This week I got to speak with Ziphire founder Bradley Hunt. Ziphire are looking to turn the recruitment industry on its head. I learn more about the Ziphire story from young entrepreneur Bradley Hunt:
Hi Bradley, great to have you on YHP today! Can you give me a little background into yourself?
Sure and thanks for having me! - I realised my passion for business when I started selling confectionary at school to other students, I noticed a demand and made a little money. Ever since, I have been fortunate enough to know what I wanted to do with my life. I want to build products/services which offer a better solution to what’s already out there - enhancing the lives of millions of people around the world. I chose to study Business at college and eventually this led me to studying towards my degree in Business Management at MMU. Today I juggle my time between my degree and ZipHire.
Tell me more about ZipHire:
ZipHire is essentially a web-based recruitment medium between employers and jobseekers looking for work. We’re revolutionising the recruitment industry and our mission is to connect employers with jobseekers in the simplest way possible. Jobseekers can create a profile on ZipHire and list everything a CV typically would, log out and leave their profile live. On the other hand, employers like your local restaurant, clothing shop, nightclub etc. can log in to ZipHire and use our intelligent filtering system to find jobseeker profiles which match their criteria. Typically, bar managers search for profiles who are local, are over the age of 18 and have experience in bartending. This then generates a list of appropriate profiles. That’s ZipHire in a nutshell. We modernise recruitment through simplification.
When did you realise there was a need for this service and why did you decide this was an idea you wanted to take forward and make a reality?
I’ve always worked part-time throughout my studies and despised the process of job searching. In August 2012 I decided I wanted a job in Manchester to subsidise the costs of living at University and started looking for work prior to starting in Manchester. I took to Google and after 5/10 minutes of browsing job boards I stumbled across a Ladbrokes application form. It took me 45 minutes to complete and asked me the same repetitive questions every other application form would have. I figured that there must be 1000’s of other students suffering just like me. So I set about designing a way jobseekers could have employment find them, here I realised I would also be designing a way to give the power of choice back to the employers. Creating a win-win situation.
Tell me more about your team culture:
We at Ziphire believe in 3 core values; Leadership, Accountability and Passion. Through leadership we all have the courage to pursue our dreams and visions for the future. Accountability comes from the idea that ‘What will be, is up to me’ and it’s our duty to go above and beyond to make things happen. Finally and most importantly it’s Passion. To be passionate about something is to put your absolute everything into a project and we here at ZipHire do exactly that.
So you have a website, will you also be building an app?
Absolutely. We’re currently building a mobile app which I cannot wait to launch. It’s going to revolutionise the recruitment industry and hopefully worry one or two competitors. I’ll send you our designs and you can vouch for me on this one.
I had a look, and I’m impressed. Well thought out, one to look out for folks!
Now, it’s a competitive space, how do plan to compete? Where do you see your biggest advantage is?
Our advantage is that we are completely flipping the switch, we’re reversing the roles of recruitment. Through ZipHire employers can recruit ideal candidates of which have relevant experience, they don't have to wait a week for a stack of CV’s. On the other hand jobseekers no longer have to look for work. The work finds them - literally. What makes ZipHire stand out against other job-sites like Reed, Jobsite and LinkedIn is that ZipHire has purposely been built from the ground up to benefit employers search for candidates, no other site is as simple.
The internet was built to make life easier. That goes for socialising, communicating etc. but for the recruitment industry that just simply is not the case. It still amazes me today.
What’s the business model?
Currently ZipHire is free to use for both employers and jobseekers. We did this purposely as we think it was important to understand what ZipHire is and has the potential to become. We’re looking to build some traction on the site and iron out errors as we move along. We’ve had great feedback, majority being good, some constructive but nothing terrible. I think that speaks volumes.
Come June 2015 we will look to charge employers to use ZipHire which will also coincide with the launch of the mobile app. There’s going to be two types of employers who will use ZipHire; the independent employers and the blue chip organisations and they will use ZipHire in two completely different ways.
As much as Ziphire will benefit employers it really has been built around improving the job searching experience and I duly believe jobseekers will be the main beneficiaries.
What do you hope to achieve in the next year?
In the next year we will expand the team here at ZipHire, we’re always on the lookout for talented people who want to make a difference and we hope to provide opportunities for them to do so. We’ll also launch our mobile application which will run in unity with the website and hopefully we will be getting some really good day to day traction on both the website and mobile app. It would also be fantastic if we could raise some good revenue to continue improving the ZipHire experience for both employer and jobseeker. I think Zuckerberg said it best when he said “We don't build services to make money, we make money to build better services.”
