Industry & Business

A new Irish company HireUp is solving a big problem for companies that are spending huge sums every year on recruitment fees. Hiring talent is a costly business with traditional recruitment agencies charging up to 30% of a first year salary. Experience and proven ability are attributes that are always in demand and especially now in an improving economy with companies finding it increasingly difficult to find skilled candidates. Recruitment is a trillion euro industry with the UK alone valued at over 35 billion Stg per annum.

Internal referral programs have become more popular in recent years, with employees incentivised to recommend people they believe are a good company fit and relevantly skilled. Referral recruitment offers a more personal and cost-effective alternative to traditional recruitment methods. Recent research has found that referred employees are hired quicker and stay longer. Employees who have successfully referred a connection are also more likely to remain with their company longer than industry norms.

Despite these benefits, and the considerable cost saving, it is often difficult to get employees to engage with company referral programs. Internally built systems are often weak on the user experience. The primary issues highlighted include no end to end process, too much manual intervention & not enough automation, difficult to share jobs with personal network/contacts, no transparency as to how a contact introduced is progressing through the hiring process and inconsistency in the incentives & rewards on offer.

The HireUp team have built a cloud based platform that delivers HR recruitment managers a complete business solution for streamlining an employee referral program, making it incredibly easy for employees to engage with and be effective with their referral program. And it all comes as an easy to use app that is available for both Apple and Android phones as well as on Desktop.

The company’s founders, Nathan Doyle and David Maloney are both Computer Science graduates from UCD and have recently won the Enterprise Ireland Competitive Start Fund, which delivers them €50,000 in funding. This will be mostly used to ramp up sales in Ireland and the UK, their first export market. Another benefit is their qualification as an EI High Potential Start Up (HPSU) business, which delivers a wide range of supports including, research, mentoring and access to balanced funding of up to 250,000 Euros.

Another success for this young company is their inclusion in the Dell Global Entrepreneur Program which has given them access to Dell’s R&D laboratory, mentorship, non-recourse funding and International network.

David Maloney, Co-Founder and Managing Director says, “We aim to be a disruptive force in the recruitment industry by increasing the percentage of employees hired through referrals. Our initial focus is Ireland and the UK, though we are already engaged with 3 multi-nationals that are global businesses”

Tom Early, Enterprise Ireland HPSU Start Manager says, “A priority for Enterprise Ireland is to help Irish entrepreneurs and companies to start up and scale. The Competitive Start Fund provides a support platform to help launch young companies with global ambition like HireUp to an international market. HireUp is an innovative and unique approach to recruitment, allowing companies to leverage their existing workforce as a means of attracting a higher quality of talent and we are delighted to work with them to help them progress and develop their business even further.”