Haystack is a mobile-first, data insights and careers marketplace that uncovers opportunities based on your interests, values, and tech stack.
We’re ditching dull jobs and taking recruiters out of the equation, allowing tech talent complete freedom to casually browse the tech landscape without being bombarded by unsolicited spam messaging or CV scraping.
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
I was working at a HRTech startup as a software engineer as it scaled from a less than 10 employees to over 50 employees in the space of 2 years, and it was during this growth phase that I first stumbled upon the idea for Haystack.
With ambitious plans to double the engineering team, the CEO said to me, “Mike, one of the hardest things about growing a company is putting bums on seats.” That got me thinking, how could an organisation with great culture, amazing employee benefits, exciting tech, and an interesting product, struggle to hire tech talent? At that point, I was hooked.
I was relentlessly trying to get to the bottom of the problem and as it turns out it was twofold. For businesses, unfair recruitment fees, shady practices, biased job boards and noisy social media platforms meant that it was virtually impossible to organically promote your employer brand and get in front of your target audience, leaving recruitment agents with a monopoly on localised tech markets. For tech talent, lack of employer transparency, being hounded by recruiters and poorly matched job listings meant that your ideal employer was often hiding in plain sight without you even realising.
More from Interviews
- Interview With Shiv Shankar, CEO Of Boundless On Being The Largest ZK Protocol
- In Conversation With Chris Pettit, CEO And Co-Founder At Revving On How Messy Industries Often Hide The Biggest Opportunities
- A Chat With Kelvin Tan, Audax CEO, On How Fintech Is No Longer About Disruption, Its About Fixing Banks’ Structural Problems
- A Discussion With Ben Gulak, Owner And CEO of NALA | The Art Matchmaker
- IWD 2026, The Women Who Move Us: Cassie Gasson, Co-CEO At Thrive
- A Conversation With With Ylva Oertengren, COO At Simply Asset Finance On Supporting SMEs’ Lending Needs
- IWD 2026, The Women Who Move Us: Gigi Schumm
- IWD 2026, The Women Who Move Us: Vinny Sharma, Senior Marketing Director – Global Field And Partner Marketing At Securonix
How has the company evolved during the pandemic?
Haystack kicked off mid-pandemic. It was a hugely challenging time to start thinking about building and growing a business, never mind creating a positive working culture with a number of people you’d barely met in person. We worked very hard during the interview processes to choose candidates not only based on their technical capabilities and know-how but also based on their cultural fit and values.
Our office always has and always will be a great place to be, but we understand that it isn’t for everyone. We have a completely flexible working policy, meaning people can work from where ever, whenever they like – they’re trusted to make the best decisions for them and this has remained true from day one.
What can we hope to see from Haystack in the future?
Haystack is already trusted by some of the UK’s biggest and most exciting tech employers. Having started in the North East, we’re expanding our userbase rapidly over the UK and expect to be across Europe and America very soon.
We’re planning to double our headcount in the team within 12 months and ramp up our internal processes to allow us to scale easily.
Instead of techies automatically going to traditional recruitment platforms, they’ll be going to Haystack to browse new opportunities.
