Meet Romanie Thomas, CEO at AI Powered Recruitment Platform: Juggle Jobs

Juggle jobs is an AI-powered, smart-matching, unbiased recruitment platform with over 15,000 users. Our platform connects startups and scale-ups with experienced, pre-vetted professionals who want to work more flexibly, and do so quickly. In fact, we speed up the hiring process as we send a list of perfect candidates to a business within 24 hours with an average time to hire of 1 week (vs an industry average of 1 month).

We help people who desire more time and autonomy in their lives to become ‘Flexperts’ in an affordable and inclusive manner. This makes us the only recruitment platform in the UK to provide job seekers a revolutionary ‘pay-as-you-earn’-like salary structure within the platform, encompassing contracts and invoicing too. As a result, apprehensive candidates worried about leaping into flexible and contractual work can now do so without the added anxiety around crafting their own contracts, invoicing and being paid on time.

We have a deep knowledge of the recruitment space and understand which aspects of the hiring process needed automating, driving value for our customers by streamlining a traditionally inefficient recruitment process.

We are the only challenger platform in the market that offers an all-in-one service where contracts are drafted, invoices are raised and processed, salaries are paid and taxes are adhered to, all within the platform. We also ensure that candidates entering the flexible market are fully equipped to handle becoming a sole trader thanks to partnerships with Tax Scouts and Coconut.

Juggle Jobs’ key differentiator is that we have always had diversity and inclusion, plus learning and development, at the heart of what we do. In fact, Juggle Jobs was initially designed with women in mind to balance a career with care-giving without sacrificing their chance to pursue leadership roles. Whilst this still remains a focus for us, we have found that the percentage of men interviewing for part-time vs full-time roles increased to 87% in 2020 (from 57% in 2019) as they opted for reduced working schedules.
 
 

 

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

 
Having worked in executive headhunting for a number of years, I became increasingly frustrated with the lack of female representation and especially at the executive leadership level. I also found the traditional recruitment process incredibly inefficient, manual, and time-consuming. I knew that there must have been a place for technology to modernise and unify the process.

I was looking for a business to invest in that was committed to improving gender diversity, but found that the majority were more focused on educating and raising awareness of the issue, rather than directly solving it.

For me, flexibility was always such a natural answer to attracting and retaining women into leadership roles and in my work I could see that there was an increasing demand for more flexibility across all departments and industries, regardless of the role.

Then, Juggle Jobs was born. I wanted to combine the mission of gender diversity (the why) with flexible working (the what) using technology, and the rise of the Flexpert organically bloomed with it.
 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
Although the concept of flexible working and being a Flexpert has been around for a while, it only became widely recognised as a productive way of working after the pandemic hit. Historically, working parents (usually mothers) have requested it to help balance childcare responsibilities, and denial of these requests has been a leading cause of gender inequality in leadership.

Fast-forward to now, there is a different mindset – Covid-19 has shifted the needle for flexible working. Most companies have had to embrace a level of flexibility with their staff and have realised that there isn’t a negative impact on the bottom line – in fact it’s entirely the opposite – companies have reported an increase in productivity (up to 40%), staff engagement, and retention.

87% of the UK population wants to work more flexibly and companies embracing remote and flexible working can tap into a much broader, diverse talent pool.

In turn, Juggle Jobs has seen steady Month-on-Month revenue growth of 20-30% and we now have over 700 businesses and 15,000 candidates on board. We have even more ambitious targets for the next quarter. This has allowed us to make 2 key hires: a Chief Commercial Officer and a highly experienced Head of Product to take our technology to the next level.
 

What can we hope to see from Juggle Jobs in the future?

 
Our mission is to become the number one flexible recruitment platform for both businesses and professionals – taking the pain and fear away from promoting the rise of the Flexpert workforce in the UK. We want to continue to provide the fastest and most accurate recruitment matching service between companies, and experienced flexible professionals – the Flexperts.

Today’s recruitment market is fragmented, so there’s an opportunity for one player to unify it. That player is Juggle Jobs, as flexible working and equality is in our DNA.

We also want to raise the bar of the Flexpert community and make it accessible to all experienced professionals wanting to join this workforce. We truly believe that the Flexpert is the Workforce of the Future and we are dead set in ensuring that our users have a compelling and meaningful reason to be loyal to Juggle Jobs as we embark on this journey together.