Tell us about the business – how did it start?
I co-founded DirectlyApply in 2018 after recognising the need to create a platform that better connects actively hiring employers and engaged job seekers.
As a self-taught software engineer, with a background in recruitment, I was frustrated to see the friction that traditional job boards created during the job search and job application process.
My co-founder and I, therefore, decided to flip the traditional job board model on its head and created a job discovery platform that put the needs of the job seeker first, firmly believing that this approach would also ultimately assist employers in hiring the most engaged and relevant people to their roles.
How are you different?
We decided to approach DirectlyApply as a tech-centric company that’s primary focus is job discovery. Rejecting the incumbent’s approach to job search (boolean and keyword matching), we wanted to instead utilise behavioural data, collected in real-time, as the user searched for jobs on the platform.
The model which I built now enables DirectlyApply to match job seekers with those jobs they have a high probability of applying to, as it is able to understand and predict what job seekers like and dislike based on hundreds of data points taken from their interaction with the platform.
DirectlyApply’s job recommendation model now has a matching accuracy rate of over 80% and in turn, delivers job seeker application rates for employers in excess of 10x the industry average.
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What challenges have you overcome? What have you learnt?
We started the business with a relatively small amount of capital (£250k) from a UK based angel investor, so the aim was always to hit profitability as soon as possible. However, the goal of profitability could never detract from our core mission of putting the job seeker first.
My co-founder and I, therefore, made the difficult decision to reject lucrative sources of revenue by moving on from the traditional pay-per-click ‘clickbait’ model of traditional job boards in favour of a new, more equitable approach.
What are your plans for growth?
We have experienced rapid growth over the last 12 months, our revenue has jumped by over 500 per cent and our turnover is in excess of £3m. What’s also really nice to see is that our month over month revenue growth rate is now 19.82%, which as a founder of a tech startup, is a great target for us to hit.
However, we now want to really target and focus on getting the SMB / SME market uploading jobs to our platform. We are about to launch a revolutionary interview platform in the near year and we hope that this will help in growing our user base across North America and the UK.
