How To Grow A RecruitmentTech Business – Q & A With Juliet Eccleston of AnyGood?

Juliet Eccleston

The HRTech and, specifically, the RecruitmentTech industry continues to grow rapidly.

In this conversation, I asked Juliet Eccleston of AnyGood? for her thoughts on how to grow a RecruitmentTech business. 

Let’s get into it. 

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What does AnyGood? do? Who does it help?

AnyGood? is a crowd sourced talent platform where professionals recommend other professionals for roles.

Clients share roles with our network, our members think about great people they know who would be appropriate and they check to see if they would like to be recommended.

Clients then see a list of candidates and are able to rate the quality of each recommendation from a member (just like you rate an Uber driver). They create a shortlist and decide who they would like to interview and hire. If they hire someone then they pay a fixed fee which is shared with the member who recommended the candidate.

It helps clients receive quality candidates from different talent pools at a lower cost and more quickly than they would do from traditional sourcing methods.

It helps candidates as the recommenders are effectively sponsoring them forward for a role. In particular this is useful for those who may ordinarily have not had the confidence to apply directly.

AnyGood? video

Click image to watch the video.

As we proactively curate the network to ensure a good representation of society, there is a benefit to candidates for having access to roles they may not have been contacted about otherwise and to clients for bringing greater diversity to their organisation.

How do you differentiate your business from other providers?

There’s a significant price difference for professional roles and because it’s a flat fee, there’s no conflict of interest when we talk to clients about salary requirements of the role.

We also don’t have any restrictions for contractors moving to permanent positions within an organisation.

The quality of our candidates are also high and most likely from talent pools that wouldn’t have been accessed via other routes and because we tap in to existing networks of people, our turnaround time can be incredibly quick.

What have been some highlights at AnyGood?

There are a number, in particular when HomeServe contacted us they had been advertising a role for a number of weeks with no luck.

The role was shared on our platform and a candidate was recommended by a member. This candidate was passive and hadn’t considered that she would be able to apply for the role, but with the recommenders support she did. HomeServe were incredibly happy with the outcome and found a much better candidate than they believed they would have done otherwise, as well as this, time to hire was within just two weeks.

Often when we share a role, we’ll get a significant response in a short space of time. For one particular role we had 21 candidates in 48 hours, all of whom were of incredible quality. It’s so rewarding when this happens and the client was very happy with the results.

What are the key messages you’re trying to get out to employers?

We’re different!

Everyone says they’re different in the recruitment industry when often what I see is automation of an existing broken process.

For those like us who have developed a new operating model, it can be a challenge being heard above the “noise”.

Once we able to have a conversation about how we work, clients see the transparency of fees and process plus the value of recommendations.

It’s also completely risk free so it’s very easy to use alongside existing approaches to sourcing.

What are your main ways of acquiring new employer clients?

Clients have normally heard about us via recommendation or word of mouth.

I’ve also appeared in some industry press and presented at quite a few events and this has gained quite a lot of interest from both clients and those interested in being members.

What does your marketing > sales process look like?

We haven’t done any traditional marketing such as adverts or paid social.

Instead, we’ve focused on sharing our views on specific and often controversial topics via articles, blog posts and then these being picked up by industry press.

We also commissioned independent research into trust in recruitment and have been running a campaign to understand how trust can be brought back to the industry.

Both the research and the debate resulted in significant interest within the industry and allows us to talk openly about how we operate compared to other ways of sourcing.

From a marketing perspective I believe having something new to say is key but you also need to be heard above the noise.

Then, as a start up, you need to find a creative way to make the news as you often can’t afford the significant marketing budgets your competitors have.

As I have some quite strong beliefs about the ethics that are required within an industry dealing both with peoples lives and the success of a business, this has allowed us to openly make a stand for this and be noticed.

What is your partnership with Beam?

We chose Beam as although we knew we could help underrepresented groups through our platform being diverse by design, we hadn’t been able to help with social mobility as much as I wanted to.

Beam are also a crowd based platform like ours and are simplifying the solution to a complex challenge, so there was a natural synergy.

We’ve started our partnership with the ability for any members to be able to donate their rewards to Beam (or they can specify charity of their choice).

This is just the start however, we have other activities planned where we will be able to provide both additional funds and greater value.

They’re an awesome start up and I’m incredibly happy to be able to work with them.

Final tip on growing an HR business?

It’s a crowded space. I’d suggest be authentic, find a stage and let clients buy into you and your mission as well as your product and proposition.

It’s all people at the end of the day, even big corporates.

Conclusion – How To Grow A Recruitment Tech Platform

Excellent insights from Juliet there. 

If you’d like some advice from Juliet, you can reach her on LinkedIn here.

Next: Join my private mailing list now and I’ll send you my four-step strategy to get more clients in the Human Resources industry.

Discover How To Grow Faster & Easier – Get Your HR Industry Business Growth Newsletter & Resources

Make sure you’re receiving my free resources and business growth briefings on growth strategies & tactics, revenue & profitability ideas, templates, guides, and much more.

If you work as a Human Resources consultant in recruitment, training & development, employee engagement, HR consulting, employment law, employee outplacement – my HR marketing update will help.