Well, Google’s amazing. As a company. And as an employer. I have the deepest love and respect for Google and could honestly not imagine myself working for any other business. Besides my own that is. That said, I was with Google for 5 years, starting in 2012 and much changed since the beginning as the company grew bigger. When I left, 82.82748% of the current employees at that time were hired after me, and as a consequence of the massive scaling of the business, my job went from being very entrepreneurial in its nature to being a more ‘typical’ management position in a big cooperation, including much more reporting, processes and internal self positioning. Still, it was nothing compared to other companies of a similar size, but enough to further stimulate my motivation towards starting my own business.
Recruitment at its core is all about matching supply and demand, pairing the right job with the right candidate that has the right skillset, experience, education and work preferences etc. Essentially, it’s an information problem and if there’s one thing I learned from Google, it’s that humans are inherently not great in handling huge amounts of information.
Yet, most recruitment is still done by humans. Whether you’re a recruiter, hiring manager or candidate, you inevitably have to crunch your way through LinkedIn, job boards or other large databases. It’s inefficient, largely based on luck, and not a viable solution for a future, where we see a great shift towards a more flexible world of work, meaning that supply and demand will have to meet much more frequently.
We couldn’t really accept that across almost all industries other than recruiting, we’ve managed to organise information. Think about e-commerce and the travel sector: if I wanted to travel to London tomorrow, it would be the easiest thing in the world to find the available ticket that best matched my preferences. These days, I wouldn’t call a travel agent to find that ticket.
However, in the recruitment industry, you still call a recruiter to find your next IT contractor, instead of just finding the person online via a platform. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s super inefficient, and takes a long time. Organising information, making it accessible and quick, streamlining processes to make them efficient – these were all inspiration-drivers that led to the creation of Worksome.