional photographer and surely one of the best-connected people in European tech over the past two decades, is offering a photoshoot session as part of a charity auction organised by Cate Lawrence of Tech.eu fame.

• Honestly, it looks like such a worthwhile cause, and Cate’s doing great work running this auction.

• Read more about the auction, and place your bid for the photoshoot!

– Martin

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UrFuture is rethinking job search for the post-CV world, as a new generation enters the workforce

The recruitment landscape is a mess right now. The predominance of all-too-easy LinkedIn applications, AI-generated covering letters, and AI-powered candidate filters makes that perfect match between candidate and job a nightmare to achieve.

This is especially true if you’re just taking your first step on the career ladder. And so UrFuture hopes to carve out a space for itself as the “the Gen Z job app”.

“One thing we always talk about with investors is we’re not just another recruitment app,” says Tom Keighley, founder and CEO of the startup.

Instead of a rival to LinkedIn or Indeed, Keighley pitches UrFuture as a new way to hire young people or entry-level staff.

Rather than rely on jobseekers uploading a CV, the UrFuture app takes them through a ‘career match’ process in line with, at present, 18 different careers.

“It breaks down your individual traits and explains what about yourself would make you good at each career. A user can go on the app having no clue what they want to do for a job, and straight away have a score out of 10 across 18 different careers,” Keighley explains.

Rather than require them to search for relevant roles, the app serves jobs to the user a bit like a social media content feed on an app like TikTok. Each is scored against the user’s career match results to make sure it’s a good fit.

“Every job has a score at the top, ranked high to low for the best fit for you… On the candidate side, the whole experience is personalised and individual,” Keighley says.

“It was really important that we delivered this totally personalised experience for entry level Gen Z, because that's what they're accustomed now to in their daily lives.”

On the employer side, UrFuture wants to help businesses find better entry-level staff than is usually possible via other methods.

“What does a CV say about someone at 18, at entry level? It says that they went to a school which is dictated by where their parents live. It says that they have help or don’t have help… Can they create a better-quality CV because they’re on a paid AI plan instead of a free one?”, Keighley says.

To see beyond a CV, UrFuture lets employers build a persona of an ideal candidate (skills, interests, traits, etc), and then receive candidates matched to that persona. This, Keighley says, can help identify candidates who might never have otherwise considered themselves for a particular role.

The story so far

Keighley began his career in recruitment before going into sales for a training and education company.

“My time there really built the idea for UrFuture, because I was an ambassador for apprenticeships and going into schools and talking to young people once a month, doing sessions with them about their careers.

“The same thing kept coming up: ‘Can you tell me what I should do?’; And I was like, ‘Well, I can't tell you that, because I don’t know you, and I don’t know who you are as a person.’ Careers people don’t know them well enough, their parents don’t know them well enough to give them that information, either.”

Talking to employers through his role, he says he kept hearing from them that they wished they could understand candidates beyond their CVs.

The seed of the idea for the startup had begun to form. After a stint leading sales for a tech company to help him learn about the backend of the software world, he was ready to start building UrFuture in 2023.

The app launched in September 2025, doing managed onboarding with a small number of employers.

Employers currently listed on the UrFuture website include Amazon, British Gas, British Airways, the Metropolitan Police, and the NHS. Keighley says young people have been recruited through the app, even though it’s early days for the marketplace. He says the app had been downloaded 35,000 times between September 2025 and mid-January 2026.

The plan is to launch a self-serve version for employers at the end of March. Other features on the near-term roadmap include an AI assistant to make life easier for candidates, and tools to help employers onboard new staff in a more personalised way.

This year, Keighley plans to build out the team, with international expansion into the US and Germany coming later.

“If you ask a young person for a food brand, they'll say McDonald's; for music, they'll say Spotify; for clothes they might say JD Sports or Foot Asylum,” he says.

“Our goal is that for jobs they will say UrFuture.”

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