Background
Hiring the best developers is one of the major struggles in the IT industry. The difficulty itself doesn’t mean there are not enough programmers; the problem is, many of them do not wish to speak to recruiters and HR managers ever again. Once they land a suitable job, they do not check available job offers, do not attend industry meetings where they could be recruited, nor do they answer calls from the recruiters. They become invisible and unreachable for staffing professionals.
In 2015, we faced this problem ourselves, finding out that there was no useful tool to break this impasse. The existing tools were inefficient and we had to find a quick solution.
Idea
Skillhunt was designed as a scalable recruiting solution to reach the best developers who willingly fell back from the market. The prototype, ready to validate on the market, was built within 8 weeks using AngularJS and Java.
What was primarily a solution to an internal problem, quickly became recognized as a desired solution for the industry-wide challenge. The Neoteric team worked on scaling the application and presented it to the public. Skillhunt became an end-to-end application for successful recruitment and management. The startup was bootstrapped initially and gathered 250 000 euro from VCs in the seed stage.
Solutions
Skillhunt is a platform that enables hiring IT professionals through recommendations (referrals). As long-year experience showed, many developers are more eager to check out an offer when recommended by a colleague or someone they trust. So how to encourage those people to recommend a job to their friends?
We decided to give a referral bonus to the referring users. When their friend gets recruited through Skillhunt, they receive a financial reward. It’s a win-win situation. Users can easily qualify, reject or invite their candidates to further contact. Thanks to this solution, Skillhunt saves time spent on the search for the best fitting candidate.
Success
Right now, Skillhunt is an application used in Europe, primarily in Poland, in the UK, and in Silicon Valley. The recruitment app built by Neoteric is a gamechanger in the industry worth more than $400 billion worldwide and helps save time on recruiting the best IT specialists for such companies as Amazon, Travactory, and LunchBadger. In June 2018, Skillhunt was listed among the Top 100 at the Europe Startup Grind Conference in London.
