The recruitment industry has seen a pronounced trend toward polarisation in the last 10 years. The large agencies compete on volume and efficiency whilst smaller agencies have proliferated based on an ever increasing degree of specialisation. The problem is that whilst an employer may have existing relationships with a range of recruitment agencies, the increasingly fragmented market and high levels of agency staff turnover make it hard to access the right consultant in the right agency at a competitive price every time. TheJobPost have created a revolutionary approach to solve these problems, by connecting employers with recruitment consultancies using crowdsourcing techniques. In the same way that businesses such as Rightmove, Primelocation & Zoopla have disrupted and fundamentally changed the estate agency market so TheJobPost is doing the same, in the recruitment market. The current TheJobPost technology platform has successfully developed and tested our business model. We already serve over 40 employers including RWE Npower, Nestle, Serco and the NHS, and have achieved engagement with 125 individual recruitment companies. Our system enables employers to post job vacancies onto the platform, which are matched up to recruiters who search for candidates. Despite the inefficiency of our current system we have already delivered effective results for a number of employers. For example, Serco say that our vacancy ‘fill rate’ is over 75% which compares extremely favourably with their other suppliers; and that our ‘time to fill’ is circa 30 days compared to their other suppliers’ average of 45 days. A 9 month SMART Proof of Concept grant project has helped to research new ways to add semi-automation steps to the manual process of intelligently matching roles to recruitment consultancies. The aim of this DOP project is to build on the progress already made by further substantial research to scale up the system, and add further features.

The recruitment industry has seen a pronounced trend toward polarisation in the last 10 years. The large agencies compete on volume and efficiency whilst smaller agencies have proliferated based on an ever increasing degree of specialisation. The problem is that whilst an employer may have existing relationships with a range of recruitment agencies, the increasingly fragmented market and high levels of agency staff turnover make it hard to access the right consultant in the right agency at a competitive price every time. TheJobPost have created a revolutionary approach to solve these problems, by connecting employers with recruitment consultancies using crowdsourcing techniques. In the same way that businesses such as Rightmove, Primelocation & Zoopla have disrupted and fundamentally changed the estate agency market so TheJobPost is doing the same, in the recruitment market. The current TheJobPost technology platform has successfully developed and tested our business model, but does not allow the business to scale. The aim of this Proof of Concept project is to research and test an empirical base for matching roles to recruitment consultancies using computer science. The innovative aspects of this project lie in the ability to accurately abstract triggers and actions from a range of data sources, which over time will drive a huge step towards full automation of this market. The Executive team has over 50 years’ experience in the industry including experience of new product launches and marketing campaigns. We are convinced that this grant will allow us to make a step change in the technology and delivery capacity, allowing us to grow the business substantially.