Australian businesses have been quick to claim a hefty chunk of the growing online outsourcing market – think Freelancer.com and 99Designs to name just two of the global big’uns.
And today local freelancing site, RecruitLoop.com.au, takes aim at the previously unpestered recruitment segment.
RecruitLoop co-founders Michael Overell, Garry Visontay and Denis Zubkov believe the new website – a place where vetted recruitment professionals with a minimum of five years’ experience can peddle their services – has the potential to solve a number of problems inherent to the traditional offline model.
“Recruitment is critical to the success of every business, but is often a painful process,” Overell says.
“It can be particularly challenging for SMEs, where it involves a senior manager/ business owner, and the cost of getting it wrong is much higher in relative terms.”
The inspiration for the site, Overell says, came from co-founder Visontay’s less-than-stellar experience of recruiting for the national business of 40 employees that he runs.
“The pain he experienced in recruiting… was the major catalyst behind the original idea for RecruitLoop.”
“Even as a successful, medium-sized business, he couldn’t justify the cost of using a traditional recruitment agency. He met an individual consultant who was happy to recruit on an hourly rate, and the seed of a business idea was planted.”
RecruitLoop’s goal is simple: to offer employers stress-free recruitment. To do this, they’ve taken on the challenge of overcoming some sizable hurdles oft associated with the recruitment status quo. Namely: cost, time, quality, uncertainty and risk.
According to RecruitLoop, the advantage of choosing it over a traditional recruitment agency model includes:
- An 80+% cost saving compared to traditional contingency-based recruitment (i.e. 10-20% fee based on the employee’s salary) as a result of paying recruiter by the hour
- Recorded video interviews, allowing employers to avoid first-round screening interviews, where often five minutes is enough to make a decision
- Flexible support for employers. For example, some clients may only require assistance screening resumes, while others may want help with the entire recruitment process
“No other business brings together a distributed network of experienced recruiters to provide innovative, online recruitment services in this way,” Overell says.
“We’ve borrowed some elements from successful and emerging models in other industries. RecruitLoop is the first to bring it all together to provide a new model of recruitment.”
So how has RecruitLoop’s model been received by prospective employers?
According to Overell: “One of the initial challenges [has been] overcoming a built-up cynicism about the recruitment industry.”
“When people understand the model they immediately see value. But the challenge is communicating in the first ten seconds that we are not a recruitment agency, but rather a new model of recruitment support.”
“All employers experience pain somewhere with recruitment. RecruitLoop has provided such a compelling and different alternative to our early clients, word of mouth referrals have come very naturally.”
