Meet Molly Johnson-Jones, Co-Founder and CEO at Flexible Working Verification Platform: Flexa

Flexa is a tech platform which verifies and vets companies’ flexible working policies to create transparency about what’s on offer for job seekers. Working with the likes of Allianz, Esports Technologies, FARFETCH, Elvie and Crowdcube, we champion employers offering genuine flexibility, so that they can be found by hundreds of thousands of users.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
From the age of 18, I have lived with an autoimmune disease – one which causes a variety of symptoms including pain that can stop me from walking, and make it nigh-on-impossible to commute into an office.

My flare ups were worse than they’d ever been whilst I was working in a demanding investment banking role, and I asked my employer if I could work from home one day a week to make things easier. Ten days later I was sacked.

As I discovered whilst looking for my next role, it’s hard to tell which employers offer genuine flexibility. My partner (now also my business partner) Maurice was having the same problem, but from the standpoint of having had the benefit of flexibility in his last role, and wanting to ensure his next job offered the same ways of working. We could both see how difficult it is from a job seeker’s perspective to get a clear sense of what an employer offers.

We knew that workers needed and deserved better, and used our shared experiences to create a new way for people to look for jobs which are truly flexible. With the tech prowess of our fellow co-founder and CTO, we built the Flexa platform and haven’t looked back since.
 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
The pandemic has been a trigger for staff to reassess their jobs and what they want from them. For many, the conclusion has been: more flexibility and better work-life balance. This has meant we’ve been very busy! Whilst waves of resignations roll out, the demand for flexible roles has never been greater, and working environments are evolving rapidly in answer to this shift. We now have over 400,000 users in 70 countries, and almost 150 companies on the platform.

Flexibility has been reimagined well beyond working from home during lockdowns. And as a result, we’ve seen a huge spike in users looking for fully remote roles over the past couple of years, and increasing numbers of companies offering them. Pandemic puppies have also triggered a rise in ‘dog-friendly’ office searches, and workers – rightly – now expect better when it comes to parental leave.

We’ve also grown as a team and invested a great deal in developing our product. It’s our job to understand what workers want. To help them to find it, it’s also our job to establish what companies are offering job hunters, and whether this stands up to the reality of their working environments.

Flexa is a unique platform (there’s literally no one else out there doing what we’re doing) and we’re constantly refining our processes and product to ensure that we are the platform that facilitates the discovery of people’s future of work.
 

What can we hope to see from Flexa in the future?

 
Genuine flexibility is here to stay. Demand will only increase, and as working environments continue to evolve, so will we. We want to become the platform that creates global transparency in the hiring process.

You could be in New York with your dog, looking to move to Paris to a dog-friendly company that encourages you to work from home two days a week… You’ll come to Flexa. We are on track to have millions of users, and thousands of companies over the next two years, and to be the biggest employer brand platform in the world.