🆔 Recruiting Businesses: AI Screening, Vertical Hiring Services, Niche Job Boards

In this Trends.vc Report, we talk about using AI to screen candidates, serving local businesses, how to find your niche, how to deal with a talent shortage and more.

💎 Why It Matters

Recruiting is a $450,000,000,000 industry with a low barrier to entry and high-value sales.

🔍 Problem

Talent acquisition takes time.

💡 Solution

Recruiting businesses help you find, screen and qualify candidates fast.

🏁 Players

Placement Businesses

• Assembly Industries • Hire a full team of experts for your business
• JobRack • Hire remote talent in Eastern Europe
• RemotelyTalents • Find talent from Ukraine, Romania, Poland and more
• Movevirtual • Hire virtual assistants for design, support and marketing
• SecureVision • Add hands-on recruiters to your talent acquisition team
• The Collaborative Staffing • Full-service staffing agency

Recruiting Tools

• Deel • Platform for hiring remote talent in 100+ countries
• Leap Room • AI hiring assistant for tech, sales, marketing and more
• Frontend Mentor Hiring • Find junior front-end developers
• Recruit CRM • Workflow automation tool for staffing agencies
• Honeit • Turn calls and interviews into actionable talent insights
• TalentReef • Staffing tool for the hourly workforce

🔮 Predictions

• Recruiting businesses will use AI to save time finding and screening talent.

• talent.ai uses AI to find and categorize talent by skill sets.
• The Work In Me uses AI to lower search and placement times.
• Turing uses AI to vet and match developers with their dream jobs.
• Dedicare uses AI to find and screen candidates faster than competitors.

• We'll see more vertical hiring services. They will help you find talent in specific, lower-cost locations.

• Uplers helps to hire remote talent from India.
• TalentQL helps to hire top tech talent from Africa.
• Remote Talent LATAM helps you hire remote talent from Latin America.
• RemotelyTalents helps you find talent from Ukraine, Romania, Poland and more.
• Shepherd helps you hire full-time employees from the Philippines and Latin America.

• Staffing firms will focus on serving local businesses. Their knowledge of local communities will help them optimize for local values and culture.

• Crown Staffing offers recruiting services to businesses in the Midwest.
• Spherion has established relationships with local employers and communities.
• Collaborative has a trusted reputation among local businesses in the UK's Wigan and North West communities.

☁️ Opportunities

• Build a niche job board. Serve companies and candidates better by making design concessions to fit their unique needs.

• DeafJobWizard shares jobs that don’t need full hearing abilities.
• 4/day Week shares remote software jobs with 4-day workweeks.
• WorkingNotWorking is a job board for creative talent with portfolios.
• Y Combinator only shares jobs at its startups that you can filter by batch.
• Women Who Code shares engineering jobs with women-friendly cultures.

• Build lead magnets to attract candidates. Offer free career tips, resume reviews, mock interviews and more.

• ReachExt does free resume reviews for candidates.
• Remote has guides on hiring remote talent for dozens of countries.
• Relocate.me has a learning center with free guides for job seekers.
• Wellfound helps candidates to know what they’re worth with the Salary Calculator.

• Build a hiring platform that uses AI to screen talent. Help recruiters save time finding, vetting and matching candidates.

• Ceipal uses AI to find and screen candidates.
• Arya uses AI to find, filter and engage with candidates.
• Manatal uses AI to match candidates with jobs in seconds.
• Globus uses AI to find, screen and engage with candidates.
• XOR uses AI to automate talent search and interview scheduling.

🏔️ Risks

• Economic Downturns • Hiring during a recession is hard as companies cut costs.
• Bad Hire Costs • The average cost of one bad hire is $15,000. Clients can recover losses from you for placing a candidate without proper vetting.

🔑 Key Lessons

• Niching down can help you succeed. It’s easier to hire developers than to hire developers, marketers, lawyers and executives. Don’t try to boil the ocean.
• Building a vetted, high-quality talent pool can help you deal with a talent shortage. It’s easier to fill your talent pipeline with qualified candidates when you don’t have to wait for them to apply.
• It’s easier to fill a vacancy if the employer has a great brand, benefits and values.

🔥 Hot Takes

• We’ll see “informal recruiters” as companies use referral bonuses to attract talent. We’ll pay $1,000 to anyone who helps us hire Trends.vc Analysts. Paraform pays you for recruiting for startups.
• Companies will prefer productized services for common needs such as design and development.
• Staffing agencies will use collaborative hiring. They will invite the client's team to the screening and testing process.

😠 Haters

“As a recruiter, how can I avoid being circumvented if I place a candidate?”
Japan Dev motivates clients to tell about a successful hire via late fees and ¥3000 Amazon Gift Cards. Word-of-mouth is effective too. As other recruiters discover this type of behavior, they may choose not to work with those companies and candidates.

“It’s hard to find a niche that is large enough to build a recruiting business but small enough to not be saturated.”
Unless it’s a marketplace-like business such as job boards, the recruiting space is fragmented and no recruiter can serve all the world’s needs. You can tap into most of these markets and there’s proven demand in each.

“How can I solve the chicken-and-egg problem to build a job board?”
Borrow supply from other job boards. Do things that don’t scale and hand-pick jobs. Engage with communities where talent hangs out. Do this until you have enough traffic to monetize with paid job posts.

“Offering paid career coaching to those in the same role sounds like a recipe for moral hazard. The coach can make more money when candidates switch roles often.”
It can be wise to switch coaches if you feel like the coach is not living up to your expectations.

“It’s not that easy to enter this industry.”
It depends on what you want to offer. While you may need a great reputation to do executive search, a good reputation can help you get started with simpler placements. If you’re a good React developer, chances are you can recruit another good React developer for your client.

🔗 Links

1. Looking for Bootstrapped Businesses in the Hiring Sector • The Tweet behind this report.
2. Glossary for HR Terms • List of the most common HR terms.
3. The Recruitment Process of a Staffing Agency • Guide on finding and vetting candidates.

📁 Related Reports

• Lead Generation • Find potential clients with high lifetime value.
• Agencies • Help clients solve problems without hiring and managing large teams.
• Consulting • Consulting helps you learn more and earn more.
• Personal Brands • Good personal brand gives you pricing power and opportunities.
• Micro-Consulting • Turn years of experience into a short call.

🙏 Thanks

Thanks to Elie Steinbock, Sumant Yerramilly, Stewart Townsend and Maisha Cannon. We had a great time jamming on this report.

✏️ Emin researched and wrote this report. Dru researched and edited this report.

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