This is a guest post from Sakeena Khatib, Strategy Director at Hytn, as part of our Recruiting Weekly Series. Sakeena shares her thoughts on some of the UK’s most innovative recruitment start-ups.
The REC’s latest Annual Report states that the UK Recruitment Sector is worth nearly £36 billion with no signs of slowing down.
Forward-thinking businesses are using this to their advantage, creating start-ups offering tools and efficiencies that surpass traditional recruitment.
Here are some of the UK’s most innovative recruitment start-ups.
Beamery
Beamery is a Talent Operating System founded in 2013 by brothers and friends Abakar, Sultan and Mike. Beamery started on the idea that although customers have advanced at selling their product, the way they recruit was left unchanged. This led Beamery to create a platform that brings predictive marketing and data-science to recruitment, empowering companies to treat candidates like customers.
Beamery attempts to provide companies with a unified system for managing candidate relationships and streamline the hiring process, including tackling high-profile subjects such as diversity.
Applied
Applied is a recruitment platform that removes unconscious bias. It offers blind recruitment profiling to allow for fair and unbiased hiring practices. It’s the first tech spin out of the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team developed in partnership with Harvard Professor Iris Bohnet.
The Dots
The Dots was founded in 2013 by Pip Jamieson, who dubs the platform as the “LinkedIn for creatives.”
The Dots offer an opportunity for no-collar professionals and businesses to connect via creative projects rather than a CV. They boast over 400,000 members, disrupting the recruitment industry by offering a platform to showcase your portfolio and work, ahead of the people you know.
Alinea
Alinea is a community-based Recruitment Start-Up. They create community talent pools solely for other tech start-ups, utilising technology and real-life networking to source the best candidates.
A sister company of Rethink Group, Alinea was founded with the mission to help start-ups scale up. They understand that start-ups offer different opportunities, career paths and skills to a traditional corporate organisation, and they build communities based on this.
Pathfinder Software
Launched in 2018, Pathfinder Software is a female-run Career Intelligence start-up that leverages technology and algorithms to offer career exploration and career planning tools.
Aimed at Graduates, Pathfinder uses psychometric tests, CV Builders, and courses to allow for career development. It is the first “life-long” career account.
Final Stage
Final Stage was released in 2018, already working with clients such as Capgemini, Bloomberg, and Grant Thornton. Final Stage helps companies access high-quality candidates who were previously rejected at a Final Stage by similar companies.
These candidates are recognised as top, pre-vetted talent and become members of the Final Stage community benefiting from access to hiring managers, fast-track opportunities, and dedicated talent guides.
Hinterview
With a surge in the use of video content and the popularity of apps such as TikTok, it is clear that video content is a relevant and useful tool to differentiate yourself.
Hinterview has taken this into the recruitment industry, offering a revolutionary Video Engagement tool that allows for the creation of videos to engage and communicate effectively with candidates.
With clients such as Page Group and Harvey Nash, Hinterview has offered recruiters ways to bring their brands and vacancies to life.
Tempo
Trusted by Monzo, Uber Eats, and Babylon Health, Tempo uses video and machine learning to surpass time-consuming stages of the recruitment process.
Tempo reduces the average time-to-hire to just one week, while also reducing recruitment costs by 65%. They already work with over 15,000 candidates and almost 600 employers actively hiring.
Zinc
Referencing is notoriously a routine, and dreary task for many recruiters, and the consequences for doing it incorrectly are dire.
Zinc is an Automated Reference Checking Platform that offers a streamlined opportunity to bring integrity and ease back to this critical process. They use blockchain technologies to remove existing pain points and create a seamless and more effective hiring process.
Broadstone
Broadstone is a “Labour-as-a-Service” temporary staffing platform that uses machine learning to fill temporary shifts in minutes. Broadstone has completely innovated traditional temporary recruitment by offering a seamless and contactless service with facial recognition identity checks, automated payroll processing, an AI-driven chatbot, and a geolocation punch clock.
Although currently focused on the Private Security sector, Broadstone is slowly looking to dominate the warehousing and manufacturing sectors.
Toggl Hire
Toggl Hire allows companies to kick off the hiring process by asking candidates to complete short skills challenges. Historically, technical tests have been time-consuming, and a speed bump in the recruitment process, but Toggl Hire revolutionises this by offering short skills tests to reject unqualified candidates automatically. This allows for smaller pre-qualified shortlists, reducing time-to-hire and less CV shifting.
Harver
Boasting clients such as Netflix and McDonalds, Harver is successfully disrupting the way we hire and select candidates. Harver utilises Artificial Intelligence and Validated Assessments during a candidate’s application to provide the recruiter with an end-result of data to make effective hiring decisions.
RTM
RTM provides flexible in-house Talent Acquisition Teams to streamline recruitment processes. They disrupt traditional RPO and MSP functions by working with some of the world’s most recognised brands, including The Discovery Channel, Sky, and Shell. Their use of an in-house approach is unique where many companies stick to an external agency model.
RTM have in-house teams at their client sites offering insights, knowledge, and experience that could easily hold back other more traditional recruitment methods.
TalentLyft
TalentLyft is the ultimate Recruitment Software combining both Applicant Tracking and Recruitment Marketing platforms into one. It is a SaaS that posts to job boards, social media, and career pages while also managing all applicants with a single service and a single interface.
Hired
Hired flips traditional recruitment on its head by offering candidates a platform to advertise their skill sets and wait for employers to apply to them. This Silicon Valley start-up selects the top 10% of candidates through a combination of human curation and machine learning algorithms and matches them with relevant interview opportunities. This platform is invite-only working with only top talent and exceptional clients, including ThoughtWorks and Dropbox.
Coople
Coople has been disrupting the industry for over a decade. They are one of the largest on-demand staffing platforms matching people looking for flexible work to companies needing instant hires. They offer a streamlined service where candidates can accept offers directly from their mobile and get paid weekly.
WhiteHat GB
WhiteHat GB creates future leaders. They match exceptional non-graduate talent with apprenticeship opportunities at some of the UK’s most exciting companies. They build an alternative pathway to amazing careers surpassing the three years of studying and increasing debt that a University degree brings.
They describe themselves as “a talent accelerator helping to create a diverse group of future leaders.”
Adzuna
Adzuna is the Google of job postings. They act as a search engine for job advertisements, searching thousands of websites on behalf of candidates, bringing them to a combined place.
Qlearsite
Working with the likes of Deloitte and John Lewis, Qlearsite offers People Analytics to help employers understand their employees and drive meaningful change.
Qlearsite is a web-based analytics platform that utilises data sources within a company. They combine behavioural, demographic, and performance data to give companies direction for their employees. They use pioneering artificial intelligence to extract trends and sentiment that may otherwise be overlooked.
To conclude…
Recruitment is notoriously an industry being overtaken by advancements in technology. These start-ups are allowing our industry to keep up with change using innovation and marketing to disrupt traditional recruitment and create new and better ways to do things.
Making sure our start-ups thrive is essential for taking recruitment into a place that is continually improving and becoming better for the future.
Author, Sakeena Khatib – Strategy Director at Hytn 
With a background in PR, Journalism and Recruitment, Sakeena has taken her core skills to the next level. She combines Marketing with Recruitment to create the best possible campaigns for her clients, bridging the gap of understanding between Journalism and Recruitment.
